Break it to Make it: Varying Form in Meaningful Ways
Caitlin Doyle
We’ll spend our time together exploring how and why poets create expressive variations when working with formal tools such as rhyme and meter. Examples include the way a poet might vary the meter at a strategic moment or break an established structural element in order to mirror a poem’s content. We’ll also examine what happens when form and content pull against each other to create complex dissonances that increase a poem’s range of potential implications. The class is geared toward writers at all levels of experience. Our main goal is to have fun with language as we think about how poets generate productive tension and build multilayered poems through the making and breaking of patterns on the page.
