Impressions from a reading

"One of the country's best writers...""Melissa Green is a contemporary, world-class poet who writes timeless poetry."
"Melissa Green is one of the most original and gifted poets writing today."
"Melissa Green is simply a wonderful poet. Her language and her imagery are poignant and extremely original."
                                -- testimonies from an online petition asking American publishers to reissue Melissa Green's previously printed books

Fred Marchant, introducing Melissa Green as the first of two readers at a literary evening sponsored by the Suffolk University Poetry Center on February 2, 2012, said of her most recent book-length publication, Fifty-Two: "Such an amazing little book. I wish we could all pitch in five dollars each, right now, and republish it again." I happen to know these poems well, and couldn't agree more: how fine it would be if Arrowsmith Press would hear the demand and do another hundred or two hundred copies. I was in the audience at the reading in 2007 when a veritable pageant of renowned poets -- Derek Walcott, David Ferry, Lucie Brock-Broido, Frank Bidart, Rosanna Warren, fifteen writers in total -- turned out for "A Tribute to Melissa" to celebrate the publication of Fifty-Two. The readers were there to honor the beauty and brilliance of Melissa Green's work, and to celebrate the appearance of another collection after she'd been a long time silent on the page. We'd had to order our copies in advance, and I gave away one of the two copies I'd bought for myself to my friend Daniel Pritchard (now Evans Pritchard), who hadn't reserved one in time. Oh, I hope he appreciated that gift! For the book sold out that evening, and it now commands a commendable price in the catalogs of fine booksellers, if you can find it at all.

Cover of Green's 2010
collection, Fifty-Two.
Click here to read a
sample poem, "Library".

How resplendent Melissa the poet looked that night when she finally walked to the lectern to read from her work, steadied by a cane, clothed in royal purple. What else do I remember about that night? How the evening's impresario, Meg Tyler, waited patiently for the crowd to calm itself so she could open the event with a few words of welcome and introduce the first speaker; how the auditorium hushed save for one voice near the front: Derek Walcott, turned in his seat, chatting hospitably, with those seated behind him in the second row. Finally he noticed Tyler's presence, perhaps cued by his seatmates who with bemused low hisses were trying to get his attention. And here's what he said as he cut his conversation short and turned right way round: "As the Shakespearean actor said: 'What is the play? Where is the stage?'"

Back to last week's reading at Suffolk. Fred Marchant described briefly the unique form of the poems in Fifty-Two: short lyrics, neat and even and well-made, as I think of them, as Shaker boxes, but each split into two halves by a break -- as crisp as a pencil snapping; as decisive as the sound that startles a body out of dreaming reverie. The first half of each poem portrays, as if the present, a moment in youth when one was looking ahead to a life full of promise, to a future full of love, companionship, comfort. The second half, in the true present, looks back upon the years that have passed to tally another way in which hope did not bear fruit. If there can be a beauty in sadness, Green's poems are beautifully sad.

Cover of the German
translation of Melissa Green's
memoir, Color is the Suffering
of Light (1995, Norton).

She read two sets of poems. The first was a series of miscellaneous lyrics, in her characteristically rich language: "Phi" (published in the first issue of Little Star); "Chrismaria," taking its name from the kind of casket or jar that holds the sacramental chrism of the Catholic church; "Nearing Winter", in which featured the feather-topped marsh plants called phragmites; "Prophecy", a poem drawing on the seascape and seabirds of Winthrop, as well as Virginia Woolf's having feared for her sanity when once she heard the birds singing in ancient Greek; and, the third poem in this landscape triptych, "First Snow", in which the sky and salt-spray and sea are laid over one another with all the enthusiasm for layering of a Renaissance artist. The last piece in this first movement of her reading was a war poem titled "Casualty", dedicated to the poet and translator David Ferry.

For the second movement, Green read a clutch of poems from a sequence concerning the tragic circumstances of Mad Maud, a mythical street woman in long-ago England and her love, Poor Tom O' Bedlam. Tom, Green explained, the critic Harold Bloom thinks must have fallen out of Shakespeare's folio, a part-mad, part-gypsy, part-wise fool figure named after the London asylum, St. Mary of Bethlehem. There's a famous poem which tells the story of Poor Tom -- and of course, his name and fate are used in the ravings of Edgar out on the moor in "King Lear" -- but of his beloved Maud, less is written. In her Maud poems, then, Green is giving flesh and voice to a woman who has been for so long not much more than the shadow of a myth.

