Five Colleges, Incorporated: Fourth-Annual Student PoetryFest

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Fourth-Annual Five College Student PoetryFest

The fourth annual Five College Student PoetryFest will be held on Wednesday evening, March 1, 2006 at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. 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.

This year's fest is being offered in memory of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Nobel Laureate and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College and at the Five Colleges. His poem, "Six Years Later," which was translated by Richard Wilbur, will be read.

Local bookstores that furnished gift certificates to student poets this year are: 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; Deb Gorlin, Hampshire College; Mary Jo Salter, Mount Holyoke College; Ellen Watson, Smith College; Lisa Olstein and Alex Phillips, UMass Amherst.

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

Amherst: Sarang Gopalakrishnan and Kit Wallach
Hampshire: Molly Herrick and Theresa Jackson
Mount Holyoke: Sarah Giragosian and Laura Hilberg
Smith: Liz Afton and Julia Williams
UMass Amherst: Hannah Allaben and Cozi Orlen

Click each name above to read one of their poems.

Here is a sampling of poems by the participants:

The Hungry Ghost Bakery Festival, by Liz Afton

Yes, it is worth a celebration: the funny hot igloo
swelled like a mother tummy, her loave babies on shelves awaiting
paper swaddling. I adopt three, still-warm fish-bellied French, for brunch:
I feel generous. The bakers are punk angels, wafting yeast and fire;
they bless me with floury prints.
Outside, honey glints: the jars are
tall gems. We dip our bread into molten light,
try not to dribble. Flower's syrup, sticky bee goo, a sweetness
I can't fully swallow. They have pale apple blossom, pinky
raspberry too, but those aren't free. The bees vibrate nearby in a cut-away
hive under glass: so many bodies, so many wax boxes, and all those wheezing
little mouths working for food, leave us uneasy.
The bakery sign bears down,
scolding. I imagine what a Hungry Ghost might look like---not Holy
like a communion wafer or Terrible like a campfire story; that Buddhist teaching
might be close if I could just remember it. The Hungry Ghost---
utensils can't help her, nor can my careful cooking.
There she is, hovering pale like a cloud of flour,
moving her mouth so desperately, filling only with more air.

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Open, by Hannah Allaben

we were young we were smart we were known to be sketchy be isolated, we were posters and rallies and bulletin boards got ripped down we were tape them back up, we were shove Matthew Shepard in everyone's face we were noisily, we were write candid poetry indexing sensual textbooks for mentions of masturbate know yourself find all the young adult novels there's something for us. I place you after school in prison-like halls with a smile. wait. we were hands we were notes we were reading our journals out loud we were parents with warnings, we were epithets jokes to the face we were righteous and wronged, we were opening skin on our wrists cliché troubled just preludes, we were hyperaware of our waists and our touch we were toast. I can't say I've met you now, hospital-knower, apartment-liver, leather-wearer, lover. we were wanting we were biting we were flaying to expose we were enlightening, we were thrift store wedding dresses, we were chocolate.

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Apropos a Tortoise, by Sarah Giragosian

I.
Notes on a tortoise:
slumberous step, darting eye,
crown cross-hatched with age.

II.
He cleaves to shadows,
his leathery shell shucking
off chinks of sunlight.

III.
The patrician head
stays my hand. He tries his limbs,
they creak like clockwork.

IV.
His impossible
lineage I trace in lines
incised on his back.

V.
He loses balance
And capsizes into wet
Leaves; he's frond-flooded.

VI.
The domed head retreats,
curves into a chamber dark
with soft coiled flesh.

VII.
Hibernation starts
with fraying skin and spoiled
fruit; the days darken.

VIII.
The carapace chips
away with age, its bony
plates are scored and thin.

IX.
I raise the emblem
of age to my face. The dark,
inlaid mirror shifts.

X.
The reptilian frame
bears the cracks of grandmother's
old cameo brooch.

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Shetland, by Sarang Gopalakrishnan

There were no voices in the streams. The dead
had been washed away
from the inflexions of lapped pebbles,
the heron's astonishment.

The curlews I flushed from a roadside ditch
fell back into the heath;
the woman hushed me getting into her car
and I sat in its stale baby-smell

wishing I hadn't asked her for a lift.
There were no voices
in the wind's fricatives, in the gulls' dry screaks
at Uyeasound, of mourning,

commemoration, advice, or warning.
Had I expected something?
The wind flapped dismissively. It was too late
and in any case they wouldn't have said much.

