Five Colleges, Incorporated: Third-Annual PoetryFest

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Third-Annual Five College PoetryFest

The third annual Five College PoetryFest will be held on Wednesday evening, March 2, 2005 in Abbey Interfaith Chapel, Mount Holyoke College at 7:30 p.m. The fest was conceived and planned by a faculty committee in 2003 as a vehicle for celebrating the art of poetry by giving recognition to student poets. Each year, two students from each campus are chosen by a selection process determined by their own school. Those invited to read their works receive a gift certificate, courtesy of a local bookshop. Their poems are then assembled as a collection and presented to them. The fest is supported by funding from Five Colleges and from the hosting institution, this year Mount Holyoke.

The student poets to read from their works this year are:

Amherst: David Molina and Jesse McCarthy
Hampshire: Sarah Austin and Aaron Gerber
Mount Holyoke: Sophia Zucker and Nancy Doherty
Smith: Carolyn Creedon and K.A. Houpt
UMass Amherst: Skyler Lew and Denise Warren

Click each name above to read one of their poems.

Local bookstores that furnished gift certificates to student poets this year were:

Broadside Books
Odyssey Book Shop
Food for Thought Books
Jeffery Amherst Bookshop

Those serving on the faculty planning committee for this year's fest are:

Daniel Hall, Amherst College
Deborah Gorlin, Hampshire College
Robert Shaw, Mount Holyoke College
Ellen Watson, Smith College
Lisa Olstein, UMass Amherst

Here is a sampling of poems by the participants:

Sonnet, Summer 2004, by Sarah Austin

I mark each evening's passing with a pen
Drawn clean across the neatly ordered days.
Note that, although in its uncounted ways
The day has let me down, it won't again.

Now static in the boxes on my wall,
It is what is has been, and nothing more.
To remain whole and well, I close the door
On calculating this day's rise and fall.

I drew you swift and sure along my bones
To mark your passage, and to let it be.
Your presence and your loss have done to me
What each day does -- preempts the last one gone.
My skin the calendar of what has been
That I might wake unsullied, end to end.

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Medusa's Love Song, by Carolyn Creedon

It used to be that I longed for my family.
Two half sisters so close they split an eye
and shared it like two halves of a jagged
crystal egg, but neither ever held it up
to glance at me. The townsfolk turned to
face the walls on hearing my heavy feet,
my hissing hair. Once, so desperate, so crazy, so
needing for someone to look at me, I grabbed
an old man's cheeks and stared. He
cracked in half like a marble baby.
Only in dreams did the people meet my gaze.
I began to sleep all day. In truth,
I was lonely. So grateful when Perseus
came finally; when he sheared me
away from my shoulders like a prize, like
a dowry, and flew on feathered toes
with me. I felt, for once, treasured. And he,
so proud, placed me up front, right on his shield,
like a rocket's tip, like a locket, like a ruby, like
somebody's beautiful baby
rocking fiercely in the armor of his arms. Now
I ride him like a worn-in saddle, like a silver dolphin
diving face-first into a sea of clouds.
He wears me like a candy necklace, like a wreath
of lily, like the skin of yes this is my true face, and
the snakes stream like lovers furling behind me.
He sees through his shield; he sees through me.
I cry when he cuts his soles on the stars, and
his blood and my tears land and make small horses.

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How I Learned to Fly, by Nancy Doherty

In the dark upstairs hall
hours after bedtime
I gazed down the stairwell at the golden light
flowing under the kitchen door
and listened to my father's rumble,
my mother's answering purr,
strains of Glenn Miller's "String of Pearls."

Trying to catch a whiff of smoke, a word,
I leaned over a bit too far --
and fell off the topmost stair.
In the night air somehow I began
to float, flannel gown billowing,
and lifting my arms like joyful wings
I sailed gently down the stairs.

