The Glascock Poetry Prize is awarded to the winner of the annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest at Mount Holyoke College. The "invitation-only competition is sponsored by the English department at Mount Holyoke and counts many well-known poets, including Sylvia Plath and James Merrill, among its past winners" [1] and is thought to be the "oldest intercollegiate poetry competition." [2]
Each year, about six young poets from the nation's top colleges and universities are selected to participate. After being selected, participants submit a brief manuscript of poems, which they read at a public reading during the culmination of the contest. [3]
The annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest is named after Kathryn Irene Glascock. Glascock was a young poet who graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1922. [2]
Glascock died in 1923. Shortly after her death, Glascock's parents established the Glascock Prize. It became an intercollegiate event in 1924. [3]
The Glascock Poetry Competition has launched the careers of many of America's most important poets including James Merrill who won in 1946 (and participated in 1938), Sylvia Plath who won in 1955, Kenneth Koch in 1948, Donald Hall who took second place in 1951 and Gjertrud Schnackenberg in 1973. [4]
Other notable participants include Mark Halperin, Mary Jo Salter, Katha Pollitt, Mary Ann Radner, William Kunstler, James Agee and Frederick Buechner. [4]
In 1973, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the contest, the English department of Mount Holyoke College published a collection of poems titled Preludes: Selected Poems from the Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest 1924-1973. [5]
The collection included selected works from the first 50 years of the competition such as "The Black Swan" by James Merrill. [5]
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is sometimes classified as a form of Postmodernism. It has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously and occasionally still taboo matters such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide, often set in relation to broader social themes.
Terza rima is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows. The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines, but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet.
Alfred Alvarez was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.
Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published. It was first released in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poems of Ariel, with their free-flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier Colossus poems.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg is an American poet.
Joel Lester Oppenheimer was an American poet associated with both the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. He was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project (1966–68). Though a poet, Oppenheimer was perhaps better known for his columns in the Village Voice from 1969 to 1984.
Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University.
"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude. An abstract poem about an absent lover, it uses clear, vivid language to describe seaside scenery, with "a grim insistence" on reality rather than romance and imagination.
Kathryn Irene Glascock was an American poet. The Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest is named after her.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The Poets' Prize is awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year. The $3000 annual prize is donated by a committee of about 20 American poets, who each nominate two books and who also serve as judges. The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City hosts the annual awards reception in May, which includes readings by the winner and finalists. The founders of the prize were Robert McDowell, Frederick Morgan, and Louis Simpson. The current co-chairs of the prize committee are Robert Archambeau and Marc Vincenz.
The Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry is given by the Paris Review "for the finest poem over 200 lines published in The Paris Review in a given year", according to the magazine. The winner is awarded $1,000.
Peter Davison was an American poet, essayist, teacher, lecturer, editor, and publisher.
Paul Smyth was an American poet, writer, and teacher.
Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.