By Camille Kelly | Reporter
The 32nd Annual Beall Poetry Writing Festival will be held March 18-20 in the Armstrong Browning Library. This year, Baylor will host three distinguished modern poets: Matthew Olzmann, Paisley Rekdal and Marcus Wicker.
Every year, students are encouraged to submit their own poems or works of fiction to the Beall Poetry Writing Contest for a chance to win a monetary prize and publication in the Phoenix Literary Magazine. The award ceremony will be held at 3:30 p.m. on March 18 in the Armstrong Browning Library.
Senior lecturer in the English department Dr. Timothy DeJong has been involved in the festival since around 2017.
DeJong teaches a poetry writing workshop class in the creative writing department, where he teaches students each semester to write their own poetry and often encourages them to enter the contest.
“There were poems that students wrote for this class, for this course that ended up winning the top prize in the student poetry contest, and that were published in the Phoenix,” DeJong said. “So that’s, as the instructor, always sort of gratifying and exciting — to see your students succeed in that way.”
One of DeJong’s students, Texarkana sophomore Dakota Dennard, said he chose a poem he wrote for the class to submit to the festival.
According to Dennard, writing poetry for both class and the contest has challenged him as a writer in new ways.
“I like writing long pieces of works where I can spend a lot of time really fleshing out an idea or an emotion, whereas poetry, it’s condensed to like one or two pages max,” Dennard said.
Hallsville freshman Reid Bryant, another student in DeJong’s class who decided to submit, said what surprised him the most about writing poetry was how much fun he finds it.
According to Bryant, the first step of sharing the poem is always liberating.
“Every time I’ve shared my poem in class, there are parts people enjoy or connect with,” Bryant said. “So yes, I’m sharing something personal, but I’m trying to share something that’s also personal to everybody, so that everyone can get to that personal space together.”
According to Corpus Christi senior Matthew Ople, the purpose of writing poetry is just like music or art — to leave some proof of existence, and whether it wins or not, if someone reads it, that’s enough.
“No matter what you do, you’re going to have your hits, and you’re going to have your misses,” Ople said. “So what matters is that from this, I at least gain some sort of feeling or experience that makes me satisfied and look at the past me and compare it to the me now, so that I can sort of get a foothold for the me for the future. That’s sort of how I’m seeing it.”
DeJong said he always hopes his students simply gain from the experience of writing a poem and find an understanding and an enjoyment of their own ability to craft language and use words well.
In explaining why poetry still matters today, DeJong quoted William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
