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February 14, 2003
It’s
a Fest: Student Poets to Read at First Five College Poetryfest
Five
College student poets now have a new venue to share their work
thanks to the establishment of an event that organizers hope to
run each year. The first annual Five College Student Poetryfest,
set for Thursday, February 20, at 7:30 pm in Smith College’s
Neilson Browsing Room, will feature student poets (two from each
institution) from Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith
Colleges and the University of Massachusetts. The participants
are Billy Lopez and Evan Klavon (Amherst); Jason Barber and Sean
Bishop (Hampshire); Olivia Bustion ’03 and Nicole Zerillo
’03 (Mount Holyoke); Maggie Halley and Allegra Mira (Smith);
and Kristina Martino and Steven Zultanski (University of Massachusetts).
A reception will follow their reading of their work. The fest
is cosponsored by Smith College and Five Colleges, Inc.
The event is the brainchild of poet and translator Ellen Doré
Watson, director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, and Lorna
Peterson, executive director of Five Colleges, Inc., who “cooked
it up together,” says Watson, and implemented it with the
help of Five College faculty. “The English chairs and creative
writing faculty on the five campuses got together last year to
talk about the popularity of their creative writing courses and
the talent of their students,” says Peterson. “It
seemed a good idea to give students an opportunity to read their
poems to each other and to their teachers.”
Mount Holyoke’s Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Lecturer
in the Humanities, and Robert Shaw, professor of English, who
are both poets and faculty members, are enthusiastic about the
fest and MHC’s student writers who are participating. “The
English department selected Olivia and Nicole to be our first
MHC poets in the poetryfest because we wanted to salute their
dedication to independent work in the writing of poetry,”
says Salter, who was involved in the early brainstorming that
resulted in the creation of the fest. “Both these students
are writing senior theses that include poetry of great technical
difficulty and thematic range. We’re lucky to have a number
of fine poets we could have chosen, but Nicole and Olivia are
indicative of what young writers can do when they set their mind
to it.”
Shaw, who is Zerillo’s thesis adviser, notes that what she
is “setting her mind to” is ambitious and impressive.
“Nicole’s thesis has both a scholarly and a creative
dimension; although it is a collection of her own poems, she is
deeply engaged in the study of traditional verse forms, and is
working hard at achieving her own style and imaginative conceptions
within such demanding patterns as the sonnet, the ballad, the
sestina, and others. She has a gift for compact, apt, and surprising
phrasing.” Salter pays Bustion the highest of compliments,
noting, “Olivia often brings me a poem in a highly complex
form she has invented, full of internal rhymes and demanding meters.
More amazingly, the poems make beautiful sense. I regularly ask
her if I can steal her work.”
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