Westminster Student Wins Smith College Poetry Contest

Westminster School Fourth Former Taite Puhala accepted a $500 prize on April 3 at Smith College for winning the sixth annual Smith College Poetry Prize for High School Girls in New England.
 

Taite, a resident of East Granby, spent the day, along with her family, visiting with Smith College English professors and with the award-winning Irish poet Eavan Boland, who was the judge in the contest. In the evening, Taite read her winning poem, "a capella," to an audience of more than 200 Smith College students and professors and other assorted guests right before Boland gave a reading.
 

The Poetry Center at Smith College brings distinguished poets to the college, creates a video archive of their readings and promotes an appreciation of poetry in the larger community through outreach to schools. Each year, it sponsors the high school poetry contest for sophomore and junior girls in New England. Entrants were required to submit one poem with a maximum of 25 lines.
 

“It was a great personal victory for Taite and a great moment for Westminster’s poetry program,” said Michael Cervas, head of the Westminster English Department, who also attended the reading at Smith. All of the finalists in the contest got the chance to read their poems but, according to Cervas, the “sophistication of Taite’s poem, both in terms of its narrative structure and in terms of its control of language, set it apart from the other poems.”
 

At Westminster, Taite takes AP English Language and Composition and she is a member of the student-run literary club, The Movement. In the winter, she was chosen to be a student reader in Westminster’s Friday Night Readings Series on Jan. 27 where she read three of her poems before introducing the guest reader, poet Jeffrey Harrison.
 

Since Taite began writing poems many years ago, it is actually possible to trace her growth as a poet from her earliest, somewhat opaque efforts to her most recent mature and measured poems. “Her mastery of rhythm is the one thing that separates Taite from most other teen poets,” added Cervas.