Jonathan J.G. McClure | Writers.com

Crafting Poems in Form: Rhyme, Meter, Fixed Forms, and More

Elle | Community Manager — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 18:58:51 +0000

Find freedom in form! Working within the guidelines of a fixed poetic structure — from sonnets to less familiar forms like ghazals or triolets — can make your poetry more creative, not less. Solving the unique puzzles these forms create will push your writing in surprising new directions.

In this eight-week course, we’ll explore a wide range of received forms like villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, terza rima, and more. You’ll learn how these forms work, and read a wide range of examples. We will look at some classic poems, but our focus will be on contemporary poetry and how these traditional forms work today.

Moreover, we’ll demystify the language of rhyme and meter: you’ll learn what terms like “iambic pentameter,” “trochaic octameter,” and “slant rhyme” are all about, why they’re not nearly as confusing as they sound, and how you can use them in your own poems. We’ll talk about meter in the context of free-verse poems too: even when writing poems without a fixed meter, understanding what’s going on metrically can help you figure out why a line sounds especially good, or why it sounds off, and adjust accordingly.

Further, we’ll look at alternative approaches to meter: in addition to accentual-syllabic verse (the most familiar form of meter, used by everyone from Shakespeare to Robert Frost), we’ll discuss accentual verse (the dominant mode in Old English poems like Beowulf) and syllabic verse.

Each week will involve reading a written lecture exploring various forms and examples of each. You will write one poem per week in a different forms of your choice, and will provide workshop feedback on other students’ poems. I will give detailed, line-by-line feedback on all poems, with suggestions for revision.

Who This Course is For:

This course is for poets who write in all styles! Few contemporary poets write only formal poems. Most poets who write in form today also write in free verse, and the lessons learned from exploring formal poetry will apply to all poems you’ll go on to write–both formal and free.

This course is recommended for students who have an active poetry practice or who have previously taken an introductory course in poetry.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will learn to:

Explore a wide range of poetic forms.
Demystify metrical terms and understand how to apply metrical thinking to your poems, both formal and free verse.
Explore what makes rhyme work well, without sounding forced or singsong.
Survey alternative metrical approaches like accentual verse and syllabic verse.

Writing Goals

In this course you will:

Write eight new poems, each in a different form.
Receive detailed feedback on each, with ideas for revision (to be completed outside the course if desired).

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1: Regular Meter - Accentual-Syllabic Verse

*Private Class | The Literary Essay

Sean Glatch — Wed, 24 May 2023 13:26:43 +0000

Literary essays are nothing like the essays we were forced to write in school. Lyrical, exploratory, wide-ranging, often funny, often devastating, the literary essay uses everything in the writer’s toolbox to create something as beautiful and memorable as the best fiction and poetry. In this six-week course, we’ll examine the craft of literary essays—what makes the most moving essays work, and how we can incorporate their techniques into our own pieces.

We’ll explore published examples covering a range of subjects and styles, from conventional literary essays to literary journalism to hybrid/experimental forms like lyric essays, flash nonfiction, and essays in verse. Meanwhile, we’ll write and workshop new essays incorporating their techniques and making them our own.

By the end of this brief course, students will:

Have read a broad selection of literary essays from very different writers.
Have a strong sense of what you like in a literary essay—what do you want your essays to do?
Have written, workshopped, and revised original literary essays.

Above all, we’ll have fun along the way—if writing literary essays weren’t a pleasure, nobody would do it!

Course Outline:

Week 1. The Essay as Exploration.

*Private Class | The Craft of Poetry

Sean Glatch — Wed, 24 May 2023 13:26:39 +0000

Some say they hate poetry because they “don’t get it.” There’s a good reason for that feeling: academic courses in poetry tend to give the unfortunate impression that when Shakespeare died, poetry died with him. Who could blame these people for not liking poetry? If poetry ended 500 years ago, I probably wouldn’t care much about it either.

But poetry is alive and well. Contemporary poets can be touching, terrifying, and laugh-out-loud funny at once. This course isn’t about “thee” and “thou.” Contemporary poetry is, above all, about human experience: our experience, today.

The poet William Carlos Williams described a poem as “a machine made out of words.” My aim in this course is to help you become a literary mechanic. We’ll take apart poems to see how they work; we’ll tune the parts and put them back together even better than before. We’ll explore a wide range of contemporary poems (plus a handful of older classics), focusing on what makes them tick and how we can adapt those techniques to our own writing.

While our focus will be on poetry, the techniques we’ll explore apply just as well to fiction, and I definitely encourage prose writers to check out the class. We’ll spend time looking at how poems tell stories, and we’ll check out the blurry/imaginary line between prose poetry and flash fiction.

By the end of this 8-week class, students will:

Have a strong sense of what you like in a poem—what matters most to you as a reader and as a writer? What do you want your writing to do?
Understand all those terrifying poetry terms like trochaic pentameter and volta—and see why they’re much, much easier than your English teacher made them sound.
Learn to “read like a writer”: take apart any poem (or story or essay!), figure out how it works, and learn to make its techniques your own.
Write and revise 7-8 new poems and learn where and how to publish them, if desired.

Above all, we’ll have fun along the way—if writing poetry wasn’t a pleasure, nobody would write it.

Course Outline

1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Good Poems

The Craft of Poetry

Sean Glatch — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 13:04:48 +0000

By the end of this 8-week class, students will:

Have a strong sense of what you like in a poem—what matters most to you as a reader and as a writer? What do you want your writing to do?
Understand all those terrifying poetry terms like trochaic pentameter and volta—and see why they’re much, much easier than your English teacher made them sound.
Learn to “read like a writer”: take apart any poem (or story or essay!), figure out how it works, and learn to make its techniques your own.
Write and revise 7-8 new poems and learn where and how to publish them, if desired.

Above all, we’ll have fun along the way—if writing poetry wasn’t a pleasure, nobody would write it.

Course Outline

1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Good Poems

True Stories, Well Told: The Art of Essay Writing

Frederick Meyer — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 23:38:32 +0000

Lyrical, exploratory, wide-ranging, often funny, often devastating, creative nonfiction uses everything in the writer’s toolbox to turn nonfiction writing into something as beautiful and memorable as the best fiction and poetry.

In this eight-week course, we’ll examine the craft of creative nonfiction—what makes the most moving pieces work, and how we can incorporate their techniques into our own writing. The course focuses on shorter-form creative nonfiction (i.e., essay-length rather than book-length works), but the techniques we will explore apply to longer-form writing as well.

We’ll read published examples covering a range of subjects and styles, including essays, literary journalism, memoirs, flash nonfiction, and hybrid/experimental forms like lyric essays and essays-in-verse. Meanwhile, we’ll write and workshop new pieces incorporating their techniques and making them our own.

By the end of this course, students will:

Have read a broad selection of creative nonfiction from very different writers.
Have a strong sense of what you like in a piece of creative nonfiction—what do you want your creative nonfiction to do?
Have written, workshopped, and revised multiple original pieces of creative nonfiction.

Course Outline:

Week 1. The Essay as Exploration.