Five Colleges, Incorporated: Sixth Annual PoetryFest

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Sixth Annual Five College Student PoetryFest

The sixth annual Five College Student PoetryFest will be held on Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. in Stoddard Hall at Smith College.

The fest was originally 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.

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

Amherst College: Neal Allar and Kate Robinson
Hampshire College: Shira Erlichman and meg willing
Mount Holyoke College: Sarah Binns and Christine Brown
Smith College: Georgia Pearle and Kimberley Rogers
UMass Amherst: Ted Powers and Jaclyn Simoneau

[Click each name above to read a poem from each author. Each poem displayed is copyrighted © by the individual authors.]

Members of the PoetryFest Committee for 2008:

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

Here is a sampling of poems by the participants:

tokens, by Neal Allar

a photograph
a taped message from two years ago

a Swiss Army knife
still sharp but hard to unfold

your voice too monotonous
the image too colorful

because the sun lights your face
you say just fix me a sandwich i’ll be home shortly

your knife on your waist
and now on mine to use as I please

i’ll cut the tape
and slice the picture to pieces

then i’ll sharpen its blade
and throw it away

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Rain, by Kate Robinson

In the park yellow roses gleam with the cold
October rain. Water magnifies their color
And draws the smell of earth upwards to fold
Around the slippery leaves. Everywhere
Things have gone tender in the fog—they let
Their scents uncurl in the damp, chilly wind
While all across town steady rain sets
The river, trees and roofs thrumming as it binds
Scattered sounds together. You lower your face
To the roses and breathe in their warm scent
Of spices and silk while your body gives way
To the song of things that are lent,
That lean into your fragile skin and sing
Of the place we come from, where all rhythms begin.

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Letter in Rain, by Shira Erlichman

We could’ve escaped but chose not to. The newest
one of us, a scrawny boy about six or seven, wept
for days while the rest of us just watched. The man
would bring us Oreos and rented video games and
while he took one of us the rest of us would stay and eat.
We’d play games we’d invented and skin our knees
on the carpet from running. Sometimes we’d talk, but mostly
we said nothing. It was three years of that. After we ran away,
everyone asked us why we waited so long to leave the man.
When I got picked up, I was a lot like the scrawny boy. But
I quickly learned that you can cry and you can cry and all you’ll get
is a room full of blinking eyes and crossed arms. I never really wanted
to talk and the man wouldn’t make me. I still don’t really want to
talk and everyone doesn’t make me, though you can tell they want it.
But sometimes I wish someone, anyone, would force me against
a wall until my throat tightened like an umbrella snapping open
and my skin would feel irregular, like it didn’t fit again,
and my voice would leap out, maybe like a tiger’s voice leaps out.
Sometimes I wish that I was stuck again because when you’re stuck
you can choose whether to escape or not. They say it was all
the man. But. The boys and I would be left alone for hours
while he was at the gas-station or even the library and we didn’t leave.
You get used to things. Whether it’s hours in front of a television or
being stolen. I’m not saying I chose to be touched. I’m just saying.
He was out. Running errands, checking the post. We had a thousand
and one chances. Now that I’m out of there, I’m in a different kind
of stuck. There’s not one room with maroon carpeting and other boys
like me. This time it’s a bunch of rooms, and only one body, the kind
of stuck where you can’t escape, where you’re just living.

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he gets old , by meg willing

you can always look back until
the brain begins to decay to and the timeline that used to stretch
leisurely and unknown in front of you
is the length of a dirty city block.

but even then, he wanted to know
what the stain on the sidewalk was, who
threw up where, if he’d find a candy wrapper
stuck to the heel of his boot. he loved
to imagine that the paper bag at the corner
wasn’t garbage, but rather abandoned
groceries with that half-gallon of milk
he forgot to pick up at the 7-eleven.

