Alyssa Halton

I came into St. Lawrence with the intention of majoring in Biology to prep for a future in medicine. Sophomore year, my interest migrated towards philosophy, and my major intentions followed. Then I took my first English course, and here I am—an English major, with a dual minor in French and Biology, with a third concentration in Philosophy. My greatest consistency as a student is that I like learning things. The subject, as it turns out, isn’t terribly important, as long as it’s fresh. When I learn something new, I want to talk about it. When my friends tire of listening to me (which happens on a regular basis), I can at least get my fix down in writing. Within the English major, I have found the space to let my mind be indecisive without punishing it. I can write about something new every day. I like that.

On to my second subject (with no graceful transition, because I don’t have one), I am from Ithaca, NY. What’s it like there? Pretty awesome. My house is over one hundred years old and still not finished. I live far away from everything, with 150 acres of space and I like it that way. My dad’s friends live in a yurt in one of our fields; my grandparents made the paper for their off-the-grid lifestyle. I miss lakes and gorges and Subaru’s and all six—yes six—of my cats when I’m at school. It’s not enough to keep me from coming back, but it’s the only thing that even comes close.

When I’m home, I just sit around and feel happy. Here at school, I don’t have time to sit around, and that makes me happy, too. I’m on the men’s crew team, which takes up what I hear is called free time. They let me boss them around in return for steering their boat around ice bergs on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Good feedback is constructive, even if it comes in a harsh wrapper. My worst feedback experiences have usually been related to a lack of feedback. I like getting suggestions for how to improve something I’ve written. Even if I choose to ignore the advice (which I will freely admit I’ve done before) I at least gain a sense of conviction in my taste for my own style. No feedback= no good.

I’m a big fan of Whitman and Dickinson. A lot of this is because I like the kind of people I imagine them to have been: they were breaking all of the rules—even if Dickinson had to do it from the safety of her house. They were rebels, talking about sex and capitalizing random words and inventing punctuation. I respect the rules and traditional forms, but these cats keep me on my toes. Yeats gets me with “The Second Coming”-- those “slow thighs” just stuck with me for some reason. So there that is.

Good poetry makes me want to read it out loud. It makes me want to roll the patterns of thoughts and words around in my mouth to make some sense of them. It should say something beyond the most obvious and literal. I would like to try and avoid the heavy-handedness or forced and farced depth that I might fall subject to as an immature poet. I’m good at saying a lot; I’m good at using 500 words to describe one detail. I’d like to learn how to reign in my excitement and make something worth contemplating; something a bit above a hot mess of words.