Five Colleges, Incorporated: Fifth Annual PoetryFest

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Fifth Annual Five College Student PoetryFest

The fifth annual Five College Student PoetryFest will be held on Wednesday evening, March 7, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Hall at UMass Amherst. 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.

Those serving on the faculty planning committee for this year's fest are: Daniel Hall, Amherst College; Deb Gorlin, Hampshire College; Robert Shaw, Mount Holyoke College; Ellen Watson, Smith College; Lisa Olstein, UMass Amherst.

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

Amherst: Michael Canavan and John Radway
Hampshire: Christina Clark and eryn alana leavens
Mount Holyoke: Angela Horner and Sara Twombly
Smith: Sara Brickman and Laurie A. Guerrero
UMass Amherst: Sarah Tourjee and Alex Butler

Click each name above to read one of their poems.

Here is a sampling of poems by the participants:

The Yellow Bathing Suit, by Michael Canavan

You never needed it to be electric.
I was apprentice to tile and linoleum
While you dried the yellow bathing
Suit in the hall. Tugging the drawstrings
Like a ground, you tested the frayed
Circuit of fabric and hipbone. I stayed
Inside where the lightning bolt of childhood
Burned me down. Now when I ford
Climes of cold under the lampshade,
Your suit glows like a translation of the sun.
Where did it bring you? Too charged to touch
Water you perched alone: savage, accidental,
Prone. A magnet for harm, you slipped
Into sunlight and sparked. I blinked.
It was done.

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In Springtime, by John Radway

The streets smell best in springtime
When must lurks up from hollows
And ferns begin to green
In the ditches by the highway.
Headlights add their cry
To the rising beams of Vega.
On every crowded block
Or ambling, zigzag throughway
Blossoms hint at fruit,
Deliver fragrant sickness.
Sick with love, you say.
I doubt your preposition.
You call me a jaded pedant
And give me a smile, rich like moss.
The night engulfs us both.

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Letter in Rain, by Christina Clark

the pigeons have drowned
the children have lost their bells
nothing to ring in Christina
nothing
they all went home long ago to
watch their lives on tv
this is a city we will stack our dead
on the street corner
no it is not unjust, go back to your
pretty country where only
the rich can afford trees
this is a city we will kick it
into the gutter now get back
to your smoking
your perfect words and
tight corners
your friends are stupid
stupid and at the bar
pretend they like you
pretend to know their names
write them postcards when finally
you decide to leave
tell them your life
has become a railing
tell them you have
learned to lean

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#19, by eryn alana leavens

we met in spring, so
when my veins glowed
bright through
pale-as-light skin
on a heavy summer night,
he asked if i was
translucent in winter.

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Pity Kill, by Angela Horner

Something hard struck my hand --
a dragonfly flopped down.
He struggled with his wings
in a series of nervequakes,
a slow seizure on cement.

I bent over,
my shadow pooling him
like a priest at burial.
I can't stand suffering,
so I inhaled some god
and steadied.

But as I lowered my shoe
in bombdrop,
he burst into flight --
a kamikaze helicopter
crashing four feet ahead of me,
still as a stick.

I looked at my shoe.

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Chrysanthemum, by Sara Twombly

The Chrysanthemums breathe deeply.
They bloom although the season is over, like a trick,
as though June follows September in the teratism
of Beethoven's tenth symphony, the detailed adagio.
And though I know these days are meandering
on their final spindly legs, there is an awakening;
Kate Chopin in another place, where language
is not so cruel and life so delicate;
a monsoon across the rapacious Mojave;
Jerusalem pausing to see again the starry sky.
When the winter whips in with it's fiery breath,
when the fall lays down it's first frost,
the Chrysanthemums have lulled us unaware,
bobbing in the wind as easily as they have thrown their shadows down.

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Theseus at Forty, by Sara Brickman

Every morning, he wakes up with the dark.

The time of day varies with the seasons,
with daylight savings:
this is his pretense of never having a routine,
of staying free always.

