Out of Love and Solidarity:
A Tribute to Melissa Green in the Poet’s Economy
Dec. 5, 2007; Boston
By Jen Garfield

Melissa Green walked slowly to the podium, seeming to savor each moment. Finally facing the audience, she paused to scan the faces gathered to honor her life’s brief work in a basement auditorium at Boston University. She took a breath.

“I haven’t known much joy in my life,” Green began, her voice shaking in disbelief; out of practice. “But it’s like anything else in this world. You know it when you see it.”

The evening, called “A Tribute to Melissa,” was part of a major literary benefit undertaken earlier this month by AGNI  literary journal and Arrowsmith Press to raise funds for Boston-area poet Melissa Green. Suffering from severe depression and mental illness, Green was unable to work since the 1987 release of her widely acclaimed collection, The Squanicook Ecologues. Two decades later, her long-awaited second collection, titled Fifty-Two, was released in a limited-edition run of 150 copies by Arrowsmith Press at the evening’s tribute on December 5th, 2007.

Marking this momentous release, Arrowhead Press Founder and Editor Askold Melnyczuk spearheaded the benefit project along with Executive Editor Cat Parnell, Senior Editor Erica Mena, and Senior Editor of AGNI William Pierce, MIT Professor and Editor of Pressed Wafer William Corbett, and Boston University Professors Rosanna Warren and Meg Tyler. With the assistance of countless other volunteers and interns, the team gathered a collection of previously unpublished works from what Green referred to as 26 “luminaries” in the poetry world. Poems poured in from a wide array of poets, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, and Green’s former teacher and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, who declared the benefit “a triumph.” The poems were then produced in a limited edition of twenty-six lettered and signed copies designed and deckled by Erica Mena. Titled A Sheaf for Melissa, the collection sold at $1,000 a pop to libraries and collectors tantalized by the opportunity to own unpublished works by so many established poets, with all proceeds going toward a special fund set up for Green.

Fifteen of the included poets were able to attend the “Tribute to Melissa” book release at Boston University, where they read their new work to a colossal (by poetry reading standards) and rapt audience before Green took the stage.

“Everybody did it out of love,” award-winning poet and professor of humanities at Boston University Rosanna Warren said in a recent phone interview. “Out of concern and solidarity for a writer in need.” Warren, who has been close friends with Green for the past 20 years, took on the tremendous responsibility of soliciting and compiling the 26 poems for the sheaf. “I do think poetry for Melissa is a lifesaver,” she continued wistfully. “It seems the only way she can pull herself out of her private depth. The poems are no longer her; they are outside her.”

Twenty years ago, Green was trying to find her way in the poetry world, but a mental breakdown kept her from writing and maintaining relationships with poets on a regular basis. She knew there were poets “out there,” but didn’t think there was a place for her and her work. The poems from Fifty-Two reveal a poet struggling to maintain connections to the heartbreaking sensations, sorrows and startling loneliness of this world. “Poetry, my oldest friend, can only come down so far,” she read from “A Children’s Tale.” “I’ve missed years of my life . . . I didn’t know I’d be so terrified of living, joy a thorn in my heart.”

Page after page, Green’s carefully-plodded and richly-desired poems expose these snapshot moments of clarity and loss that arise out of life’s darkest hours. Each poem is written in uniform stanzas, which Green explained reflects a “snap” of consciousness she experienced in 2005 after a traumatic physical injury where she almost lost her foot. Returning from the harrowing ordeal at the hospital, Green began to write as she always had, with dense, “sparkly adjectives,” “pearlescent and gold-leafed,” when two and a half lines in her pen stopped stock-still on the paper:

____________________________________ ____________________________________ ___________________

She heard a loud crack, as if someone “had snapped a yellow Ticonderoga pencil beside my ear,” and she suddenly knew she could no longer write the way she always had. Realizing there were other lexicons she hadn’t explored, her form organically materialized to reflect the working of her brain, with five lines and a break in the middle:                                                          ________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________

“Her poems are startling,” said Warren, who had already seen the manuscript but was nonetheless on the edge of her seat throughout the tribute. “They seem so naked, they almost threaten to erase the boundary between the personal, the not-yet poetic, and the art. But her poems are art because they have been framed – charged with electrical language, leaps of imagination, consonance and grammar.”

And though Green herself stayed true to her dark, eloquently wounded form and subject, the evening served as a litmus test to the range of diversity in New England’s poetry scene, ranging from Michael Collier’s tender sketch of his aging father in Bermuda shorts to C.D. Wright’s lovely, fragmented homage to awareness; from Iraqi poet, novelist and translator Sinan Antoon to Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

“There isn’t a Boston ‘school’ of writing,” poet, critic and teacher Lloyd Schwartz said in a recent interview from his office at UMass-Boston overlooking the frozen harbor. “The range of individuality is really a virtue. I think of Frank Bidart and Robert Pinsky, who have been friends and colleagues for years, yet don’t sound anything alike.”

