Katharine Sapper

A Look at Glascock Poet Katharine Sapper
College Street Journal, April 19, 2002

One year ago, Katharine Sapper FP sold Alto Voltage, the successful advertising agency she operated in Guatemala City, to pursue an education and career as a writer in the United States. "I want to be a voice for people in my country who are disenfranchised, who don't have a voice," said Sapper. "I can convey to Americans what I've seen and what my people are like. I am not a political animal, just interested in people and their souls." This month Sapper will take a big step toward her goal, becoming the eighth Frances Perkins scholar in the past decade to participate in the Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition, now in its seventy-ninth year.

Sapper will be judged in competition with student poets from Brandeis University, Colby College, Hampshire College, the University of Connecticut, and Vassar College. The six contestants will read their work Friday, April 26, at 8 pm in Gamble Auditorium. Glyn Maxwell, Rosanna Warren, and Karl Kirchwey, the three poets who will make up this year's panel of judges, will also participate in an open conversation, "Life and Letters," Friday, April 26, at 3 pm in the library's Stimson Room and in a reading of their own work Saturday, April 27, at 10 am in Mary Woolley's New York Room. The Glascock winner will be announced following the judges' readings.

"Katherine is quite an extraordinary talent," said Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities. "Her vocabulary is enviably rich, and the turns of her mind always unexpected. In addition to her meditative, romantic, and political modes, she can also be risqué and very funny. I hope Guatemala is proud of its first Glascock contestant."

Winning a place in the Glascock competition came as a wonderful surprise for Sapper, who has been writing in earnest only since she came to Mount Holyoke. It was also a great relief. "I didn't sell my company for nothing," she jokes. Although she is a new writer, Sapper is a longtime reader of both English and Latin American prose and poetry. She credits her love of language to her maternal grandmother, a nurse from Sudbury, Massachusetts, who married a Guatemalan surgeon and passed the English language "as an heirloom" to her granddaughter. Sapper hopes to combine that inheritance with Guatemalan cultural traditions, such as superstition, magic, and folklore.

"There is a thin dividing line between what is real and not real in Guatemalan culture," explains Sapper. "Whereas writing in the United States is very reality based, I like the blending of worlds in Latin American writing, dream world and real world, conscious and unconscious. . . . I am learning to get out of the way of my writing, to just let it flow from a place I'm not conscious of."

Through writing, Sapper taps into not only other worlds but other perspectives, as well. "Writing is a way for me to get into others' skins," she says. In her poem "God's Dogs," for example, Sapper speaks as a soldier in Guatemala's civil war. In other pieces, she speaks as a prostitute or as a Mayan farmer. "It is more interesting and challenging to be someone else," said Sapper of imagining the lives of multiple personas. "It makes me feel more connected to humanity."

Since its inception, the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Prize Contest has been bringing aspiring undergraduate poets into contact with established poets, as well as launching the careers of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated poets. Sylvia Plath, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, Katha Pollitt, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg were all Glascock winners. Schnackenberg won two years in a row for MHC (1974 and 1975), and Mary Jo Salter took second place representing Harvard-Radcliffe in 1976. Glascock began in 1923 with a memorial gift from the parents of a member of the class of 1922 who died shortly after graduating. After one year as an MHC event, it became an intercollegiate contest, with MHC holding a permanent place in competition with students invited from a changing roster of four to six colleges. Past judges have included W. H. Auden, May Sarton, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, John Crowe Ransom, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, and Derek Walcott.

About the Judges

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Prize, English writer Glyn Maxwell is the author of several collections of poetry, including Time's Fool (2000), and The Breakage (2001). Next fall, his collection The Nerve will be published by Houghton Mifflin, and he will begin a visiting professorship at New School University in New York. Rosanna Warren is a poet, translator, editor, and associate professor of English and modern foreign languages and literatures at Boston University. Winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, she is author of Stained Glass (1993), Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), and Snow Day (1981). Karl Kirchwey is director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York and author of three books of poems: A Wandering Island (1990), Those I Guard (1993), and The Engrafted Word (1998). His play in verse A Chapter for Thanatos received the 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama.