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This year’s Greater Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival, which will be held April 21, marks the 10th consecutive year that Boston College has hosted the event – a celebration of the literary genre and a showcase for the work of talented students.
The festival takes place at 7:30 p.m. in the Yawkey Center Murray Room, and will include readings of original works by students from some 20 area colleges and universities. Each participant, selected by his or her school, makes a three-minute presentation; a chapbook of their poetry is published in conjunction with the event.
“I’m thrilled to arrive at the 10-year milestone mark for the Intercollegiate Poetry Festival at BC,” said Professor of English and department chair Suzanne Matson, who revived the festival in 2006.”
This year’s BC poet is Carroll School of Management senior Christine Degenaars, a double major in English and marketing, whom Matson describes as “a great example of how creative and other interests often come together in the same person.”
A Montvale, NJ, native, Degenaars describes poetry as one of her passions, and has been writing it intensely for the past few years. The attention to detail and language it requires, she said, is a powerful tool in all aspects of her life, including her business studies.
“As a senior, it’s an incredible honor for me to represent BC this year. I’ve attended the festival the past two years and have always admired the poets who have read there. Coming from a place of respect for the festival, I’m proud and excited to read this year and to have my poem, ‘Borderline,’ published.”
Degenaars says her poem focuses on “the complicated relationship between people’s internal lives — their emotions and memories — and the external world in which they live. I’ve always been fascinated by the everyday and the ways poetry can express the smallest details of people’s lives and invite the reader to experience those moments.”
A cross-country road trip that included a stop in New Mexico served as an inspiration for “Borderline,” she says. “There’s something about a desert landscape, about the dryness, the stripping away of water and color that made me think of the ways loss follows us. Oftentimes we remember those we’ve lost by the feeling of their absence, by the way the world feels stripped of them, instead of remembering them as the way they were before they passed. I find a desert landscape works in a similar way. I think the powerful thing about ‘Borderline’ is that it deals with this element of loss while tying it to the desert landscape.”
The festival will begin with a keynote address by Jill McDonough, a University of Massachusetts-Boston assistant professor who was the 2014 Lannan Fellow and a three-time Pushcart prizewinner. Her work has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2011.
Other participating schools include Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Brandeis University, Bridgewater State University, Emerson College, Harvard University, Lasell College, Lesley University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, New England Conservatory, North Shore Community College, Pine Manor College, Regis College, Salem State University, Simmons College, Suffolk University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, University of Massachusetts-Lowell and Wellesley College.
The event, sponsored by Poetry Days and Boston College Magazine, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Dan Soyer in the Office of Marketing Communcations at ext.2-8928 or at soyerd@bc.edu