Schwartz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1994 and edited the forthcoming Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s collected works, contributed what he called “the world’s shortest sestina in six languages” to the sheaf.

Also present at the tribute was poet, MIT professor and editor of the magazine Pressed Wafer William Corbett. Known as a pioneer in literary fundraising, Corbett helped to envision the collected sheaf along with Melnyczuk, Warren and others.

“It’s a pleasure to be reading with Melissa when poetry is as it should be — a social art,” Corbett said in the introduction to his poem, which gives a nod to Walt Whitman. I recently met Corbett at his brownstone home in Boston’s South End, where we sat at a wood table and discussed his vision of the literary community over black tea and clementines.

“No artistic community can support all its needs,” he said, leaning back in his chair as though settling in to an old, familiar topic. “There are too many demands, and we’re all aware that poetry doesn’t have a broad audience. So it’s inspiring when a group of poets can come together to say we can support this, we can sustain this, we can go this far. We can’t always do it, so it makes it doubly gratifying.”

Although not acquainted, Corbett knew of Green’s work and was happy to join the group of poets to let Green know her work was valuable. Like Warren, he too noted the deeply personal nature of Green’s poetry.

“Melissa did not hide from herself or the audience,” he said. “Personal stories of a life are what communicate, what attract and hold the reader. That’s what lyric poetry is all about. You can’t help but stamp whatever you do with your character. To avoid that would also be a stamp.”

While Corbett notes that most of the poetry being “stamped” today falls into the lyrical category, he, like Schwartz, makes a point to acknowledge that in a city of universities and MFA programs, there isn’t simply one poetry community. He notes that Boston is inundated with readings and boasts a staggering lineup of established and emerging poets producing work that is conventional, experimental, and anything in between. The sheer numbers can’t help but fraction off the literary world into sub-communities, which Corbett says is a positive, as it allows for various attitudes and opinions, but it can make it difficult for the communities to cross-pollinate.

One mainstay he does perceive, however, is that most poets writing today are also teaching in universities. This is surprising to Corbett, who said his generation of poets didn’t grow up with the blizzard of creative writing programs and literary contests that today’s poet has come to expect.

“In part, it’s a pyramid scheme,” he said, staring out his first floor window at the first big snowfall of the season. “How many poets can train how many poets? And there are so many literary prizes, people are looking to grade poetry, like meat – this one’s A, this one’s B.” He considered this for a moment, then submitted, “Even way back when, poetry was an art of the court in China. I guess you could say there’s always been a hierarchy.”

One of the most contentious hierarchies in the literary world today is the division between big publishing houses and small presses. Many of the poets included in A Sheaf for Melissa are published by small presses and journals, and their writing life is sustained not only through teaching but through institutions like independent bookstores and reading series. While compiling the poems for the volume, Warren was prompted to think deeply about the ways these institutions create “a complex set of neural pathways” through which writers can travel.

“We live in a state of ferocious corporate capitalism, where even the publishing houses are run by people who don’t care about literature,” Warren said, her voice rising in strength and power. “Small presses and journals keep alive the notion of another economy based on artistic values, where excellence and beauty are the currency.”

Warren acknowledged that money is a key enabling medium in these endeavors, but stressed the importance of finding ways for the minority passion of poetry to survive in a for-profit economy without being compromised. The countless hours invested in creating the benefit for Green struck Warren as a demonstration that another exchange is possible.

“How can you put a monetary value on healing, and not just for Melissa, but for all the participants?” she demanded. “It’s incalculable. There’s an economy of the soul, mind and heart, and the benefit reminded me that, yes, we can deal in this other economy even while living in our brutal, monied world.”

And yet, despite the immense importance of this “other” economy, and the support and encouragement a town of poets can garner for one of their own in need, Warren noted that Green’s own work makes one thing very clear: like Rilke tells us, writing ultimately comes out of mysterious, solitary places. There may be release, gratification and compensation in the public hour, even a unifying sense of objectification as the poem prepares to stand alone without its maker. There may be invaluable encouragement from a workshop or community of writers, and validation in the standing ovation Green received and all 150 copies of her book selling out in one night. There may have also been camaraderie in the wine-soaked book signing and reception that followed the tribute.

But the true pleasure, the ultimate call to the page (or keyboard) can only materialize in the most private of realms. As evidence, Green herself said she has barely left her own home over the past fifteen years. “I was book-dreamy, language-inebriated, mentally ill, incredibly shy and in my own world most of the time, under some kind of enchantment,” she said. “If the vibrant writing life of Boston has shaped my work in any way, it was to make me believe in my heart of hearts that there was no place for me.”

These feelings explain the bewilderment Green felt as poets she had never met appeared for her tribute with both creative and financial support. “The fundraiser was a welcoming celebration of my work,” she said. “I was remembered and loved more than I knew.”