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In
the Footsteps of Plath
 Jamie
Samdahl '15, following the footsteps of past winners Sylvia
Plath '55, James Merrill and Robert Lowell, was named this
week as the winner of the 90th Annual Glascock Intercollegiate
Poetry Competition, the oldest and most prestigious prize
for college poets. Samdahl, an American studies major with
a Poetry Concentration, was the youngest poet in the competition.
The Glascock Competition,
hosted by Mount Holyoke College, is named after Mount Holyoke
alumna Kathryn Irene Glascock '22. The competition invited
six college poets to recite several of their works on April
19. Other contestants, all seniors, were from Skidmore, Fordham,
Mount Holyoke, SUNY-Buffalo and Harvard. Contest judges were
Cleopatra Mathis, of Dartmouth; Mary Jo Salter, Johns Hopkins;
and John Yau, Rutgers.
"I am honored and proud," said
Samdahl about winning the prestigious competition. "The best
part of winning the Glascock Prize has been realizing how
blessed I am to have such unconditionally loving family and
friends. I am absolutely struck by the extent to which they
come to support me."
One of Samdahl's poems,
June, displayed below, was composed for a painting
in the Smith College Museum of Art.
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June
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after
Rouault’s Christ of the Incas |
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Your father
was taking his time
to die.
We waited him out
moonfaced,
moonlimbed
from the waist up,
swimming in a thick of
lily root.
We were lost to each other
already
and young,
never daring to admit
the thing Christ had right
was loving wildly. |
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Christ of the Incas
Georges Rouault |
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