VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants
This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!
Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:
This is a unique poetry generative writing workshop for writers of all levels. We will meditate on different ways to perceive the way food nourishes the soul, just like a poem does: through memory and survival, through gratitude, through synesthesia, through love languages and through socio-economic commentary. Join us and leave with at least one solid poem draft!
Saranya Subramanian completed her MFA at the University of San Francisco. Her writing has been published in The Caravan, Aainanagar, Outlook, Vayavya, The Bombay Review––among others. Her essay, “The Cockroach and I”, was published by Penguin Random House and won runner up to the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. She runs The Bombay Poetry Crawl (which has been featured in the New York Times), an archival space dedicated to 20th century Bombay Poets.
Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Festival events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.
What can poetry teach us about psychoanalysis, and the process of sharing one’s inner self with another? What can therapeutic or healing work teach us about writing poems? In this panel, two poets who have written about and undergone forms of therapy will explore the art and practice of writing about interiority and healing. We will read Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, and each presenter’s work, and explore the intersections between them.
What do acts of erasure afford a writer? How can blackout poetry be used to create community, unlock writer’s block, or clap back? The reasons for engaging in an erasure of a text can range from playful engagements with the literary canon, to political reclamations of voice and language. In this interactive workshop, we’ll be looking closely at resonant models of erasure (including Nicole Sealey, Sarah Sloat, Tracy K. Smith, and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth), and exploring the effects of different blackout poetry strategies. Participants will leave the workshop with prompts, tools of erasure, and recommended readings. Featuring Matt Donovan and Jenny George, authors of We Are Not Where We Are: an erasing of Thoreau’s Walden (Bull City Press, 2025).
Follow Emily Dickinson’s example by writing letters “to the World” in a virtual workshop with epistolary fantasy author Sylvie Cathrall. In this gentle and good-humored writing program, participants will play with letter-writing as a form of poetic and personal expression while drawing inspiration from Dickinson’s own letters. Guided freewriting sessions will be followed by opportunities for sharing and reflection. No experience necessary – open to all writers (and sometimes-writers, first-time-writers, letter-writers, and everyone else, too!). 
In Dickinson, we meet a speaker who sees Death as a kindly chauffeur and notes the flies buzzing around their deathbed. In these and other remarkable poems, Dickinson upends the heaviness of confronting our own mortality. She situates the speaker as a witness whose playfulness, wit, and sarcasm defuses the volatility of the moment – and helps renew the reader’s perspective. In this generative workshop, we turn to Dickinson and other contemporary poets who use a light hand to address tough subjects. Through readings and interactive writing exercises, participants will explore the power of this approach to inspire their own writing.
This workshop provides beginning poets with a framework for analyzing poetry with an objective approach centered on craft elements. With an eye toward formalism, this workshop centers on a streamlined infographic to help writers objectively analyze and discuss any poem — from ancient to contemporary — at the level of craft and technique. Participants will analyze Dickinson’s poems and contemporary examples, and they will generate and analyze their own poetry in response to Dickinson-centered prompts. The key focus of this workshop is for writers to view any poem objectively and ask not: “Is this poem good or bad?” but “What is this poem doing?”.
Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and currently divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico in the US. Her creative work combines sculpture and photography with performance and digital video to recreate appropriated narratives and research drawn from the history of science, literature, and other sources. Bouton’s recent projects have been shown at museums such as the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Bouton’s work was featured in the exhibition, “Charlotte Great and Small,” celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England. Bouton’s video work has been shown at Art Claims Impulse in Berlin, in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nimes, France, and at the Temporary Art Center, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as well as in The Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague. Reviews of this work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant for the opera “Inheritance” which premiered at University of California, San Diego in 2018 and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her project “25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Bouton is currently Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks: We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Walden, co-authored with Jenny George, Bull City Press 2025), The Dug-Up Gun Museum (a collection of poems about guns and gun violence in America, BOA 2022), Missing Department (a collaborative collection of art and poetry created with artist Ligia Bouton, Visual Studies Workshop 2023), A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (a book of lyric essays, Trinity University Press 2016), Rapture & the Big Bam (selected by Lia Purpura for the Snowbound Chapbook Competition, Tupelo Press 2016), and Vellum (selected by Mark Doty for the Bakeless Contest, Houghton Mifflin 2007). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
The Carriage House achieves this through five core principles: