am about to graduate in May, 2004 with a B.A. in English. This poetry represents the culmination of my work as a Gaines Fellow. Writing over the years has become a larger and more legitimate part of my life, and I am very grateful to the Gaines Center for providing a venue for this type of creative work. These poems were written in the fall of 2003 over a fairly short period of time, and are part of a larger group of poems, which I hope to work into a book-length collection this summer, perhaps for some type of publication. This group of poems is a narrative about loss, abandonment, and how the narrator copes with this to become a stronger, selfaware person. All three of my thesis committee members, Professors Gurney Norman, Randall Roorda, and Jane Vance, proved to be extremely supportive and enthusiastic mentors, and their advice was indispensable to me. After graduating, I plan to work on writing and submitting my work to various journals, along with finding an MFA program to attend in the fall of 2005.
Melanie Fee's "A Letter Would Have Been Fine," a series of short poems, isactually one long poem in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This collection both implies a narrative and explores honestly the deep and shifting feelings of the protagonist (the "I" of the poems), who has been left holding the shreds of a broken relationship. The narrator, through images that place us in her skin, makes us feel what she feels, thus compelling us to follow her into the depths of her pain and, finally, to emerge with her, at the end of the work, into new coherences in her life, the beginnings of healing.
The narrator's voice in the poems, non-rhetorical and human, convinces us that it comes from a real person. The integrity and strength of this voice, along with the realness of the character's suffering and her emergence from it, are the remarkable accomplishments of this poet's work. The strong emotional suspense it creates is akin to that evoked by a good short story.
The poet does not simply describe how her protagonist feels or tell us explicitly what feeling her story should elicit from us. Instead, these compressed, intense poems, in which every word is necessary and none is wasted, dramatize the character's states of mind and body. This creates in the reader a strong sense of her emotions and experiences. This achievement, and Melanie's dramatic, energetic use of language, partakes of the essence of poetry.
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