Breaking a Long Poetic Silence

Mazur, Pinsky, Walcott, and Warren read tonight to honor BU alum

By Caleb Daniloff

Sitting in the basement offices of the literary magazine Agni on Bay State Road recently, poet Melissa Green (GRS’82) felt overwhelmed. On a nearby table lay broadsides of unpublished poems — written in her honor — by such luminaries as Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of creative writing, and former three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy, a CAS professor of English.

This evening, at the College of General Studies Jacob Sleeper Auditorium, a roster of heavy hitters from the poetry world — including Pinsky and Walcott, as well as BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities Rosanna Warren, who is also a University Professor and a CAS professor — will gather around Green, who fell victim to depression and illness after a promising early career. The event, A Tribute to Melissa Green, is being touted by its organizers as “one of the most important literary events ever held in Boston.” Presented by Agni and Arrowsmith Press, it is sponsored by the College of General Studies and the University Professors Poetry Reading series.

“I feel like a field mouse in the middle of all these great voices,” says Green.

In 1987, Green published her first book of poetry, Squanicook Eclogues, which garnered a handful of awards as well as praise from Walcott and from the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky.

“Here, by the grace and wisdom of the language in which ‘rhyme’ rhymes with ‘time,’ comes the poet who commits everything she touches to your memory,” Brodsky wrote. “In these eclogues, the New England flora seems to have finally acquired the power of speech.”

But then a crush of depression and physical ailments led Green to seclude herself in her Winthrop, Mass., home for nearly two decades, breaking off connections to everyday life.

“I wrote a book, did some readings, and then retreated from the world,” says Green, now 53. “I stayed in the house for 20 years. I didn’t see people, didn’t know I had friends. I wasn’t able to make a living. I couldn’t take care of my house.” In 1995, Green turned to prose and published an acclaimed memoir, Color Is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir, but then retreated again.

About six months ago, a group of Green’s friends and admirers became increasingly concerned about her physical and mental health. They’d also heard she had completed a manuscript of new poems. Warren, a longtime friend, decided it was time to take action.

“We wanted her to know she had not been forgotten," Warren says, "that she was respected and admired and there was still a place for her voice and that it needed to be heard again.”

Boston-based Arrowsmith Press offered to publish Green’s collection, Fifty-Two, and Agni, which is published at BU, printed 11 poems in its latest issue. Meanwhile, Warren enlisted some of the nation’s top poets to donate unpublished work for a limited-edition set of signed broadsides called “A Sheaf for Melissa,” which will be sold to raise funds for Green. Acclaimed writer and painter Rikki Ducornet supplied the cover art.

“I wake up every morning and I’m still stunned,” Green says. “When you live here, you know there are a lot of other writers living here. But I’ve been so shy that I haven’t known many of them. When they all come out like this, it’s like a New Year’s ball. It’s wonderful.”

Among those presenting new work tonight will be Walcott, Warren, Pinsky, and David Ferry, a CAS lecturer in creative writing and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as Gail Mazur, an NEA fellow and writer-in-residence at Emerson College, William Corbett, a poet and MIT writing teacher, Michael Collier, director of Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and a former poet laureate of Maryland, and Frank Bidart, a professor of English at Wellsley College and 2007 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Green will read from Fifty-Two, which she describes as in a completely different style, one that acknowledges the fractures in her life.

The campaign to draw Green back into the fold of working poets has been a thrilling and unifying experience for her friends, too, says William Pierce, Agni senior editor.

“The world of poetry is often viewed as being fragmented, scattered all over the place,” Pierce says. “For people to be getting together from all over, from Chicago, from North Carolina, is a powerful display of the poetry world’s concern for one of their own.”

Click here to read three of Melissa Green's poems.

A Tribute to Melissa Green begins at 7 p.m. tonight, December 5, at Jacob Sleeper Auditorium, College of General Studies Room 129, 871 Commonwealth Ave. A reception will follow and copies of Green’s work will be on sale.

Caleb Daniloff can be reached at cdanilof@bu.edu.

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