Student named poet-contestant for Glascock competition
Charlie Watts ’25 is Mount Holyoke College’s poet-contestant for this year’s Glascock Poetry Competition and writes about what it’s like to compete with support from a community of other writers and poets.
Editor’s note: The Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition will be held April 3–4, 2025.
When I learned I was chosen as Mount Holyoke College’s poet-contestant in the one hundred and second Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest, I was at the bus stop in Northampton. I stifled a yell and loosely jogged around the corner to get my energy out. All day long, I’d been checking and rechecking my email, as I had done for nearly two weeks. It sounds silly, but I literally pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t that irrational of a thought — I’d had the dream before.
The chance to represent Mount Holyoke at Glascock isn’t something I take for granted, and I’m not ashamed of my sincerity. I transferred here in the fall of my junior year, and getting to be part of a truly active literary community still has a sparkle to it. Before transferring, I dreamed of poetry readings, department mixers and lively class discussions for two years, yet it felt like a world that was out of my reach. I rarely wrote anything. When I did write, no one read it. I didn’t read anything either. I just existed, floating around Boston, listening to music and not connecting with anything. When I applied to transfer, I perused Mount Holyoke’s website and dutifully wrote down anything that excited me: campus trails, the Five College Consortium — and the Glascock contest. I mentioned the contest in my application, and I talked about it with my friends. Mount Holyoke was, to me, the epitome of a school that had Actual Stuff Going On.
Being a transfer student anywhere is hard. You might feel out of place, trying to weasel into long-established friend groups and rise in the ranks of organizations, all with an added time constraint. You have to complete first-year orientation again, even though this might be your third time moving into a dorm room. I worried a lot that first fall that I had spent two years slipping behind everyone else and that I would never catch back up.
Over the next year and a half, I tried very hard to be active. I went to club meetings, ran for board positions and asked classmates to lunch. Still, I spent many sleepless nights in the library reading. Feeling like part of a community is something you appreciate most when you’ve known what it means to lack one. When the English department sent out the email announcing me as Mount Holyoke’s Glascock poet-contestant, I received so many thoughtful emails and texts. I hope no one hacks into my phone because they’ll find screenshots of every single one of them. Maybe that’s a bit much, but I like to keep their kind words close to me. It means a lot that my classmates, professors and peers are so supportive, offering advice, congratulations and well-wishes. It feels like many people are in my corner, cheering me on.
When I transferred to Mount Holyoke, I hoped that by my senior year, I would feel connected to my department and the people around me. In a smaller, secret way, I also hoped to be part of Glascock. I’m a competitive person, and as a writer, I don’t get to experience the thrill of competition often — at least not in contests where I have any semblance of winning. But despite the cliché, I truly know that winning isn’t the most important part of Glascock. Learning from other writers, especially writers my age, always opens my eyes to the many different ways of working with language. It’s completely indispensable knowledge. If it weren’t for all the amazing prose and poetry writers here at Mount Holyoke who knock my socks off in every class workshop, I doubt I would be as excited as I am going into the Glascock competition. They fueled my eagerness to experiment, write and grow.
I’m looking forward to continuing a Mount Holyoke tradition that dates back over a hundred years, and I’m also looking forward to gobbling up all the opportunities that come with it. Most of all, I am so excited to read the other contestants' poetry and hear the works from the incredible judges Kirun Kapur, Dora Malech and Kiki Petrosino. Two days where I do nothing but share poetry, hear poetry and mingle within a supportive, inspiring and exciting writing community was my wildest dream when I came to Mount Holyoke. I am so honored and pumped to be representing us at Glascock, and I’m very thankful to everyone who’s helped me along the way.
