April 21, 2005
Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry
Competition April 22-23
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Nancy
Doherty FP ’05
MHC’s Glascock contestant (photo
by Donna Cote) |
By
Ember Oparowski ’07
The
eighty-second annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate
Poetry Competion will
be held Friday, April 22, at 8 pm in Gamble Auditorium
and Saturday, April 23, at 10:30 am in the Stimson Room of the
library. Begun in 1923 as a memorial to Kathryn Irene Glascock ’22,
the competition has long connected talented student poets with
distinguished professional poets.
Former
Glascock winners who later became prominent poets include Sylvia
Plath (Smith College),
Donald Hall (Harvard University),
James Merrill (Amherst College), Kenneth Koch (Harvard University),
and
Gjertrud Schnackenberg ’75 (Mount Holyoke College). Mary
Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities,
came in
second in 1976 as Radcliffe College’s representative.
“Some of this country’s best poets started their careers as
student contestants in the Glascock contest—sometimes as
losers!” Salter
said. “And many of America’s most distinguished writers
have served as judges. We hope lots of people will turn out to
support Nancy [Doherty, this year’s MHC contestant] and
one of Mount Holyoke’s oldest traditions.”
Past judges have included W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise
Bogan, Robert Frost, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, John Crowe
Ransom, Adrienne
Rich, and Stephen Spender. This year’s Glascock judges are
renowned poets Sarah Lindsay, author of Mount Clutter and Primate
Behavior; Deborah Warren, author of The Size of Happiness and Zero
Meridian; and Greg Williamson, author of Errors in the Script and
Silent Partner.
Nancy Doherty FP ’05 was chosen as this year’s entrant. “Nancy
Doherty’s poems combine wry humor
with hard-won wisdom,” said Salter, Doherty’s thesis
adviser. “She is deft at working in a number of forms and,
in her rigorous approach to her craft, achieves also an open-endedness
and a respect for mystery.”
Since
1924, the first year the competition had contestants from other
schools, 27 Mount Holyoke
women have placed either first or
second.
Q&A:
Nancy Doherty Vies for Glascock Poetry Prize
Ember Oparowski ’07 sat down for lunch recently with Nancy
Doherty FP ’05 to speak about what it feels like to be a
contestant in the eighty-second Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Competition.
When you heard that you were chosen as Mount Holyoke’s
entrant for the Glascock Poetry competition, what was your response?
I got the letter at home during vacation and whooped for joy. This
was the second time I’d competed. Three years ago I was runner-up
to Katharine Sapper, another FP. We’d taken Mary Jo Salter’s
Verse Forms course together. She’s such an amazing writer
that I had to be happy she was selected.
How do you feel being chosen?
I am in awe to be in such elevated company. It feels like the culmination
of what coming back to Mount Holyoke has done for me. [Doherty
was a first-year student at MHC in 1966, dropped out after one
year, and returned in 2000 to complete her undergraduate degree.]
Do you have any expectations of winning?
For Mount Holyoke’s sake, I hope I win [chuckle]. But actually,
there’s a grand tradition of great poets competing in the
Glascock and not winning. Take for example, Mary Jo Salter. She
competed for Harvard, came in second, and has gone on to an illustrious
career. Even Sylvia Plath only tied for first place. To me, just
being a competitor feels like a victory.
Is it surprising that in 2000, 2002, and 2005 Frances Perkins Scholars
have been chosen as Mount Holyoke’s representatives for the
Glascock?
Not really, when you think about it. Mount Holyoke always has terrifically
talented traditional-aged student-poets, like Sophie Zucker ’07,
who read in Poetryfest with me. But, assuming the same ability,
someone older is just going to have a greater wealth of material
and depth of perception. One of my poems, for instance, is about
finding my mother’s false teeth in the refrigerator the day
after she died. It’s funny, but it took 20 years for me to
see it that way.
What was your formative poetry experience?
I’d written poems as a young woman but had been away from
it for years. Then in 1997 I took a creative writing course with
the poet Karen Chase. It wasn't a poetry class per se, but
the idea was to emerge from each session with the first draft of
a piece of writing. Chase would use all kinds of techniques—words,
sounds, smells, and objects—to stir our senses and provoke
memories. I found myself rediscovering poetry as a result, and
in the months that followed I began writing poems almost daily.
I was in a wonderful, exalted state—it was like falling in
love.
What poets have influenced you?
That’s a tough one; no doubt I’ve been influenced by
every great poet I’ve ever read. Just in the last century
I can think of a huge range of poets that I admire immensely. I
tend to be attracted to more formalist writers—Yeats, Auden,
Frost—but I like rule-breakers like e. e. cummings as well.
Part of the magic of a good poem is the surprise of its language,
whether expressed in a sonnet or a purely invented form. Some other
favorites who come to mind—Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht,
Richard Wilbur, Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Peter Kane Dufault,
and Lisel Mueller. And I find Virginia Hamilton Adair ’33
an inspiration, since she didn’t publish her first book,
Ants on the Melon, until she was 80.
Why do you write poetry?
Because I can’t sing! Which sounds glib, but what I mean
is that music, in an obvious way, moves people. Good poetry moves
people, too, and at heart that’s what I want to do. Anyone
involved in creative work is trying to affect other people. The
more you care about it, the more your audience will, too. I don’t
mean to sound too solemn and tedious, because poetry can be delicious
fun. Robert Frost said, “No tears for the writer, no tears
for the reader.” But the same goes for laughter. Poetry is
life-enhancing; who wouldn't want to be a poet?
Poem
by Nancy Doherty FP ’05
MHC’s Glascock contestant
Van
Gogh’s
Bedroom at Arles
I bought a postcard, a painting by van Gogh,
an impulse buy, because of all the blues
and yellows used, and because the bed
inspired me to write “Wish we were there,”
on the back. I mailed it to you, thinking
in my lust: a room, a bed, and us—what more?
You’d been gone so long and I forgot
Van Gogh had fought with demons every day
in that humble, sunny room at Arles. Why did he
paint the place
with love? On one wall a face—
his own?—peers from a frame, the only hint
of sadness. Maybe that’s why a room with a bed’s
not
enough. There’s always a mirror somewhere.
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