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April 19,
2002
A
Look at Glascock Poet Katharine Sapper
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Poet
Katharine Sapper FP
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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.
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