Puckerbrush Review

WINTER / SPRING 2008

TRIBUTES

About Sylvester

Charlotte Herbold

Sylvester didn’t talk much, but it was always obvious that he was listening. Since he left us, I’ve been thinking about him and realizing that he spent a lot of the time when others were chattering on, also looking at things. I remember Tony saying, when Sylvester cut some wooden blocks for our living room ceiling on the farm, what a careful carpenter he was; how perfectly each block was cut to fit exactly into its own space. Last week, when I stayed with Majo at 963 Wikumpaugh Road, in the house that she and Sylvester built, I got to know him better. As I lay on the futon in the big room between the two stoves and looked up at the ceiling, I saw a symphony. Above my head was the sub-floor of one of the lofts. Each stained and polished board looked hand-cut; each piece of wood was burnished and set in its row beside the others, each one paid attention to. Above that floor, the interior boards of the steep roof made a counterpoint to the lofts, and high up, near the peak, a row of elegant supporting joists created a rhythm in the design. I loved lying there, warm and being instructed by Sylvester’s art.

The same awareness of his careful looking and listening made me love his poem, “Mud Season,” which I know by heart, and which I used to share with my students in the Onward Program. Most Onward students are ordinary Mainers who don’t read poetry but sing it in country songs. They loved “Mud Season,” for its precise observations of April in Maine, and for Sylvester’s friendliness toward the “potholes, sinks, and washouts” that slow his trip home; and especially toward the “young doe” who spies the old car and “flicks an ear, secure in the season’s turn.” The deer felt safe in the poem with Sylvester, my students felt safe in reading his poem, and I felt safe in the house that Sylvester built; not only safe, but blessed by his presence and his gifts.

—January 9, 2008

Sylvester Pollet, 1939–2007: Poet, Buddhist, Sailor

An Elegant Way Of Being In The World
Naomi Jacobs

I first saw Sylvester Pollet at a poetry reading back in the early 1980s. I was a new faculty member in English. He and his wife MaJo Keleshian walked into the grimly institutional auditorium in Neville Hall, both so tall, so gorgeous, and so alive; and the person I was with said, “Wow, who are those people?”

Despite the back-to-the-land casual dress, their Manhattan origins were signified by Sylvester’s perfectly trimmed beard and MaJo’s long black hair and bold jewelry; they both looked like the artists they were, and like people one would want to know. I saw Sylvester again at a local crafts show, selling his hand-carved hobby horses and walking sticks alongside his book of poetry, and I heard him reading his own work from time to time, but I was too shy to find out more.

It was only later, through my peripheral connection to the small-boat sailing scene as well as at English Department events, that I would come to know Sylvester and MaJo as dear friends. Sylvester and I were usually on the same work schedule and arrived early enough to chat over a cup of coffee before the day got going. For me, his office was an oasis of sanity in the sometimes turbulent life of academia.

It was a long, narrow room about the width of a ship’s cabin, with just room enough for his chair between the crowded bookshelves and long counter. A pot of salmon geraniums bloomed on a tall stand by the window behind him. He had brightened that concrete-block cell with several of MaJo’s vibrant paintings, a Tibetan thangka, and framed poetry by Ronald Johnson, one of the many writers whose work he had edited. The wall calendar of late was a curious hybrid: he’d liked his 2003 Buddhist Paintings calendar well enough to re-use, so current dates were provided by more recent and presumably free calendars (“Hot Rods” for 2007), folded back and clipped over the original dates. The whole arrangement was characteristic in its frugality, ingenuity, and precision: the clips were just big enough, no bigger, and somehow he’d rigged a paper clip and a piece of scotch tape to hold the calendar(s) to the concrete wall.

