UM teacher, poetry patron Pollet dies

ELLSWORTH – A poet who taught creative writing at the University of Maine and was assistant editor of the National Poetry Foundation has died.

Sylvester Pollet was 68 years old.

Pollet and his wife, artist MaJo Keleshian, moved to Maine in the 1970s as part of the back-to-the-land movement and built their home on Winkumpaugh Road in Ellsworth, according to some of Pollet’s UM colleagues.

Burt Hatlen, an English professor at the university, said Pollet was diagnosed with cancer five or six years ago but became more seriously ill in the past several months.

“I didn’t expect him to go so quickly,” Hatlen said Monday.

According to information posted on the Web site of a Boston funeral home, Pollet died Dec. 20.

Pollet’s own poems were “admired and fairly widely read,” Hatlen said, but the greater legacy Pollet leaves behind is in the students he taught at the University of Maine and his “Backwoods Broadsides” poetry compilations. Pollet also edited poems published in Paideuma, a poetry journal published by the National Poetry Foundation, which was founded at UM in 1971.

Pollet edited and published 100 of the single-sheet “Backwoods Broadsides” editions between 1994 and 2006, mailing them across the country and overseas and drawing the attention of poetry fans wherever they were sent, according to Hatlen. Each sheet was folded into thirds, which on the two sides created a total of six panels where Pollet published new poems, some of them by well-known poets intrigued by the publication’s simple format, he said. Then, they were mailed out.

“He wanted to get poetry out to people,” Hatlen said. “It was something you could stick in your pocket and read on the subway or whatever.”

Margo Lukens, another UM English professor, said Pollet liked sending out jokes to friends via e-mail but that the low-tech ethos of “Backwoods Broadsides” echoed Pollet’s natural sensibilities.

“That was a deliberate choice to use an antique form,” Lukens said.

A message posted to Keleshian in an online guest book at Boston funeral home’s Web site expressed sympathy for Pollet’s death.

“Our thoughts are with you and do know that many people were given pleasure and reflection by the effort to help poetry reach a wide audience,” the message read. “That is an incredible gift to the world.”