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Ithaca, by Molly Herrick

We shuffled back and forth
from the oven to the porch, laying plates
on the green tablecloth, speckled with dirt,
laying food on the plates, vacillating from the heat
to chilly breeze.
We heard the oblivious roar
of a jet engine overhead,
watched the ice melt in the lemonade pitcher.
You cleared your throat and
told me you'd be back soon,
as soon as possible, as if
you wanted me to believe
both of our lives would stop
until you returned.
Out the window, the neighbors' Clydesdale
nickered in the tall grass.

The sun went down. We lay
out on the dewy lawn, and I wondered why
we couldn't feel the earth spinning.
You started babbling
inanities. It's the way you act when
you want not to
care. Your fingers picked nervously
at the hem of my shirt, rolling
tiny white balls of cotton from the fabric,
and flicking them off.
You kissed my forehead, three times.
Each kiss was a promise to return.
But you haven't got the build of a hero
and I've never learned to weave.

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Three, by Laura Hilberg

One girl's nudge on arm, soft head on knee,
says ‘time for bed'. Eight feet on stairs---four small,
four large---then two of us, sipping our tea,
turn back the bed, and drop our clothes (or all
except perhaps our underwear). But she,
the third of us, just turns around three times
and sighs. She has to wait for us to come
to bed before she can lie down, sometimes
between, beside, beneath; she does not care,
wants to be warm, and, sniffing, look for crumbs
in folds of blanket---if a crumb is there
then she will find it. This is how I fall
asleep: my head is pillowed on dark hair,
my feet are warmed by her. Our bed is full.

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No More Goodbyes, by Theresa Jackson

When you leave
Every moment is a stutter,
Every room feels emptied
And suddenly everything I say should've been said to you.

When you go
I rework my day and fill it with distraction
Still waiting to hear you're safe
Wondering if this emptiness will fill in

When you leave
I can only try to let you go.
Can only try to believe it won't hurt for long.

I can laugh all day
But in the darkness I will remember you in my bad habits.
It makes no sense.
Our choices and their consequences.

When you're gone it'll be up to me to keep this going.
I will pace the house at night
And make sure everyone sleeps in peace.

Once your gone
I'll regret my silences and all my judgments of you.
It's that simple,
Once you're gone
the logic of the guilt ridden will keep me going.

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To All That Glows, by Cozi Orlen

I am weak
as I bathe in you,
as you flirt with the whiteness
in my eyes, the color
hopelessly adrift within.
You dig enticing claws
into my helpless membranes
and pull with your particles,
never holding me close enough to kiss.

I am hollow
and devoted,
for nothing as luminous could infuse
these empty corridors in my cells.

I am red as sore skin can be,
as incomplete as sleep,
as broken as my own blood vessels.

I will find you in all that glows,
and I will drink my fill
until breathing you in is
breathing you out,
and the speed at which
your ephemeral nature will take over
will leave my veins ringing with
that which never truly was.

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Grown Sons, by Kit Wallach

The house was full of woman-things;
I packed your teacups in a box,
The china chipped and stained like pearls---
We gave your jewelry to friends,
We left your diary unlocked.

The yellow pillows on your bed
Had faded to a dusty grey.
Your wedding dress had moths in it;
They'd wormed the silk and laid their eggs.
We threw most of your clothes away.

We found your copy of King Lear,
Your fingerprints on every page,
The hardbound cover thick with dust,
Your little notes beside the verse.
Each printed word a blot of age.

Your lamps, with all the bulbs burnt out.
The window boxes, dead from frost.
The bathroom's rusty faucet leak.
The pictures I'd forgot about,
The music scores I thought I'd lost.

It took an afternoon to pack
All of your pretty, broken junk.
You never threw a damned thing out.
Our knick-knack legacy, I guess---
It lies together in my trunk.

I drove home over potholed streets,
Not caring if your china broke.
We'd sorted blindly, grabbed and fled---
Like treasure-seekers from the deep
Who surface, far from all they know.

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The Stone Poem, by Julia Williams

for Elizabeth Bishop

The field is no place without the stone that sits there;
the stone brings a road sign, for the set of runes carved in it,
a history for the field to consider or forget its part in
as it grows up avidly around its tenant.

The ball of stone, like twine coiled neatly in itself
sits closed, unasking; will not demand a looking-on,
will not demand a thing at all---love, a meaning,
the swift graffiti of opinion; does not diminish
as grasses rise and small cars pass unseeing.

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