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Graceful Drowning, by Sarah Binns

Mr. Collins called it an art:
That is, the way we submerge ourselves
beneath oceans, struggling
for breath.
Myself?
I say we must drown
gracefully.
Throw a kick to the side, just so—
Dive down once, twice, to apprehend
that shock in the lungs, the water’s
unrelenting press.
Water mirrors sky mirrors water—
And,
where those converge—
The not-quite-life
and the not-quite-death; the in-between—
That is where we drown:
Almost-specters,
sighing.

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Four Ways of Looking at a Calla Lily, by Christine Brown

*
At dawn the sprinklers
scatter thousands of diamonds
over endless green and white
calla fields

**
She walks down the aisle.
Callas reflect
soft light on her radiant face
flushed with promise and joy

***
A man brings a woman
twelve callas.
They blend into the white
walls that hold her

****
Reflections off the black finish
pierce swollen eyes.
Only the callas that lie there
can break the silence of death

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The Deposition, by Georgia Pearle

She was four years old
The year of the Barbie birthday cake
the jellyfish rebellion
the jelly shoes

We wanted her on Geraldo
so we could sit back on floral couches
and say:

Look at the pitiful princess
in her patent-leather tap shoes
her purple tutu

Her father’s body deposited
into the Gulf
into her bank account
His skull slow moving
toward an ocean floor

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Ghazal, by Kimberley Rogers

How clear your eyes, Sekou. Pulse caught mid-rhythm in the still life.
Hands up, head askew—your cadence booms: “There is still life.”

The big question in the news: from the first flash of conception
to the last ash of cremation, is there still life?

The Luna Moth withdrew its mint vellum wings.
The next day, pinned under blue glass, a still life.

Ghazal, at its sinew, means, “Cry of a gazelle when it’s hunted down.”
In every tongue—Hebrew, English, Urdu—its still life.

Last night, winter sneezed and blew its last rattling solo.
This morning, Bleeding Hearts—Georgia’s ingénues of a still life.

In the hospice bed, Grandpa. A slow blue bloomed.
My granddaughter lets go her coo. I think, “Still, LIFE.”

Where to root into? What’s this impenetrable music?
Suddenly words, rough-hewn. In spite of you, Kim, there is still life.

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swap meet, by Ted Powers

Suzie and I were bored and wanted to get famous
so we sat around writing a movie script
that could be shown in the summer
when everyone would be too hot to make the small
smart decisions. The scene opened with a grazing unicorn
being burned alive by an immortal dragon
whose flame was true love shooting from his eyes
but whose machine gun shot real bullets. By then we knew
we hated each other, which wasn’t my fault. I’ve seen the power
of love, it lacks all the pertinent details. Back on this
long, long day, Suzie finally said something
that didn’t make me want to punch a rooster. “Steven told
me, write what you know.” “Steven once wrote a movie
about nothing, I guess,” I replied, but she didn’t laugh,
so we started up again. We wrote a script whose only character
was Thomas McElroy, a muskrat whose day-to-day activities --
cutting wood, catching fish, scratching his back, brushing
his muskrat teeth – occurred in the haze of two minds
uncomfortably in sync. It was a gray boring area, to be sure,
we fell asleep almost instantly. We called the script “The Future
Was Then and It was Green,” and when we woke up
I gave it to her as a confession, Suzie laying there
bristling with an iridescence I adored but could not understand.

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Grace, by Jaclyn Simoneau

I am alive in the 21st century.
I live in a busy city in the North\
Look above, but, I will not be there!
I circumference through the vocal folds.
I soar like spider man on the Empire State.
I will shuffle step on your scapula.
Wrinkle your nose for me on top of the tree.
I am a hum on a drum for the boy.
Hear the vibration and catch the air.
I will dance inside your mastoid with exuberance.
A tasty delight melts in your hands.
I race the people on Wall Street in rhythm.
I let rainbow sprinkles fall high in the sky beyond the eye.
I sing in your ear drum.
I learned from the best!
I flow tidal volume in and out like a wave in the city.
I exemplify and pull gravity toward the song.
I lift the sand beyond the ocean.
The Milky Way is my first choice.
Be sure not to make too much noise.

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