A weathered bronze oarlock sat next to the computer, perhaps as a reminder that summer would eventually release him from our red-brick fortress to his other life on and around boats. Delicately balanced along the electrical strip that ran above the countertop were a series of postcards: among others, Dennett’s Wharf in the fog; Castine Harbor with Sylvester’s boat Echo at mooring; a schooner under full sail; a 4 scene of falconry from the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, sent by the friend who translated his “kechiks” into French; a Shakyamui Buddha and the great Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu, with prayer flags flying. Le Plus Petit Larousse, a tiny French dictionary, was there, too, along with his smiling teacher Thrangu Rinpoche, the lovely young Nepali girl whose education he and MaJo had sponsored, a dashingly goateed French poet, a black cat and Jack Kerouac, and a newspaper clipping of an Orono student sticking out her tongue.

On the shelves near the door were stacks of portfolios from past courses. Most of us discard such materials after a semester or less, because so few students ever retrieve their work. Sylvester kept portfolios for years, just in case a student would reappear in search of lost work. He nurtured hundreds of student writers over the years. Some were bright and talented; others had read little and thought less, and would probably never write another poem after the class was over. But whatever the student’s level of skill or interest, Sylvester gave his respectful attention. He could spend an entire weekend of ten-hour days reading and responding to a set of stories or poems. His method was to encourage rather than critique, to praise the sparkling phrase or striking observation in a nondescript piece, to gently suggest an edit that might create a stronger effect or a more nuanced meaning. He liked to remind his students that Flaubert, already an accomplished writer, took fourteen years to produce Madame Bovary—not to point up their own inexperience, but to emphasize that writing is a craft that no one ever fully masters, and to give them faith that if one keeps on working, something wonderful can result. Wrote one in a course evaluation, “I feel and see that I have improved my writing. I can write even poems now. It is great!” I love that “even poems” and the exclamation point, because they show how Sylvester could give confidence and a love of words to the most innocent of would-be writers.

One big box on the floor and another up on the shelves held extra copies of the Backwoods Broadsides. It’s hard to imagine a more apt expression of Sylvester’s aesthetic, ethic and sensibility than this series of 100 chaplets published from 1994– 2006. Deceptively modest in format (a legal-sized page folded into fourths), the series began with Sylvester’s own “Dandelion Sutras” and the work of friends. It grew to feature a who’s who of poets of his generation—Robert Creeley, Carl Rakosi, Anne Waldman, Jackson Mac Low, Amiri Baraka, and Joan Retallack, among others—as well as translations from the French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and Czech. Each had been elegantly designed by MaJo and printed on a different fine-quality paper; together the collection makes a rainbow of subtle hues and textures, and an equally varied rainbow of moods, idioms, subjects, forms and voices. Sylvester’s attention to detail was visible in the hand numbering of each chaplet and the hand-stamped logo of a sea creature twined around an anchor. His generosity was evident in the range of poets to whom he gave space and in the fact that this was in substantial part a self-funded enterprise, though the print run ultimately grew to 750 copies. The annual subscription appeal was characteristically understated and witty, just a small slip of paper saying, “This venture has no pockets but yours and mine.”

I don’t think I ever saw Sylvester in a tie or dress shoes. Yet he always seemed perfectly at ease, whether working up firewood, walking Fifth Avenue, or sitting on the terrace of a villa in Chianti. In recent years, with His clipped white beard, white hair, and sparkling eyes, he had the air of a sexy Santa Claus. Though loving his life in the woods, he was one of the first of my friends to communicate by email; I know I was one of many for whom those near-daily exchanges provided a comforting pulse of connection and, in tough times, a lifeline of support. He could be sweet or deliciously sarcastic, as the occasion required, and some of his observations on daily life were small poems in themselves.

I will miss him in ways large and small: his “smooch” of greeting, his fondness for period film with tight bodices and lush bosoms, his winter beret and summer sailing cap, his cool eye on my bouts of self-pity or melodrama, his Buddhist equilibrium, bad puns, sharp wit and kindness, and simply his ability to keep an eye on what matters. Like the sailor that he was, he had learned how to play the winds, an elegant way of being in the world.

