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Local poet Hailey Leithauser receives prestigious poetry prize

by Frances Snowder

Almost everybody has written a few lines of rhyme to record a heartfelt moment or to commemorate an occasion. But how does a serious writer work his or her way up from obscurity into the ranks of recognized poets? One way is to win a national competition such as the "Discovery"/The Nation poetry contest.

In the 30th annual contest for the award, Takoma Park’s own Hailey Leithauser was chosen as one of four emerging voices for 2004. The winners each received a cash award of $500 and were flown to New York City to read their work at the Unterberg Poetry Center on May 10. In addition, one poem from each winner was published in the May 24 issue of The Nation.

To enter the competition, Leithauser submitted 10 poems for the award, five of them in the "small sonnet" form–her own invention, which she describes this way:

"When I wrote the first few sonnets two years ago, I thought they looked promising, so I gave myself an assignment of writing a 26-poem abecedarian sonnet sequence. It took me seven months, and all I did for seven months was write these sonnets. I mean, I wrote my grocery lists in small sonnets; I started to speak in them."

In the poem "Form," which appeared in Poetry last September, she wrote, "when cast small, exploit/what is small."

"That’s what I was learning to do in these poems: to really exploit what you can do in a poem that is only 70 syllables long and that relies on rhyme to really carry it through."

Although Leithauser’s poems had been appearing in magazines for some time, it did not occur to her to submit work for the Discovery award until she was encouraged to do so by an editor who had published her work.

Leithauser, a native Floridian who has lived in Takoma Park for the past 20 years, has a typical writing background. She majored in American and English literature/Creative Writing at University of Maryland, College Park, and then went on to get a Master’s in library science leading to a career as a librarian. During her college years she took poetry workshops.

"I had the very good luck to just stumble into a couple of workshops. The first workshop I ever took was with John Frederick Nims who was an excellent teacher. I always expected and assumed that I was going to be a poet. And then when I got out of school, for some reason, I stopped writing. I was working and it’s very difficult for me to work and write at the same time. It just takes so much energy for me to write that I can’t do much of anything else while I’m doing it. But I still considered myself a writer even when I was writing very little."

The turning point came for Leithauser four years ago, after 20 years of not writing. Standing before Van Gogh’s Pieta at the National Gallery in Washington, she had an irresistible urge to go home and write about the piece.

"I started writing and writing and writing. Six months later, I came into some money and I knew all I wanted to do was write, so I quit my job. I started writing full time. I wrote about two years, basically in a free verse form, until I created the first of my small sonnets. And that just absolutely fired up something in my brain. I just began writing so prolifically."