Kathryn Foran '02 will represent MHC as a contestant in the seventy-eighth annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition to be held at MHC April 20.

When Kathryn Foran '02 was in second grade, her rhyming poem about spring was read over the intercom to her entire elementary school. Today, fourteen springs later, her maturity as a poet, and her nerves, are being put to the test in a more challenging venue. As a contestant in the seventy-eighth annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition at MHC, her work will be judged by a panel of three distinguished American poets. The American studies major will represent Mount Holyoke, competing against five students from Amherst College, Bryn Mawr College, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, and Smith College Friday, April 20, at 8 pm in Gamble Auditorium.

Poets April Bernard, John Peck, and Alastair Reid, who will judge Foran's work, will also participate in "Life and Letters: Conversations with the Judges" in the Stimson Room at Williston Library Friday, April 20, at 3 pm. They will read from their own work and announce the contest winner Saturday, April 21, at 10:30 am in the New York Room, Mary Woolley Hall. The MHC community is welcome to attend all events free of charge.

Foran transferred to MHC from Manchester Community College (MCC) in Connecticut and is now completing her first year at MHC. She studied poetry in the fall semester with Robert Shaw, poet and professor of English, and took her first college creative-writing class at MCC with Stephen Straight, professor of English, whom she considers her first poetry mentor. In 1999, Foran was honored as a Connecticut Student Poet. She and five others participated in a statewide reading tour. She has also seen her work in print in several small poetry journals.

Creation Story After he cleaned the first seventy pages from rough to first draft, he drove through rainstorms for the coast of Maine. He didn’t bring a pen or paper. He set out early in the morning for the beach where cliffs beaten by ocean had deep wrinkles like old men and smooth, gray stones were swirled with white, like the Earth seen from space. He set to work, bending to lift the stones in his hands, stacking them one on top of the other in rows, like clusters of druid ruins or signs to fellow wanderers along the sand and ledge of the shore. He felt the rhythm of the muscles in his arms and back and the sun on his shoulders. He heard the ocean breathing behind him. The movement was something like all the jobs digging fence holes in the sun, the push and lift of the shovel, the heft of dirt. Or it was like picking corn those summers when he was in middle school, after his mother ran from his father back to the reservation. He picked row after row in the early morning, bag after bag, forgetting the sharp stalks cutting his hands, the burn of the pesticides. Now he’s home again. He’s writing again, ordering ideas along the shore of memories he could drown in. The little blonde girl from across the street stops by for the third time that day. He gets up from his typing. He picks up a book and begins to read to her an old Indian story about the beginning of time. The one where there is nothing— no shade-giving trees, no sweet strawberries, no rich, brown dirt. There is no land, even, only a long memory of water, salty like tears, and fish weary of swimming, until the Creator utters the word and a fish begins piling rocks. Kathryn Foran ‘02 Glascock contestant

It was a surprise and a delight, she says, to be selected for the Glascock contest. “To be a part of the Glascock tradition is incredible. It was a big deal for me to submit my work. I really didn't think I had a shot.” Glascock has, in fact, launched 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, Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities, took second place in 1976.

The Glascock contest 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 event at MHC, it became an intercollegiate contest. Students are invited from a roster of four to six colleges that changes each year, with MHC holding a permanent place in the contest. 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 many others.

Glascock continues with a distinguished panel of judges for 2001. Bernard received the Walt Whitman Award for her first book of poems, Blackbird Bye Bye, in 1988. Her second collection, Psalms, appeared in 1993, and she has also published a novel, Pirate Jenny. Peck is the author of Shagbark, The Broken Blockhouse Wall (for which he received a Prix de Rome prize), M and Other Poems, and Poems and Translations of Hi-Lo. He has taught at Mount Holyoke (1977–1983) and Princeton University. Reid, who was born in Scotland, is a staff writer for the New Yorker, where he contributes poems, reviews, translations, and reportage. Noted for his translations of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, he is also the author of To Lighten My House; Oddments Inklings Omens Moments; Passwords; and Weathering (his selected poems).

While Foran says she does not have "lofty aspirations" in the poetry world, writing has been an important part of her life. She was an obsessive journal writer as a teen, putting pen to paper as a "coping tool." Her favorite poets include Billy Collins, Jane Kenyon, Czeslaw Milosz, and Mary Oliver. Writing poetry allows her to "see the connections between things," she says. "I like metaphor as a way of appreciating the world around me." She relies on "imagery from the natural world and flights of imagination." But her instincts tend to be intuitive. "I like trying to take an idea and run with it. I never know how successful I will be, but that's what I enjoy doing."