What do Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, and William Kunstler have in common? They all have been associated with Mount Holyoke's annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition, which will be held at the College April 16 and 17. This year marks the distinguished competition's seventy-sixth anniversary.
The Glascock will begin Friday afternoon with a "Life and Letters" discussion with the contest's three judges at 3 pm in the Library's Stimson Room. The six student contestants will read their ten-minute entries before an audience and the judges that evening, at 8 pm in Gamble Auditorium. The judges will read from their own work and announce prizes on Saturday at 10:30 am in the New York Room of Mary Woolley Hall.
The competition brings aspiring undergraduate poets in contact with some of America's finest poets. This year, judges John Ashbery, one of America's best-known contemporary poets; Billy Collins, a widely known poet often heard on National Public Radio; and Carolyn Kizer, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, will spend two days with six students representing Brown, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington Universities; and Skidmore, Smith, and Mount Holyoke Colleges. Together, the select group of poets will celebrate, discuss, and read poetry. Frances Perkins Scholar Erika Dyson '99 has been chosen to represent MHC at the competition.
Since its inception, the Glascock has helped launch some of this century's most celebrated poets. Contestants from previous years include Muriel Rukeyser, James Agee, James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, Virginia Hamilton Adair '33 , and MHC Emily Dickinson Lecturer Mary Jo Salter. (Other contestants have been successful in different careers, such as the controversial lawyer William Kunstler, who was a contestant representing Yale University in 1941.)
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