Four Poems
Sylvester Pollet

Poem for St. Francis

At 10 below
thinking to help the birds survive
we increase the dole of seeds—
look out to see a fat jay
pinned by a hawk

In this cold even death moves slowly
there is time for much crying
and flapping of wings
but the hawk holds
and things calm down again

The woods are silent:
two movements only— —
the hawk’s beak to the jay’s breast,
and the bits of fluff
blown over snow crust.

We have helped a hawk survive.

On the Road

I- 90, southbound
Worcester rush-hour
clinging life-and-death
to the wheel of
a neighbor’s Subaru
no way could I
swing my eyes
from the gray road
to the gray skies
see the wedge of geese
first one
then another
winging north/northeast
over the gold domes of Worcester
over the Merrimac
over the Lowell Connector
over Lowell
over Kerouac’s grave
toward the Penobscot
toward my own roof
north toward their nameland
as we, our carload
in straight rat-file
sped south to gain
the vision we did not know
awaited us—
a rat crossing
West End at 0th
from St. John the Divine
world’s largest cathedral
to a haven, a heaven
of garbage
there by the
Green Tree
Hungarian Restaurant.

Hannah at Harbor Fish

Two gold rings
flash above the
rough surface of salt cod

earrings of pearls
hanging from pearls
move among the wire drying racks

narrow work porch
over the slip at the fish pier
trawlers with their following gulls

“Aren’t you afraid
they’ll take the cod?”

“We throw them
the heads and gurry, they’re happy.
Gulls won’t eat salt fish.”

5. (for me)

When it’s time—
don’t rush me, but when it’s time
burn me down, sail me from Castine
past Nautilus, past Holbrook, Cape Rosier
to the Green Lodge Bell.
Starboard tack would be nice
the dead deserve the right of way
so keep the bell to westward
start the sprinkling.
I’ll warn you, it’s light and flaky stuff
like ground up shells.
Say breeze is S/SW, the
afternoon sea breeze,
some flakes may stick to the boot stripe,
the bottom paint—don’t worry
they’ll wash off on the other tack.
Come about, round the bell, watch the jibe;
sprinkle the rest downwind &
head on back to Dennett’s Wharf for beer.
I’ll be fine—hang out with
my buddies the seals
eat sushi, with finally the time
to finish Proust in French,
study the Kelp Sutra in the original,
listen to the bell.

TRIBUTES

Philip Booth, 1925–2007

All the Way Home
Patricia Ranzoni

Gone off with Frost
again, hasn’t he.

Over the hill
we’ll rethink
seeing bobolink flush,
in that flash when
last wild strawberries
and first wild blueberries
might be found
blushing together
in the hay
where he’d love to be
after docking.

A bit late tonight
but he’d want us
to go ahead
wouldn’t he, Betsy.
So I’ll call this old
Castine ark on my
mother’s old school-
house green
where we’ve met
to listen more times
than you could
shake a stick at
Philip Booth Hall
for the tribute he’s
paid us in it all these years.
What he’d stand for.
Wouldn’t.
And what we’ve prayed
to return no thanks
he thought
to being our laureate.

The same way
I long ago mended
in my mind
the town’s logo
from battleground
of four nations
to five seeing maybe
a Penobscot root club
across the French,
Dutch, British,
and U.S. flags
on the town line
just north of Julia’s
for the clans of
Madockawando
abiding still upriver if not a Wabanaki shield.
Or arrow pointed down
in peace as I stitched on the bicentennial
quilt’s early Maine flag
but thought tipped up,
sovereign, the way
depicters have always
layered powers
into their work.

Here he is now.
His hand
on my shoulder showing
the only word we need.

Five Sentences From Philip
(Or How To Write Poems)

Candice Stover

Spoken, years ago, on a March morning
Following a dream he had, words he wrote
In the dark and found again
To read out loud, words traveling lines
Of cable and wire, peninsula to island:

Feeling is first.
The author is the authority.
The words will tell.
Listen to how they say.
Thus, they empower you.

Repeating them, the reed of his voice
Sounding each key, one by one
Over the phone, the receivers held
To our ears as I wrote his words, spoken
As if he knew we would be needing them.