He never needs the alarm clock:
his body accustomed to blackouts now.
In the darkness his eyes snap to focus fast,
like a shade whipping up a window.
But in the bathroom -- squinting --
they take a few seconds to adjust to the light.
After he showers, he knots a tie around his throat,
walks downstairs and drinks a cup of coffee with milk,
like he's headed to work,
as if there hasn't been a layoff in heroes lately.

Sometimes he catches sight of his wife's knitting basket
as he's getting a photo album
or filing a tax return
and standing there in the study,
wrist thrust deep in the metal cabinet,
he remembers the feel of that thread in his hands,
the lifeline stretched out taut between them
like a shared artery pulsing, whispering,
"I've got you."

He reads the paper, mows the lawn when he remembers to.
His daughter runs out of the hall and into his lap,
his mouth filling with kisses.
When she asks for a dollhouse,
he builds her a maze.

He brings home tiny white mice instead of puppies,
puts them in the endless wooden tunnel,
lets them run around.
"No sense of direction," he sighs.

He buys a big glass house made of windows
to let in the sun,
but he finds himself papering over the skylight in his workroom.
Every hallway to him is another vein blocked,
every tunnel he drives through, another path to his lungs closed up;
but he paces again and again
from workroom to his daughter's room,
every day takes the route through the tunnel,
route nine off the highway, holding
his breath till he goes red and his lungs constrict.

He feels the maze inside him, in his guts:
a map crooked
and wrong side out that he can never decipher.
He's waiting for a set of horns like gleaming razors
to nudge him forward,
around another corner,
to know its way blind through the dark he cannot empty,
to come along, find its way inside,
spill him open.

At night, in his dreams,
he wanders through it again
and never quite reaches the end of the tunnel.
But, because this is how dreams work,
and in them, sometimes it all makes sense,
he is never the one who turns away from the opening.
It is always the light
that turns away from him.

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Turnips, by Laurie A. Guerrero

We pulled them up, dug them out to let their white-purple skin see the sun. We dusted their tops and their bottoms like proud parents, our fingernails black with worm guts and hard gray dirt. On a cool dusk, years ago, my brother and I planted them in one round row in the front yard where they could be seen. The small, smooth seeds were dark and jumpy in mama's hand like chocolate sprinkles on a cake. We giggled as we took two or three at a time and lulled them into the belly of their earth mommy. They grew quick. Overnight, I think. I swear their limey green arms welcomed us home from school the very next day. Then mama cut them, souped them and we ate them.

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The Facts, by Sarah Tourjee

I'll take your word for it, because I'm not much for math,
that 2 + 2 = 5, and fish are always dead (judging from
their absent eyes) even when they're technically alive.
I'll believe you when you insist that Jane Fonda
recorded an exercise record just for you, and initially
there was a dedication which she later removed. And I won't ask
why she did it, because that question always makes you cry.
I'll let you dress me in stripes or dots or checkers
and pull your thread through my skin
when you say it will tie us together.
I'll take you to the hospital as many times as it takes
to keep you out of the bathtub face down.
To convince you that you're not a fish.
"Jane Fonda wouldn't love a fish," I'll say,
"And fish cannot do math, or sew like you do
in perfect lines of stitching, or whisper into my ears
such strange and beautiful things."
And you'll just answer that after all this time,
I ought to know that fish will do all sorts of things
to avoid the fact that they've never been alive.

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Street Corner Time , by Alex Butler

Right before God died, she sat up and said something like this: "What creatures do I have before me? What are these wonderful things?" Her eyes were still alive as she curled to the floor like a wet towel. We were in the alley down by the corner. There were three of us. I guess it wasn't my place to judge her, and I shouldn't have said those awful things. But now, well, there she was, right in front of me -- not blinking, eyes always open. I tried to take my eyes off of her, but there was no chance it... She lowered her brow and I was there. Veins dripped with sweat of dew in the cascading web of red around me. Still that eye. No one was around anymore. She was toying with me. All in a moment, she was a tigress, an ant, a bee. Closer and closer. A lion. A red panda. Closer still. An oak. The eye was pulsating, throbbing and red. It was touching my forehead. She kept moving closer. Let me in, Let me in -- she spoke with a soft wind. Let me in and forever I will let you call me you.

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