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A Commotion of Birds, by Aaron Gerber

A commotion of birds in the trees,
just a few visible alighting
on the higher branches.
And I thought of a continuous note
vibrating like a body.
And I thought of the boy with the heart murmur
at the side of the gymnasium.
He watches the class play kickball,
sees them scramble among the squares of afternoon light
on the wooden floor slats.
I'm craning my neck,
it sounds like a party
where no one's talking, just
endlessly exchanging chairs.
And I'm happy that my bed
has been slept in little,
it means I've been somewhere.
You changed the idea of a bed,
made it a place where one could get things done.
These days it's like a rest stop. I'm filling up the tank.
Sometimes someone's inside,
tracing backwards messages in condensation,
the N is the hardest part.
I could sit up here, the blankets slipping,
it would quiet the sound of
heart beats in the one ear
sealed to the pillowcase,
the swarm of human speech
out in the nighttime
or the cluster of bird noise in the morning.
The moon gets cut off mid-crescent
by the ledge of the window
and what survives into the bedroom
lights the glow buttons on the remote
and so many books I feel sick.

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Bluegrass Haiku, by K.A. Houpt

Home in Kentucky
creek water warms limestone rock
melds corn mash and wood.

In a charred oak cask,
there where mint tongues Bear Grass Creek,
clear Bourbon is born.

This ends, all's wedded --
creek bed clans rejoice and toast
this strange alchemy.

There, in bluegrass hills
they reject unions simpler
than this chemistry.

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MDMA, by Skyler Lew

Temporary fixtures that consists of water swallowing methods combusts
Residues of corroded emotions in my mind. Mixing chemical elicitations and
Potions of carbonated acidic green thoughts and white imbalances trickle
Along the sides of my mind underneath my temples.
Diluted white powdery dosages formulate complex polygon math equations that drown Out coherence and make me oblivious to the destination of my daily travel itinerary.

Deviance opens internal discussions on abstract theories of philosophic discourse of
Right and wrong.
As I begin to stroll my intoxication continues behind my rockstar glasses and
Hides my eyes from the scheming Po-lice.
Left to my own devices and gadgets to my small black book of scribbles so jagged.
Atmospheric urban dimensions are in regard of my eyes as I promenade through my life In 3D virtual reality.

The cold asphalt casts the low sun behind me.
Filmy charcoal shadows stalk fifteen feet ahead of me
To my home. My right mind composure makes
Me think of how I know that
These little thrills
They co$t to kill
A mill-
Ion brain cells.
Just another three hours till,
My day is over finally.

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Monet's Roses
for E.S., by Jesse McCarthy

This was after the sunrise.
This was after Honfleur and Paris,
after Argenteuil and Pourville, Rouen and London,
Amsterdam, Venice and Trouville. This was after
the tulip fields at Sasenheim, the apple trees in bloom at Verneuil.
It was long after St Lazare, Charing Cross, or the beach
at Saint Adresse. Long after the haystacks' petaled sheathes,
the cathedrals of Chartres, and the Japanese bridge,
the waltzers in the water lily pond.
This was after the snow revealed blue, the Seine
a misted window on heaven. This was last of all,
the last year of good life, the last flesh of living color.
And what better way to let go after more changes than Ovid,
Swimming in a summer sky, this arc of wild roses.

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A gray fedora --
Dobbs, Fifth Avenue,
New York., by David Molina

Too big for my head,
you know,

but fits my face
well enough.

I took it from
his closet; we all

tore through
his old things.

There is also
a shirt of his --

Audubon
Country Club --

a tan sweater
with buttons and pockets,

lime green
pants and a jacket

that doesn't match,
but has golf clubs,

holes on the lining.
I have received plenty of compliments.

Sully was the kind of fogey
who loved to hokey-pokey
and at his wake
only children would shake;
while the rest couldn't see past their nosies.

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All I Hear, by Denise Warren

All I hear are dead songs
through the ash-tip
of the day discarded in a pit
that lacked a hole.

Crooked and boxed
the tightness has nowhere to go
grave digging is not the way to go
as I cannot write the g's.

Ash-tipped with ground leaves,
smoke that billows up from
the ground. Fall is smoking and dying around here.

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To Fear, by Sophia Zucker

You who tie me to my chair
to sit and stare with longing and loathing
at that which sustains me --

You who must return at my body's
every betrayal
(a pound gained, a pound
lost,
another month gone by bloodless) --

You, held at bay by needles and psychotherapy --
by careful ceremony --
how is it your fists
still pummel the dread back into my abdomen?
How is it, unsubtle sculptor,
you continue to whittle me away?

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