Start with the Line: March 18, 2024
3:30-5pm ET US, 7:30-9pm UK
One of the biggest barriers for new poets can be poetic form.
There are just so many forms—villanelles, sonnets, blank verse, and so on—and they all seem so complicated!
In my experience, beginners often feel that they need to learn all these forms right away, and until they do, they won't be writing "proper" poetry.
But nothing could be further from the truth!
At the beginning, all the form you really need is a sense of how the line works in poetry.
That simply means how we decide where to stop the words before we reach the edge of the page.
Although this might sound too easy, using lines is fundamental to making poems that work. Here are just a few of the things that lines and line breaks can do in a poem:
Help you control pace and flow
Create surprise and tension for the reader
Change the tone (feeling) of a poem
Shape the “voice” that seems to be speaking
Highlight important words and phrases within a line or sentence.
This workshop will show you how to make lines that don’t just hold your poems, but add to them.
We will cover:
What different line lengths add to a poem
How you can change a poem’s pace with line lengths
Using line lengths to “wake up” a poem that’s not working
Different ways of making line breaks, and how these make a poem
Afterwards, you will feel more confident about how your poems take shape on the page, and have a good idea of how you can keep learning about lines.
So if you’d like to learn the most important way of shaping a poem, I hope you’ll join us!
No experience or preparation is needed, but please come prepared to write. Thank you!