Verse Engineering: A Craft Talk with Mary-Alice Daniel

This talk will be held in Barn 024.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This is a master class on Originality. It asks: “What poetic elements constitute a signature style?” The culture of this craft laboratory encourages writing with audacity. I will ask all participants to take risks: to surprise themselves and me. We will practice architecting and investing in a pleasurable, personalized, lifelong practice of reading, writing, and revision. We will identify our writing “comfort zones”—then step in and out of them. We will survey techniques giving rise to a new aesthetic, a radical approach. We will deliberate the constraints of form, then we dream. We shall follow a directive: “Write only what only you can write.” We will learn from my methodology of mistakes. We will read poetry that might pull us apart.

About

Mary-Alice Daniel is the author of Mass for Shut-Ins (Yale University Press, 2023), which won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and was referred by competition judge Rae Armantrout as “a Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” She also wrote the tri-continental memoir A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco, 2022), People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, New England Review, and The Yale Review. Born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee, she is a Cave Canem Fellow, served as the inaugural Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, and holds the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.