Sylvester Pollet at the tiller of his beloved sailboat, Echo.—PHOTO COURTESY OF DONNA GOLD

Sylvester Pollet Remembered as Great Teacher and Good Human Being

Ten days before Christmas, Sylvester Pollet sat up in bed to entertain visitors in his room near the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. His eyes brightened and the cheeks above his white beard reddened as he capped the conversation with a droll and witty comment that caused a wave of laughter throughout the room. Always a great teacher, the Ellsworth poet underwent a demanding series of experimental treatments with calm courage and philosophic humor that instructed those around him. But as the December light waned toward the solstice, so did his life. When the light returned and the air warmed, the poet, teacher, sailor and Buddhist practitioner was on his way.

When Pollet died on Dec. 20, he left a remarkable literary legacy that included a book of poetry, “Entering the Walking-Stick Business,” along with poems published in Exquisite Corpse, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The New York Quarterly, The New England Review, Maine Speaks and many other journals and anthologies. Pollet, who taught creative writing for 25 years at the University of Maine in Orono, also left 100 numbers of his “Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet” series, each featuring the work of an individual poet — along with numerous friends spread across Maine, the nation and the world.

According to fellow Maine writer Bill Carpenter, Pollet was “one of the clearest and most elegant voices in what has been called the Maine literary renaissance of the ’70s and ’80s.”

Pollet was born in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1939, the son of the painter Joseph Pollet and sculptor Betty Strassburger. He was raised among artists and writers in Woodstock and in New York City’s Greenwich Village, including his sister Elizabeth’s husband, the noted writer Delmore Schwartz. In 1961, Pollet graduated from Dartmouth College as an English major, the recipient of several awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize.

After spending much of the intervening 10 years in New York City working at the Eighth Street Bookstore, a gathering place for poets, in 1971 Pollet came to Maine. Eventually, he and his wife, the artist MaJo Keleshian, built a home near Branch Lake, looking south to Flying Moose Mountain.

His days of living off the land, making do by carving walking sticks and hobbyhorses, are celebrated in “Entering the Walking-Stick Business” (published by Blackberry Press in 1982). These poems, said Carpenter, “applied the flavor and discipline of Eastern philosophy to life in Maine, and made it fit. He gave literary expression to what it was to go back to the land so intentionally and forcefully in the post-sixties generation.”

Note, for instance, the poem titled “Walking Poem,” about his truck’s ignition points:

gunnin’ her up

Dead River Hill

she quits cold.

time changes

in an April wind

wind over snow

snow over mud

points beyond filing

Pollet’s life and work were of a piece, added Carpenter. “As a person he was as spare, sage and disciplined as his poems. In a group — whether by the woodstove or in the cockpit of his beloved sailboat, Echo, he would provide the moment of illumination that could bring the whole conversation together — never without humor, human sympathy and understanding.”

Pollet later returned to academia, receiving a master’s degree from the University of Maine Orono in 1985. He stayed on to teach creative writing and serve as associate editor of the National Poetry Foundation.

Naomi Jacobs, chairman of the UMO English Department, came to be a close friend. “I had a taste of what he must have been like as a teacher when I would show him some of my own creative work,” she said. “He was so thoughtful, so careful, so encouraging. It was clear that he put his full attention to whatever he was reading, no matter how amateur or accomplished the writer.”

His office, said Jacobs, was a little space of sanity: shelves of books, a pot of geraniums, a Tibetan thanka painting, artwork by his wife, a photo of his Tibetan Buddhist teacher and also a newspaper clipping from the university newspaper: “a picture of a student sticking out her tongue,” said Jacobs. “For some reason he just loved that picture of this 19-year-old being sassy. That office for me was such a pool of comfort.”

Pollet approached creative writing classes with generosity and compassion, continued Jacobs, finding great delight in his students’ work, from the ones who would light up with writing, to those who could just manage to turn one great phrase. When it was time to read their portfolios, she added, “he would spend the entire weekend — 10-, 11-hour days — reading that work; some that had been produced in the same careful spirit; some dashed off the night before. He didn’t judge that. He wasn’t willing to write anyone off.”

He approached editing with similar attention, said Carpenter. “He carried the same high standards into producing the ‘Backwoods Broadsides’ — a generous encouragement of poets all over the world with an expansive yet consistent vision of what poetry could be.” Pollet edited and published his “Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet” series for a dozen years, beginning in 1994, with the 600-odd subscribers forming a widespread poetry community of its own. These broadsides carried poems he selected to be published, each number printed on one legal-sized sheet of paper, front and back, folded into four sections, often featuring one long series of poems. According to a conversation with Pollet recounted by Thomas St. Pierre of UMaine, the broadsides were “inspired by his work in the sixties at the Eighth Street Bookstore, where he saw ‘poetry change hands in every imaginable form, usually for free.’” The series published celebrated poets such as Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley and Anne Waldman, local poets Theodore Enslin, Carl Little, Jennifer Moxley, Kenneth Rosen and John Wetterau, translations of poetry from Cesar Vallejo along with poets from Japan, France, Belgium, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy and the Netherlands.

Steven Evans, an associate professor in the UMO English department, hailed the project as a “marvelous ongoing anthology in real time,” a way of getting poets and readers in touch from around the world.

Since childhood, Pollet had been drawn to the poetry and philosophy of the East. Seven years ago, he began a serious study of Buddhism, actively participating in the Vajra Vidya Downeast meditation center in Ellsworth, traveling with them, and his wife, to Nepal, and to Sarnath, India, for a week of teaching and meditation.

But the simplicity, acceptance and deliberate experience of each moment were always integral to Pollet’s life. Take, for instance, this poem written on his birthday in 1974:

June 28, 1974 MAINE

Thirty-five years                                                                                                  

for this —

to cut six mortises,

hang an old door

in a new shack.

Thirty-five more

to open it,

step out?

His prediction was very close. During the intervening 33.5 years, Pollet shaped a life both local and global, one that was treasured by students, friends and colleagues for its dedication to the art of poetry, and appreciation of the humor and the beauty of rural Maine.