Lamont Younger Poets Reading

Rockefeller Hall fell silent on Wednesday evening, the audience captivated as prep Anne Brandes prepared to read her poem. “Pine,” she began. “Feathered needles spread by damp, salty breeze.” With these opening lines, Brandes kicked off the Lamont Younger Poets Reading.

"This year’s Lamont Younger Poets Prize was awarded to Brandes along with lowers Mai Hoang, Virginia Little and Blane Zhu, recognizing the best poetry written by preps and lowers at the Academy."

This year’s Lamont Younger Poets Prize was awarded to Brandes along with lowers Mai Hoang, Virginia Little and Blane Zhu, recognizing the best poetry written by preps and lowers at the Academy. The winners’ reading was followed by a reading from Lamont poet Jill McDonough, the author of multiple poetry collections and chapbooks, including “Habeas Corpus,” “Where You Live,” “Reaper” and “Oh, James!”

The Lamont Younger Poets Prize was founded in 2004 in memory of Rex McGuinn, a member and later committee head of the Lamont Poetry Committee during his time at the Academy. As a poet and teacher, McGuinn believed that poetry could give rise to a new way of seeing the world.

He was particularly encouraging towards underclassmen in the prep and lower grades. Following in McGuinn’s spirit, the Lamont Poetry Program recognizes up to four promising younger poets every year. “After the death of McGuinn, a very influential teacher of poetry here, we wanted to do something that would honor his influence for students, particularly in the lower and prep level,” English Instructor and Chair of the Lamont Poetry Committee Todd Hearon said.

Hearon, who helped organize this year’s event, further detailed that the Lamont Poetry Prize was “tailor-made to the younger students,” as the Sibley Poetry Prize, the Academy’s other poetry prize, typically honors upperclassmen. “Every year, I’m impressed by the quality and variety of the submissions,” he said. “The event just nails home that poetry is alive and well in the prep and lower levels.”

Brandes began with her poem titled “Mother Nature,” followed by Hoang’s “Ghazal: A Confession,” Little’s “Villanelle: ‘Body Language,’” and Zhu’s “Man, Foreign.” Hearon found this year’s event to be particularly memorable, as it featured Hoang, a two-time winner, and Little, whose sister, senior Alice Little, also won the award two years prior.

At the time, Virginia Little, who had just been accepted to Exeter, expressed excitement about Exeter’s arts program after learning about her sister’s award. “[Alice] is a great writer and thinks deeply about the subjects of her poems and narratives,” she said. “It is special for us to share such a distinction, and we are both humbled to have been chosen out of so many great writers and poets here at Exeter.”

Students drew from a variety of experiences for inspiration. Inspired by this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Little wrote a poem about “the difficulty of spoken language to convey what we mean and to connect.” She added, “[On MLK Day], there were people who weren’t connecting—not listening to each other and understanding each other’s hurt feelings—and I thought about how people struggle to reach each other but, because language can be a barrier, just can’t.”

For Little, reading poetry is a family tradition. “Our family sometimes reads [poetry] to each other and shares poems when we’re together or by email when we’re at school,” she said. During the reading, Little was joined by her grandparents, parents and sister.

Brandes, who served as the editor-in-chief of her previous school’s writing magazine, wrote a poem dedicated to her mother. “I related her to different aspects of nature—a pine [and] a Japanese maple. I described our experience with those plants and how I interacted with her,” Brandes said.

Hoang was fascinated with the ghazal format, an Arabic poetry form consisting of a rhyming format and a repeating word or phrase. “The first ghazal I read was Meg Day’s; she wrote an amazing one that really inspired me. There are so many different ways that you can think about one word and it has different meanings,” Hoang said.

She applied this concept to her word: drama. “I just Googled different forms of drama. I didn’t really have a unique story that I wanted to tell; I didn’t even know what I was going to write about, just the concept of drama,” Hoang said. She wanted her poem to be one that could be better understood through research.

Zhu entered a poem that he wrote during an English class. “My poem was an English assignment. We were reading Gregory Pardlo at the time, and one of the poems he had was a rhyming poem. I was really intrigued by it because I had never rhymed before,” he said. “I thought of a recent experience I had going back to the Beijing countryside over vacation. I wrote a poem about that experience because I’m a city person, and I tried to show the juxtaposition of identity and the people around me.”

Student poets were further inspired by McDonough’s reading. “Jill was just so great,” Brandes said. “She talked about what she believed in, she wrote about what she felt. I think that was really refreshing. She was very passionate, and she really gave all of herself to the people who were listening.”

Hoang admired McDonough’s pursuits outside of writing poetry. “I really respect what she does with prisoners in Boston; she started that whole program to teach them English, and it gives me so much hope that you can do that sort of thing,” Hoang said. “She’s such a funny and optimistic person—who wouldn’t love Jill?”

Zhu left the event with a crucial piece of advice. “There was one thing that she said [in one of her poems] that was really striking. It said we’re poets, you can be anything if you’re a poet, you can have that power. I really liked the connection between poet and freedom and liberation. I really liked the idea that the voice liberates your thoughts,” Zhu said.

McDonough was similarly impressed by the Lamont Younger Poets. “[The student poems] were ambitious, accomplished, and moving. [My advice would be to] keep having fun with writing—let poetry be a place where you are experimenting and trying new things,” McDonough said.

Brandes was thankful for the opportunity to enrich her exploration of poetry. “Exeter is a great environment to learn poetry. Prizes like the Lamont Poet Prize or the Sibley Poet Prize are really positive because they give students something to work towards. I’ve definitely learned a lot,” she said.