Make the rhythm of your poetry run, skip, and dance!
We’ll learn the fundamentals of repeating rhythms in the poetic line – how to see it in others’ work, and then how to adapt our own lines to repeated rhythm, whether it’s regular meter, or various rhythmic patterns in free verse. We’ll begin by scanning well known verse, become familiar with the rhythmic structure of our own lines, then practice rewriting one of our own poems in a metric form. In the second half of the course, we’ll generate a draft of a new poem in either a verse form, or in free verse which has been rhythmically enriched.
Live video conference: This workshop will be held via our online video conferencing platform, Zoom. You can view brief tutorials on using the platform here. On the start date or the day before, participants will receive an email with login info (please check your spam if you don’t see it).
In this workshop you’ll learn:
- Sounding out words aloud to find their stresses
- Strong and weak stresses – not a switch that’s on or off!
- Basic feet and how they are grouped
- Iambic lines and their variety
- 5,4,3 feet/lines
- Headless lines
- Feminine endings
- Elisions
- “Strict” and “Loose” iambics
- Skipping and Dancing rhythms – Dactyl and Anapest
- Irregular rhythms in free verse
Time requirements
- 45 – 60 min/week
Materials
- All reading materials will be provided.
Who should take this workshop?
- Those who are interested in exploring meter, but who don’t really feel or understand how to scan, those who want to write free verse with a more rhythmical component, and those who already write in meter but who want to refine and expand their skill. In all cases, we’ll connect the natural rhythms of the way we speak with the way we write.
If you need an accommodation for this workshop, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.
