Like both a high-rise and a tiny house, every poem has its own design and structure. Some consist of brief wisps of lines with plenty of airspace around them. Others have lines that run loose and long across the page. Some utilize couplets, tercets, or quatrains. In free and formal verse, why and how are poems divided into stanzas—“rooms” in Italian? And what about the popular hybrid form, the prose poem: how do the best ones go beyond mere paragraphs? We will focus on understanding, appreciating, and emulating a variety of shapes of poems. We’ll read/discuss published work by Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, Tony Hoagland, and others. Each week class members will build poems using a different shape, and the instructor/group will offer supportive feedback.
Week by Week Outline
1 Line lengths
2 Couplets
3 Tercets
4 Quatrains
5 Mirror poems
6 Prose poems
