Erika Dyson FP '99 only started
writing poetry seriously in September, but already had her work
chosen to represent MHC in the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry
Contest.
No, she isn't an English major, and she hasn't been writing poetry since age four. But senior Frances Perkins Scholar Erika Dyson's work was of such high quality that it was chosen over all other entries, and she will represent Mount Holyoke at next week's prestigious Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest. Dyson will read four of her poems during the competition.
"I used to write a little poetry in high school, but I was more interested in journalism," says Dyson. And a post-high-school career as a theatrical costumer left her no time for writing anything except letters and journal entries. But once at Mount Holyoke, Dyson says, "I wanted to do something that had to do just with words." Her first playwriting effort won Dyson honorable mention in a Five College contest last year.
"I took Penny Gill's Writing from the Inside Out course my first semester here, and she made it clear that I could be completely myself when I write. She got me to love words again." Dyson has been writing poetry consistently only since September, and all the poems she submitted to the contest were composed for MHC classes.
Dyson took Robert Shaw's Verse Writing course in the fall and is taking an intermediate poetry course from Mary Jo Salter now. It was Salter who encouraged Dyson to enter the Glascock. "I'm throwing my poems into the world to see what happens," Dyson says. "I don't want just to please myself anymore; I want to find out what others think."
Dyson, a religion major and English minor, is completing an honors independent research project on "the relationship between nineteenth-century science and natural theology and the beginnings of the spiritualist movement in the United States." Spirituality finds its way into many of Dyson's poems too, though their subjects are quite varied. "Two of my Glascock poems stem from personal experience and two are of a metaphysical bent," she explains. "I am endlessly fascinated by the ways humans approach what they consider holy."
Left to her own devices, Dyson is likely to write in free verse; she admits she's "only just learning to trust meter and rhyme." Her poetic role models include contemporary poet Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, and Jewish poets from Andalusian Spain.
Although neither piece below was submitted for the Glascock competition, in which Erika Dyson FP '99 will represent Mount Holyoke, the poems below will give you a sense of her style ... and talent.
Eternity is countless kalpas*
churning into countless more kalpas,
if you can believe in kalpas,
or if the sound of the word doesn't make you suspect
that someone is making fun of you.
Eternity is how long it takes
for some arhat or archangel or concerned citizen
to empty a warehouse of mustard seeds
one seed every hundred years,
and then, once empty, fill it back up,
and to keep doing this until whoever told him to do it
remembers to tell him to stop.
Eternity is how long it has taken
for me to lose my taste for plankton,
and how much longer it will take me
to truly shake the tinny mucus taste of Velveeta,
or the old clam juice taste of that bad sake.
Eternity is not a long golden road
which you saunter down hand in hand with some soul mate
or that aunt who smells like gossip and never leaves.
It is the insistent immediacy of a mosquito
invading your sleep.
It is the moment you discover the conspiracy of muscles
that keeps you from opening to scream.
* A kalpa is a unit of cosmic time found in Buddhist scripture which represents the entire amount of time it takes for a world system to be created and then be destroyed.
when the Ocean moved the ungrassed mounds of sand,
hand
to mouth, we stared at the stunned homes, half-gone.
on
water-smooth dunes, waves strew beach plums, kelp strips,
hips,
dead fish, shack chunks, a shimmering spume boa,
the
artistic flourishings of Her commotion:
Ocean
so unimpressed by the lazy sequinning of lakes.
shakes
and silent tears, in the aftermath, a blur,
Her
waves purring, slap and shush, we, unwanted,
head
-ed inland to wetted turf and embarassed fits.
it's
not personal, it's that our fences offended. But
what
ever truth in seaweed stuffed shacks I espied,
I
felt foolish, felt betrayed and knew, as you
do,
we own, but only momentarily,
silly.
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