Part of the 2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:
“Drama is never dead” wrote Emily Dickinson, “Everything is as good as it is dramatic,” wrote Robert Frost. But what is drama in poetry? By turning the lenses of drama on the poems we read and onto our own drafts, we will think about how the theatrical cues of place, voice, and address make a poem legible to us, and help a poem to feel spoken and embodied across time. In this masterclass, we’ll read a few Amherst poets and a few poets from the great wider literary tradition. Using lenses and techniques we learn, we’ll turn our eyes towards our own drafts, seeing how we can refine them for resonance and reverberation.
Closed captioning will be available for this program!
Participants in this program will not be able to turn on their cameras or microphones, but are encouraged to follow along with Tess from home as she facilitates exercises with a group of students. All participants are encouraged to enter questions into the typed Q&A during the program.
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Tess Taylor is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning.” Her second book, Work & Days, was hailed as “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephanie Burt and named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Last West, Taylor’s third book, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures and is currently being adapted for the stage by the Poet’s Theatre. Her most recent book, Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, was hailed “brilliant” by Stephanie Danler in the LA Times and “stunning” by Naomi Shihab Nye in The New York Times. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She served as Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland and was most recently the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. Taylor has served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She grew up and lives again in El Cerrito, California.
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2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule
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Tiana Clark 
Marylou Davis is a specialist in documentation, conservation, design, and replication of decorative paints and gilding on historic architectural surfaces and objects. Davis’ work includes: replications of 19th-century factory made block printed floorcloths installed at the Gardner-Pingree House, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, CT; replicated flame mahogany wood graining at Boscobel Restoration at Garrison, NY, and cedar graining in the George Washington bedchamber at the Joseph Webb House in Wethersfield, CT. Marylou’s’ work has increasingly turned toward project management for restoration projects within historic churches and house museums. At the Emily Dickinson Homestead she has worked with Director Jane Wald in surveying extant physical and written evidence toward the restoration now in progress.
About Marta McDowell:
Alena Smith Alena Smith is a playwright and TV writer. She is the creator, showrunner and executive producer of the critically-acclaimed series “Dickinson” starring Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Dickinson, which recently aired its second season on Apple TV+, and is currently in production on its third. Dickinson won a Peabody Award in the category of Entertainment, and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comedy series.Smith previously served as a writer and producer for Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Newsroom. Variety said of her play Icebergs, which had its world premiere in 2016 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, “Smith shows impeccable comic timing, and also knows how to layer her drama with pathos.” Other published plays include The Bad Guys, Plucker, The Lacy Project, and The New Sincerity, which The New York Times called “Splendid… entertaining and thought-provoking… comedy with a poignant edge.”