Elegy for Simon's Rock, by Caleb D. Sabatka

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Simon’s Rock, known by various names over the years, was the nation’s first residential early college, designed for students to enroll after the tenth grade in lieu of finishing high school. In 2025, the original campus was closed and the Simon’s Rock community moved from the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts to New York, leaving behind their namesake glacial erratic. What remains are quirky buildings filled with the ghosts of alumni and faculty who gave life to the place.

Elegy for Simon’s Rock is an autoethnographic project of memory and mourning for a place and an institution that no longer exists in its original form. Anthropologist and poet Caleb D. Sabatka began his studies in 2017 at 16 and completed his Bachelor of Arts in 2020. Drawing from traditional forms and found poetry, these poems recount one experience of the community’s intellectual life and its undoing, of friendships and their silences, of mental illness and belonging, and of a campus whose geography he still walks in dreams. To write about Simon’s Rock is to write about what it means to be formed by a place and to keep carrying it long after the institution has moved on and changed its name again.

Caleb D. Sabatka is an anthropologist and educator, serving as chair of the Human Services department at Urban College of Boston. He holds a Master of Arts in Restorative Justice from Vermont Law School and a Doctor of Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where his research focused on prison monasticism. He attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock from 2017 to 2020 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Cross-Cultural Relations and Literary Translation.