The Maud poems form a sequence; I won't name them all, but I will quote a few lines and mention a few images which stuck in my ear as Green told the story of Mad Maud at the river, Mad Maud and the swans, Mad Maud's four dreams, Mad Maud's song. They knit together in a fabric of tattered, desperate longing for refuge and love:

A horse-drawn sledge of brick in the mud, a child buried in the foundation of the pier, his "weep, weep, like a little wind"; "When he fled, my Tom, he trod upon the stars, and put the morning out"; the lovers clinging to each other at the water's edge, and a swan bearing down upon them, his breast furrowing the water like a prow, then rising into the air with his white wings spread wide, like an emblem of protection or sanctity; "soaring toward the day-moon from the radiant Thames"; "he sees not me, but I think a succubus!"; "there are lovers living yet that lie together"; Maud shivering with a nither in the night air, imagining the mawk's eating out her heart; "blood bracken takes the woods"; "when Tom is from me I cry"; Maud looking for her Tom, heart-sick, though he is once again in the asylum while she is on the streets; Maud speaking of he trees: "I heard their singing boughs"; beside the ivied trees, beneath the theater of the moon.

"Nither" (to shiver with cold) and "mawk" (maggot) are not words we use today; but are given renewed currency in Green's verse. These rescued terms are the latest in Green's ongoing replenishment of the word-hoard -- her as-yet unpublished book-length sequence Akeldama, based on the romance and tragic outcome of Heloïse and Abélard, returns many forgotten words to the language -- a glossary of some of these -- including dimmet, skyme, wistness, and other darlings -- appears in the September 2009 issue of The Charles River Journal, along with an author's note and selection of text from the book (click here to view a PDF of those pages).

Let us hope that the Maud poems, as well as all those in Akeldama, make their way into print soon, and from there to bookshops, and from those shelves to readers' hands.

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Really, this post is only the impressions of part of a reading. I'm sorry I could not stay to hear the second poet of the evening, Tom Sleigh. I have long appreciated his writing in print, though I have not heard him read it in person. One of my favorite poems of his is "New York American Spell, 2001", in his collection Far Side of the Earth (2005, Houghton Mifflin). Look at how he ranges between modes in different sections of this long poem, from "Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile, / I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph" to "A woman hugging another woman / Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk." Great.

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Melissa Green's first collection, The Squanicook Eclogues (1988, Norton), was brought back into print in 2010 by Boston-based publisher, The Pen & Anvil Press, and is available for purchase at the press website, Amazon.com, and Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Mass.

*

NB, on the German translation of Green's memoir: How serendipitous that "Glas", glass, is also glas, "green" in Irish Gaelic. Both the fragile heart of glass, and the heart of Green.

Reading: Tom Sleigh and Melissa Green

This Thursday, February 2, 2012, the Suffolk University Poetry Room presents a reading with two acclaimed contemporary writers: Tom Sleigh and Melissa Green.

TOM SLEIGH is the author of eight highly acclaimed books of poetry, including Army Cats (Graywolf, 2011), and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has also published a translation of Euripides' Herakles (Oxford University Press, 2007), and a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2006). He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

MELISSA GREEN'S first book of poems, The Squanicook Eclogues (Norton), was awarded prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets; it is currently available as a reprint edition from the Boston-based Pen & Anvil Press. Fifty-Two, her second book of poems, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2007. Her work has been published in AGNI, Little Star, Charles River Journal, Fulcrum, Epiphany and Ibbetson Street. Ms. Green lives in Winthrop, MA. More about her work:

• The Poetry of Melissa Green (Jacket Magazine)
• A new stanza for poet (Boston Globe)
• Notes on a Reading (Boston Poetry)
• William Logan reviews Fifty-Two (The New Criterion; poems.com)

This reading, free and open to the public, will take begin at 7 PM in Sawyer Library, in the 3rd floor Poetry Room, at 73 Tremont Street Boston, MA.

