The Tripod

Trinity Senior Kristin Rocha has been writing poetry since she was eight years old. "I mean, I wrote horrible poetry about raccoons and trees for years and years and years," she admits. "It took high school for me to graduate into actual poetry that means something. It was always poetry." She completed her senior thesis in poetry last semester, working with Professor Ciaran Berry. This semester she is conducting a creative writing thesis in fiction, under the tutelage of Professor Francisco Goldman, who is abroad for the semester in Berlin, Germany. During Rocha's own time abroad her poetic voice matured. She spent her entire junior year in Spain, her first semester in Barcelona, her second in Cordoba. There, she saw a side of studying literature that was not provided in her studies to that point at Trinity. "For a year I was only studying Spanish literature in Spanish, so that was huge for me. Learning to write in another language is always going to be a major shift. The Spanish poets are brilliant and it's like, when you go through four years of being an English major and you never take a poetry class in any language, even English, any thing is going to be important." Within the first three weeks of her stay in Barcelona, Rocha was mugged. This incident had a significant impact. "It kind of put me on edge and I was so hypersensitive to everything I was experiencing in Barcelona so coming at an abroad experience from that standpoint where everything felt violent to me and everything was super intense, I couldn't process it except through poetry." The shift, second semester, to the southern city of Cordoba, provided Rocha with yet another perspective, though she fought hard against going back to Spain. "My dad literally had to drag me, had to get a special pass to come through security, drag me to the plane to come back to Spain cause I was crying the whole time. This did not help me to make any friends. […] I was a bitch for the first ten days. Then it turned out to be the best time of my life." "[Being in Cordoba] was also a really great way for me to relax and start to appreciate being in Spain and Spain and what that was doing for me. So I got a lot more writing going. By the time I was in Cordoba I was back into fiction a lot." The shift in location and comfort corresponded to her chosen medium. "I think that for poetry you don't have to be able to process yourself in order to write and I think that for fiction you have to have some sort of handle on what you mean and what you think and the characters you are trying to put together to understand things you have to have a grasp on that when you start." Coming back from abroad, Rocha was excited by the addition of Berry to the Creative Writing faculty. "I had heard really good things about him," she said, "so even though it was his first semester at Trinity, I went there the first day and was like, please just be my adviser, I have no one else, I believe in you." Berry, who started teaching at Trinity in the Fall 2009 semester, is a published poet and previously taught at New York University. Rocha's poetry thesis is a 40-page collection titled "Secondhand Bones". By Rocha's estimation, "Much of the poetry of Secondhand Lions is the product of struggle. There is struggle within the poems, between the poems, and serving as one of the organizing factors behind the collection." Rocha's collection was also inspired by the poetry of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Denise Levertov. Rocha drew poems from "Secondhand Bones" for submission to the Connecticut Poetry Circuit student competition. Rocha was selected as the Trinity nominee to the Circuit, and then as one of the five winners. For the past forty years the Circuit has sent their winners on tour around the state to read their work. Trinity was the first stop on this year's tour. Last Thursday, Rocha and her fellow winners, representing the University of Hartford, Yale University, and Connectictut College, read selections from their work at Smith House. The winner from Southern Connecticut State University did not read. For Rocha, sharing her work through a poetry reading is a unique chance to enhance the work. "If you're not adding anything to the voice, you might as well just let each person walk in and hand them a packet of your poems." "I think that it's really important to have a place that you go to when you're reading your poetry. […] As soon as I start reading a poem I am back in the place where I am like, this is my baby, I wrote these words, I know where they're coming from, I know what they mean, and I know why I put them there, so I go into a place where I'm very calm and my voice plays to the poetry, and my voice understands where the music is in that poetry and how to work with it the best. […] The fun part is [getting] to add the second element to the poem where like if you hand your reader a poem they're going to have a poem, it's all words you put together, its your poem, but when you're reading it you get to play, you get to add the element of yourself in there." Rocha plans to go on to Graduate program to obtain a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction. "It's not an emotional choice it was something that I had to be very logical about. I know that I'm ready to go right into graduate school at this point and I don't think that poetry benefits as much from workshop settings as fiction does. If I'm going to be putting myself in a possibly expensive two-year intensive workshop, I would rather be doing that for the area of writing that will benefit the most."

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