M.K. Sterpka of Bernardston and Prudence Wholey of Shelburne Falls won first and second place, respectively, in the Beals Memorial Library third annual Beals Prize for Poetry. The contest was postponed for two years due to COVID-19.
The poetry contest honors the memory of Charles L. Beals, the benefactor of the Beals Memorial Library located in Winchendon. The competition is funded by a grant from the Winchendon Cultural Council and by the Friends of the Beals Memorial Library.
Library director Manuel King started the contest in 2018. King had worked at the Wheeler Orange Public Library which holds the Robert P. Collén Poetry Competition, and he said that contest was one of his inspirations to start holding a poetry contest at the Beals Library.
“I’m a poetry lover,” exclaimed King. “I started in 2016 (at the Beals Library) and I was thinking about what could we do to bring poetry to the library.”
King said that the three judges for the contest pick their top ten “blidnly,” meaning they are given the poems without any names on them. This year those judges were Candace Curran of Shelburne Falls, bg Thurston of Warwick and Paula Sayword of Hatfield.
Sayword was the winner of the Beals Prize for Poetry for the second annual poetry contest. King said it was a tradition to have the first-place winner be the third judge on the panel for the subsequent year’s contest.
M.K. Sterpka won first place and was awarded $150 for her poem “White Buffalo.”
Sterpka said her poem is about a trip she took with her partner to Saskatchewan, Canada. She encountered a white buffalo on the great plains, and it was the only white buffalo around.
Sterpka explained how unique the experience was because she “felt worthy” that this white buffalo came up to her, and was “extremely grateful for those five minutes.”
She said she has worked on “White Buffalo” since 2013 by changing adjectives and making edits here and there. She explained how she was “strongly encouraged” by her partner to enter the contest, and how she originally didn’t want to. She described herself as an artist who does “writing on the side … I didn’t really have an aptitude for poetry,” she said. “But my mother wrote poems.”
Sterpka has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works in policy and advocacy for an organization in Franklin County.
Prudence Wholey won second place and was awarded $75 for her poem “Keepsakes”.
“Keepsakes” is about one of her friends who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) but was a “talented poet and woodworker.” Wholey said she used her “poetic license” to describe what it’s like to witness a close friend go from “very talented and energetic” to then “be diagnosed with something this devastating.”
The poem, she said, “goes from looking at his cellar where he did a lot of his woodworking. Then it goes up into his living area. And here is this man sitting in his wheelchair, basically unable to do anything anymore, but he still has his hand on the joystick of his motorized wheelchair and he’s dreaming of his next piece.”
Wholey said her friend, Barbara Lemoine, encouraged her to enter the poem into the Beals Prize contest because she thought it was really good.
Wholey is a nature lover, and photographer so she finds writing about what’s around her to be inspiring. She has been writing poetry since the early 1980s and is a part of two all-women writing groups. Wholey mainly writes poems about her friends and family.
“It started when my mother died. She died in the ‘90s,” she said. “I started writing about the grief process and things like that.”
Wholey is a retired farmer. When she’s not writing poems, she is raising her animals and helping her neighbors or helping her older brother with haying. “I just enjoy agriculture,” Wholey exclaimed, “I think it’s almost a dying art in a way. But I continue to do it.”
Amherst resident Jan Lamberg won third place in the contest for their poem, “Missed, Found.”
According to the press release, the other competition finalists included: Barry Carter of Hull, England, for his poem, “Visions”; Michael Goldman of Northampton for “Luthier’s Co-op Bar and Restaurant”; Madlynn Haber of Northampton for “Poems of the Dead”; Daniel Hales of Greenfield for “As Is”; Elaine Reardon of Warwick for “Gilfeather Turnips”; Jack Virgo of Plainfield, New Jersey for “Biracial”; and Gerry Wojtowicz of Enfield, Connecticut for “Feet Padding Across the Carpeted Floor.”
Off exit 258 in Jamestown, North Dakota
the sign reads, “World’s Largest Buffalo.”
not the authentic one, a giant replica
of resin and concrete, there amid
250 acres of cultivated flatness.
picture-takers, scanning burnt grasses
wait for the “Real” buffalo to show
in half-baked boredom, ambling apart
alone, a creature to myself, I feel expectant
until, even you walk away.
Only then does the buffalo emerge
Tip-toe-ing from under the brush
to pause in the vast sunlight
appearing the way some might call white
a sun-bleached version of the original
Rufus snout muzzling the dust
munching a dry stalk or two
before vaporizing back to the tree-line
Without being captured
so often the case
when what one looks for
desires not to be there
except on its own terms
present to the sight-line
as genuine invisibility
that substitutes for grace
when no thing is left to be beheld.