Poets and scholars Lucy Dougan and Alan Fyfe are hosting an online poetry masterclass exploring masking and distancing, personas and personification in the making of imaginative selves in the work of Emily Dickinson and Fay Zwicky.

Dougan and Fyfe will lead close readings of both Dickinson and Zwicky’s work, which will then be followed by discussions and writing exercises to inspire the creation of new work.

In this poetry masterclass, Western Australian poets and scholars, Lucy Dougan and Alan Fyfe explore masking and distancing, personas and personification in the making of imaginative selves in the work of two iconic poets from different eras and different hemispheres, Emily Dickinson and Fay Zwicky.

Iconic American Emily Dickinson (1830 to 1886) once wrote: When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person. Dickinson’s most famous works are often narratives with intimate details of events she could not have possibly experienced, such as her own death. Across the body of Dickinson’s work, there are many approaches to imagined selves, from personification of inanimate objects to gender morphing, perhaps related to the poet’s attempts to Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Paired with Dickinson is the highly regarded contemporary Western Australian poet Fay Zwicky (1933 to 2017) who had a deep engagement with Dickinson’s poetry, both through her own experimental practice and her teaching. Whilst Zwicky has written directly about Dickinson, such as in the poem Emily Dickinson Judges the Bread Division at the Amherst Cattle Show, 1858, Dickinson’s wider influence on Zwicky is felt throughout her work. It is traceable in the dramatic monologues of Zwicky’s Ark Voices poetry sequence which imagines the lived worlds of various animals. It is also present in the autobiographical poem Kaddish, a complex mosaic of voices, and a meditation on the tension between daughterly devotion and rebellion.

Lucy, the co-editor of Zwicky’s collected works, and Alan, a scholar of Dickinson will lead close readings, discussions and writing exercises to inspire your reading and writing.