Margaret Park Haas up for 2019 Moth Poetry Prize: Poet of distinction at Millbrook School

MILLBROOK — With a wide smile, Margaret Park Haas looks like a student — fresh-faced and friendly. But Maggie, as she prefers to be called, has the soul of an artist, and because of that, she has been short-listed as one of the contenders for the 2019 Moth Poetry Prize, worth 10,000 pounds. That’s roughly $13,014 in U.S. dollars. This prestigious prize is sought by poets from around the world, and it’s quite a feat that Park Haas is among the four finalists. She submitted the single poem, “Sestina.”

The contest emanates from rural Ireland, presented by the publishers of The Moth magazine, an international art and literature publication. Jacob Polley, a recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize was this year’s single judge who put together the short-list of candidates. The winning poet will be announced on May 2 in Dublin, Ireland. 

Park Haas’ Sestina is about family relations, unresolved in the space of the poem.

Polley spoke of Park Haas’ work in a press release.

“It’s when material and form become one that a poem really takes off, when the poem’s content becomes both bound up in and released by the poem’s shape,” he stated. “I felt this forcefully when I read… where the returns of the form come to enact the narrator’s compulsive searching around his or her defining hurt, as well as note fragments whose poignant shuffling and putting together never bring the certainty wanted so badly.”

Living in a small town, Park Haas loved to read, and after reading “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop in high school, she developed a passion for poetry.

Her poem, “Sestina,” is in a sense a tribute to the American poet, Bishop, a Pulitzer Prize winner who attended Vassar. She died in 1979, but Park Haas studied under April Bernard, at Skidmore, and Bernard had trained under Bishop. Park Haas graduated magna cum laude in the English department. She won the prestigious American Poets College Award.

A sestina is a lyrical poem, having six stanzas with six lines in each stanza, but ending with a three-line sentence called an envoy. Park Haas usually prefers free verse, but likes to experiment.

Park Haas grew up in the Hudson Valley and attended Hotchkiss School, in neighboring Lakeville, Conn., where she still extols the excellence of the teachers who taught there. She has studied in Scotland and England, and is thrilled to be traveling to Ireland again in May.

Both her parents are writers. Her father, Dan, lives locally and teaches in the Millbrook Central School District. Her mother, Vanessa Park, works at Fairwinds Counseling Services on Nantucket, Mass. Park Haas lives in Copake, and has a cat named Walt Whitman.

Having been a barista until last December, Park Haas is now working in the dean’s office at Millbrook School. She loves the interaction with students and happily confesses that her job is “a gift.” Always writing, Park Haas may take a short break in May, when she makes the trip to Ireland with her mother to attend the final judging. They plan to do some sightseeing while there, and hopefully some celebrating as well.