Michelle Greenblatt (1982–2015) was an American poet and editor whose work joined repetition, memory, trauma, sexuality, collaboration, visual intensity, and experimental form. Her books include brain : storm and ASHES AND SEEDS, alongside collaborative projects with Sheila E. Murphy, Vernon Frazer, and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. Her writing often lets phrases, colors, bodily images, remembered scenes, and voices return with small changes, allowing recurrence to carry emotional pressure across long sequences.
ASHES AND SEEDS
ASHES AND SEEDS, published by Unlikely Books in 2014, gathers poetry shaped by memory, sexuality, trauma, desire, and survival. The volume includes the long sequence “Streaks of Scarlet: a Story in 100 Parts,” whose extended structure gives recurring images and emotional states room to accumulate.
The book’s title places destruction beside continuance. Ashes imply aftermath; seeds carry the possibility of another beginning. That tension gives the collection a temporal structure in which intense experience leaves residue while language keeps generating new forms from what remains.
Serial form
A one-hundred-part sequence changes the reader’s relation to recurrence. An image can disappear for many pages and return carrying memory from its earlier appearance. Small variations become meaningful because the sequence has trained attention toward what repeats.
Serial form also gives trauma and desire a structure suited to uneven return. Memory can recur through color, phrase, bodily image, or interruption, creating continuity without requiring a single chronological account.
brain : storm
brain : storm, first published by anabasis Press in 2006 and later reissued by Unlikely Books, established Greenblatt’s book-length practice. The volume includes “some halo,” a poem in one hundred parts, the novella not a very big box, and collaborative work.
The title suggests mental weather and concentrated verbal activity. The colon makes the relation visible: “brain” and “storm” remain distinct terms while the punctuation binds them into one charged event. Repetition, sequence, fragmentation, and shifts of register let thought appear as movement through pressure.
Collaborative ghazals
Greenblatt collaborated with Sheila E. Murphy on Ghazals 1–59 and Other Poems. The ghazal’s recurring formal expectations become a field for exchange between two writers, making collaboration part of the poem’s rhythm.
Shared authorship allows voice to develop through response, interruption, echo, and difference. A repeated formal element can belong to both writers while each contribution changes the sequence’s tone.
Definitions of Obscurity
Greenblatt also collaborated with Vernon Frazer on Dark Hope, later expanded as Definitions of Obscurity. The project joins distinct verbal sensibilities through sequence and exchange, extending her interest in collaborative composition.
The title gives obscurity an almost lexicographic frame. “Definitions” suggests clarity and bounded meaning, while “obscurity” points toward uncertainty. Their conjunction suits a poetics interested in language that clarifies and destabilizes at once.
jump beast
jump beast, created with Finnish poet and artist Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, adds an international collaboration to Greenblatt’s work. Language, visual imagination, and experimental procedure meet across different literary and cultural contexts.
Such collaboration expands the field of form. A project can move among text, visual relation, sequence, and procedural exchange, giving authorship a distributed structure.
[I hum a melody]
[I hum a melody] is a compact prose poem built from repetition, hesitation, memory, color, and self-correction. The speaker begins with an ordinary act of humming and moves through obligation, forgetting, suspicion, and return.
Each sentence alters the status of the one before it. Repeated phrases acquire new emphasis, turning memory into an active process of revision. The closing cry of “Green!” shifts color into sound and theatrical interruption.
Color and verbal pressure
Color in Greenblatt’s poetry often acts as more than description. A color can become a recurring signal that links separate moments across a sequence. Its return gives the reader a sensory anchor inside otherwise shifting syntax.
Scarlet and green carry visual force immediately. Repetition changes them into structural markers, allowing color to organize memory through recognition.
Editing and literary community
Greenblatt served as poetry and music editor for Unlikely Stories: Episode IV and earlier co-edited AND PER SE AND. Her poems appeared in publications including Poetry, Sugar Mule, Free Verse, Hamilton Stone Review, Moria, Coconut, BlazeVOX, Counterexample Poetics, Word for/Word, and Otoliths.
Editorial practice complements her collaborative writing because both depend on relation. Editing places texts beside other texts, while collaboration allows several voices to shape one evolving work.
Legacy
Greenblatt died in 2015 at the age of thirty-three. Her books, collaborations, editorial work, and long sequences preserve a distinctive body of experimental writing marked by intensity, recurrence, vulnerability, and formal openness.
Her strongest formal signature lies in repetition made dynamic through sequence. Images and phrases return carrying the history of their earlier appearances, making the poem a structure that remembers itself.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for related writers and traditions.