This poem from Muriel Rukeyser’s contestant portfolio appeared three years later in her debut collection of poetry, Theory of Flight, which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award. The version of “Sonnet” contained in the Glascock archives differs from the one that appears in Theory of Flight. The lines “and works approach our minds, like near footfalls / warning us of a latening hour’s chime” in this version were changed to “and words afflict our minds in near footfalls / approaching with latening hour’s chime” in the book.
A contestant from Vassar College in 1932, Rukeyser did not win the contest but went on to publish 17 collections of poetry and has recently been recognized and celebrated for her ground-breaking documentary poetics. Mount Holyoke’s Archives and Special Collections houses contestants’ poems from many other young poets who later contributed significantly to American life and letters.
The Glascock archives contains surveys from the 1940s through the 1960s that Mount Holyoke’s Press Bureau conducted each year, asking the contestants the same questions concerning their past, present, and future writing interests. James Merrill’s responses reference multiple obstacles in his writing life, such as his service in the Army and a lack of literary activities at Amherst College. Despite these challenges, he won the Glascock competition in 1946 and went on to become a pre-eminent poet of the 20th century, later returning to judge the Glascock contest five times: in 1956, 1960, 1969, 1973, and 1990.
As a contestant from Barnard College during the Glascock’s 25th year, Diana Chang is the first known BIPOC student to complete in the Glascock competition. Chang later became a renowned poet, novelist, and pioneering AAPI author, publishing six novels, including the critically acclaimed The Frontiers of Love. Chang was a runner-up in the Glascock contest with Kenneth Koch, a student from Harvard College and later a founding member of the New York School of Poets, and Sidney Michaels, a student from Tufts University, sharing the first prize in 1948.
Featuring one of the few two-time Glascock winners, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Mount Holyoke class of 1975, this photograph also shows the three distinguished judges sitting in the center: Maxine Kumin, James Merrill, and James Wright. After winning the contest twice in a row in 1973 and 1974, Schnackenberg was recognized as a literary prodigy and has had a distinguished literary career, winning major awards from all over the world. She has published six poetry collections to date and judged the Glascock in 1983 and 1998.
This is one of the poems that Margaret (Maggie) Nelson submitted and read for the 1993 Glascock competition. Nelson was a junior at Wesleyan University when she participated in the contest and did not win or place in the competition. Garnering mixed feedback for this poem from judges Amy Clampitt, Molly Peacock, and Robert Pinsky, it is one of the more raunchy and unfiltered poems in the entirety of the Glascock collection. The poem embodies themes that Nelson has continued exploring throughout her celebrated writing career including sexuality, feminism, pop culture, and aesthetics.