Diane Rainson

Rainson to Compete in Glascock 2000
College Street Journal, May 5, 2000

Diane Rainson '00 will represent Mount Holyoke at MHC's prestigious Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition, to be held at the College April 14 and 15. The MHC community is welcome to attend all Glascock events.

The seventh Francis Perkins scholar to participate in the event in the past decade, Rainson will compete against contestants from Carleton College, Hampshire College, New York University, St. John's College, and Yale University. Competitors will read their work on Friday, April 14, at 8 pm in Gamble Auditorium before a panel of professional poets.

This year's panelists are John Burt, Rachel Hadas, and Margaret Holley. Prior to the Friday evening event, the poet-judges will lead a "Life and Letters" conversation at 3 pm in the library's Stimson Room. They will read from their own work on Saturday at 10:30 am in the New York Room, Mary Woolley Hall.

Rainson is a Long Island native who spent two years at Nassau Community College before transferring to MHC in 1998. While a student at Nassau, Rainson began writing poetry in a creative writing class taught by Kathryn A. Schwertman '77. Last year, Rainson was an alternate for the Glascock event, which Erika Dyson '99 won. Dyson, a religion major and Frances Perkins Scholar, was the first MHC student to win the event in twenty-one years.

Rainson, an English major with a special interest is nineteenth-century Romantic poetry and a minor in religion, is delighted to have an opportunity to compete in this year's event. She credits professors Mary Jo Salter and Virginia Ellis, her thesis coadvisers, with nurturing her poetry talents at MHC. Rainson has also been involved in "some intense literary theory work with Richard Johnson" and notes that the experience has given her "a broad field of reference in which to explore [her] own ideas, both in prose and in poetry."

"What I love about Diane's poetry," says Salter, "is how self-demanding it is, and on how many levels. Many of her poems employ symbols borrowed from the Bible, but she always reinvents them and makes them contemporary. Her vocabulary is exceptional, and the range of forms she tries out--including imitations of Chaucer--is very wide. You can also read Diane for the complex texture of sounds she produces. I have high hopes for her future."

Kay Althoff, director of the Frances Perkins program, echoes Salter's enthusiasm: "From the first time we read Diane's application, we saw real talent. She was a top student at Nassau Community College. We anticipated she might emerge this year as the Glascock representative."

The Glascock competition, now in its seventy-seventh year, has involved such literary luminaries as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, and William Kunstler. This year's panelists, Burt, Hadas, and Holley, will continue the event's distinguished legacy. John Burt, professor of English and American literature at Brandeis University, is the author of two books of poems, most recently Work Without Hope (1996). He has also published a critical study of Robert Penn Warren and edited a volume of Warren's Collected Poems.

Rachel Hadas's numerous volumes of verse, translations, and criticism include Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (1998). Hadas was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and is a professor of English at Rutgers University.

Margaret Holley directs the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College and is the author of three poetry collections, including The Smoke Tree, which won the Bluestem Award. She has also published a book of criticism on Marianne Moore.

Matins
By Diane Rainson '00

Idle fingers snap to
Gabriel's brass attack,
Reveille and Taps,
splitting the fog
of hand-rolled smoke
and lazy city jazz;
one tag-line note
chases a siren's tail
out into the street--
the wail of a babe
born too soon to find a comfortable bed;
an amniotic sparkle,
beacon in the red
strobe, the chaos,
blaring pulsar,
star we've never seen before
tonight.
Or maybe
it's the last call,
gasping for a drink,
vinegar or wine,
any taste to stay
the sentence,
ride a little longer,
even in an ambulance--
either way, the medic
washes his hands.

-- Photograph by Fred LeBlanc