Selections from Akeldama: Author's Introduction
from issue Number 2, September 2009
by Melissa Green

I have been thinking about the story of Heloïse and Abélard for many years. At some point I realized I couldn’t ‘see’ the 12th century, though I’d read many books about the period. I pictured generations of tourists with their cameras in front of Notre Dame, snapping pictures of the great Rose Window—the spectacular round stained glass window in the center of the cathedral—thinking they had captured something of the Middle Ages. I tried to peer through the image of the tourists at Notre Dame and realized I couldn’t see what I was hungry to see—the medieval world and the people as they themselves would have seen their world.

How could I see the 12th century, see the story of Heloïse and Abélard unfold, without smashing the cathedral’s Rose Window? I needed to feel air from the 12th century rushing toward me so I could breathe it in. Then I began to listen for the voices. I found I was listening for ordinary voices, speaking about the ordinary things of their world that would be important to them, what they would do, how they would think. I could hear how their lives sounded to them, and looking through the various fragments of the smashed Rose Window, which had been in my way, watch as they went about their ordinary lives.

So Akeldama is unusual, rather like an imagined medieval creature with the hinderparts of a lion and the head of a dragon. Wanting to interleave the story of Heloïse and Abélard added another layer of difficulty. And then there was the problem of language. I know no Old French and can’t speak or write in Latin as my mother tongue, so I had to invent a language for my nuns and lovers, using as many Old English or Early English words as I could.

Much is known about Heloïse and Abélard, especially from 1117 when they met and had their love affair and all that ensued until 1142 when Abélard died. When Heloïse and her nuns were thrown out of Argenteuil by Abbot Suger of St. Denis in the late 1120s, for example, we know Abélard gave them the Paraclete, the site of a small oratory he possessed. Akeldama, though concerned with their love affair, began for me when I started to think that after Abélard’s death, Heloïse lived for over twenty years. I was very curious about what she might have been doing and thinking about all that time, in a convent where she had never wanted to be enclaustrated.

The nuns’ days are circular; the rural seasons are circular. I wanted the voices and the actions to count, rather than the names. During the hour of Nones (where Heloïse’s poems are) each nun is supposed to be in her cell in prayer and contemplation. Readers may object to not being able to identify characters by name. We are accustomed to reading fiction that makes us aware of the character’s biography, personality, extended family, city or work or likes and dislikes. We are accustomed to loving or hating characters, being moved by the traditional ‘arc’ that ends in the denouement and with the bookcover closing. I wanted to interrupt that somehow and hope that the voices would be simply ‘overheard.’ There is a mystery in the voices. Obviously, the overt poetry happens at ‘midovernoon’ when we hear Heloïse’s story, but as it is in poetry and only part of the sound of convent life, it’s more clearly artifice.

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About the author
Melissa Green’s The Squanicook Eclogues (Norton) won the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her latest book is the poetry collection Fifty-Two (Arrowsmith). Her writing has appeared in Yale Review, AGNI, Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books.