The Making of a Slim Volume

Not many Dartmouth undergraduates have offices like hers. The small woodpaneled study off Baker's Paul Room looks out on Tuck Mall, the Murdough Center, and, on this clear day, beyond the Connecticut River to Vermont. The view inside is just as nice. Nancy Kricorian '82 has covered the walls with poems and photographs of poets. There is also a bookcase, one entire shelf of which is filled with poetry volumes and chapbooks no mean feat, as anyone who reads poetry knows. Volumes of poetry are notoriously slim.

Kricorian has been a senior fellow at the College for the past three terms. Approximately ten fellows are chosen each year from the junior class, and their status entitles them to forego major and course requirements in order to work on independent creative or research projects. For Kricorian, that project is a book-length manuscript of original poems, something she is well-qualified to produce: she is one of Dartmouth's best undergraduate poets.

Coming from what she terms "a working-class background" in Watertown, Massachusetts, Kricorian arrived at the College in the fall of 1978. She had first seen Dartmouth the previous spring on her way up to Middlebury College for an interview. That first impression was enough. "There was no need to go any further," she says. But beautiful as she found the College, Kricorian still had difficulty adjusting to life at Dartmouth. It was especially hard, she recalls, to reconcile her own upbringing with the affluent atmosphere of an Ivy League college. In addition, she found the relations between men and women at the College strained a situation which, she feels, contributed to her own feminism.

In the winter of 1980, Robin Morgan, poet and well-known feminist, came to give a reading of her work at Dartmouth. For Kricorian, who attended the reading, there was a sense of "incredible anger" in Morgan's poetry. In an attempt to understand that anger, she enrolled in her first Women's Studies course the following term. That was a turning point. Nancy not only came to understand the anger but took some of it on herself. "I was miserable after freshman year," she recalls. "I couldn't watch television, I couldn't read magazines. I needed to be angry." In time, however, the anger subsided, and Kricorian's energy became more productive. "I just got over being angry all the time," she says. "It's a process. You feel as if you've been blind, and then you see the way the world is and it's bad. Gradually, though, you learn that it's not so bad."

Further Women's Studies courses helped: "More than in other courses, in them you really bring your life into the classroom, so it's easier for people to get to know you." So did Kricorian's growing interest in poetry. Although she had written for several years, freshman year, again, provided a new direction. "I just took it as something I liked to do," she says. "It never entered my mind that I would be a poet." But that is what she is. In the spring of her junior year, a manuscript of her poems won one of Dartmouth's highest writing awards the Alexander Laing prize. The following year, Kricorian repeated that achievement.

In addition to her Baker Library office, Kricorian's fellowship has provided several other fringe benefits, including bimonthly tutorials with a well-known Boston poet and travel and tuition expenses for two summer writers' conferences: the Centrum conference in Port Townsend, Washington, and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. At both conferences, Kricorian was able to study under Carolyn Forche, whose first volume of poems, Gathering the Tribes, was published as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. This was an experience she is tremendously grateful for and from which she feels she has grown as a poet. "The better I get at poetry, the more complex it will be," she explains. "I want my poems to portray a whole range of emotions, instead of only one or two."

Just as Kricorian's interest in poetry has grown since freshman year, so, too, has her interest in and commitment to feminism. She spent one term working as an intern in a women's health care center in Seattle and another as a Tucker Foundation intern working in San Francisco for Union W.A.G.E. (Women's Alliance to Gain Equality). This second internship dealt primarily with researching occupational hazards for jobs primarily associated with women, such as nursing and clerical work.

Then, during her senior fall, Kricorian was awarded a $1,000 grant from Xerox Corporation to make a study of feminist activity in France. Having secured a place as an au pair with an American banker's family, she set off for Paris to attend meetings of the various groups within the movement and "talk to everybody." She laughs. "It was an incredibly schizophrenic existence," she explains. "I was reading feminist literature and going to all sorts of different meetings during the day, then coming home at night and ironing shirts."

As to the future, Kricorian's plans are fairly definite: they include a trip to Australia and New Zealand, a lot of poetry, and, eventually, enrollment in a master of fine arts program in writing. She is ambitious, she says, but not ruthlessly so. "I would really like to have a book of poems published, and I think, that I will. But it's not important that I do it right now. I'm not in any rush."

Kricorian is grateful to Dartmouth for the opportunity she has had to study the issues that interest her in such depth. She also feels indebted to the "incredibly supportive" Women's Studies faculty and to Dartmouth's rural setting: "This is the first time I've really lived in the country. It makes me realize how much I'd like to live in an area like this." Her Dartmouth years have been good ones enlightening, productive, and happy, if, at times, hard. "I realize what a privilege it has been to go to school here," she says.