Announcing Little Star #2

Now available for purchase: Little Star #2, the new issue of a new annual magazine of poetry and prose.

New work by: April Bernard, Melissa Green, Karl Kirchwey, Mary Jo Salter, Mark Strand, Wislawa Szymborska, Eliot Weinberger, C. K. Williams, Robert Wrigley, Adam Zagajewski, Cynthia Zarin, and others... and some pretty good prose by Jamaica Kincaid, Kathryn Davis, Ingrid Winterbach, and more.

The new issue also has the two winners of the Susan Sontag translation prize and the recorded conversations of the Russian absurdist Oberiu poets, for the first time in English. Order online at a special price until Wednesday, December 22.

To celebrate our arrival this week we're featuring on our web site the work of Glyn Maxwell: his Little Star poem "The Double" and a new recording of his poems from issues #1 and #2. Past poets featured on the journal's blog have included Zbigniew Herbert, Gertrud Schnackenberg, Gary Snyder, Jean Valentine, Don Paterson, and the letters of Anthony Hecht.

Found in 2009 by Ann Kjellberg and Melissa Green, Little Star is dedicated to the proposition that literature deserves its own company: that our traditions are alive in our youngest practitioners, our eminences are urgently with us, and our literature longs and deserves to be read in the climate of its highest aspirations. We work to give literature a home amid the proliferating new technologies around us.

"Casualty," a new poem by Melissa Green

Melissa Green's posting for this week's Tuesday Poem, "Casualty," is stunning. A soldier, who knows his condition, is lifted on his shield and carried away from where he fell by a party of unnamed stretcher-bearers. They might be medics, or psychopomps, or Valkyries; her poem encompasses both the real and the mythic.

The perpetual journey of those who bear the dead is chilling; a retreat from war that doesn't deny but rather speak truth against war. As they march, or more likely stagger grimly, through the surf and mud and campaign fields, Green names the places they have walked before, are walking, will walk perpetually as long as war is waged: "Bosworth Field, Bull Run, Crécy," "The Siege of Acre, the Siege of Austerlitz." There is something of Isaac Rosenberg's pathos here -- his "Earth has waited for them" ("Dead Man's Dump") her "murmuring of cypresses urging them on" -- and of his stillness -- his "None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass," her "They followed the snowy lanes through sleepy villages." I hear also Wilfred Owen's theatrical outrage -- his "each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds" ("Anthem for Doomed Youth"), her "incarnadine clotting the water."

Also David Jones, Yeats, and Whitman. Not that I see Green's poem as a verbal child of that prior art; her language is her own, and if she has woven in phrases from other sources I do not recognize them. But then, a poem needn't bring in literal allusions to the works that went into its composition, in order to claim its place among the. The peculiar color mixed from a particular integrity of emotion and the particular verbal texture, too, should be considered allusion, as much as a borrowed phrase. Or more so; often an appropriated is re-colored by its inclusion in a non-native context. Whereas a particular moral seriousness will remain recognizable (palpable, audible) in any number of differing phrasings. Call it "family resemblance."

The battles -- so many -- are listed alphabetically in harrowing abecedary. What happens in her listing is both geological and archeological: the solemn digging into history and self that reveals stratum upon stratum of conflict each laid over the one before, the graves deepened and widened to accommodate new bodies before the grass has had time to soften the earth pushed hastily into the trench. A catalog not of ships, but of the dead that were borne by those ships to their death.

"Casualty" is not just an alphabetical exercise. The poem is free of the battlefield tabering that can sometimes he heard when war is depicted in anti-way poetry. It is appropriate that we learn nothing about the soldier being carried, or what he was fighting against or for or why. Bombardment and the tread of vehicles and men create the universal, landscape of war: featureless, empty, squalid, boundless.

Beneath the gross burden of these wars and their dead, we would be right to feel while reading this as if we too were struggling with the weight of a fallen soldier, trying to reach some safer place behind the front line; as if, struggling, we'd fallen to our knees in that clammy Asia Minor mud she writes about, amid the stink and clamor and "crimson chorus of the guns."

[Cross-posted from The Wonder Reflex blog by Zachary Bos]