Poetry Course

Lesson 1 • What Poetry Is and Does

Defines poetry by its functions—compression, musicality, image—rather than by form. Establishes the lens used throughout the course.

Lesson 2 • Denotation, Connotation, and Diction

Examines how word choice creates layers of meaning. Students analyze how diction controls tone and reader expectation.

Lesson 3 • The Role of the Speaker

Distinguishes the speaker from the poet and explains how speaker identity shapes meaning. Grounds later work on voice and persona.

Lesson 4 • Imagery and Sensory Language

Covers the five senses as poetic tools and introduces the image as the poem's basic unit of experience.

Lesson 1 • Performing and Recording Poetry

Applies sound knowledge to oral performance. Students record a reading and evaluate their own sonic choices.

Lesson 2 • Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance

Analyzes repeated sound patterns at the phoneme level. Students hear how these devices create texture and emphasis.

Lesson 3 • Onomatopoeia and Sound Symbolism

Explores words whose sounds enact their meanings and broader patterns of sound-meaning correspondence.

Lesson 4 • Rhythm and Stress Patterns

Introduces natural speech stress and how poets manipulate it for effect. Prepares students for formal meter study.

Lesson 1 • Introduction to Metrical Feet

Defines the foot as the unit of meter and introduces the four primary feet. Builds the scanning vocabulary used throughout the chapter.

Lesson 2 • Line Length and Scansion

Teaches counting feet per line and marking scansion. Students scan complete poems and identify dominant meters.

Lesson 3 • Iambic Pentameter in Depth

Focuses on the most common English meter through extensive reading and imitation. Connects meter to meaning and emphasis.

Lesson 4 • Other Fixed Forms

Surveys villanelle, terza rima, and triolet as examples of constraint-driven creativity. Students attempt one additional form.

Lesson 1 • Irony, Paradox, and Oxymoron

Analyzes figures that create tension through contradiction or reversal. Students identify how irony controls reader distance.

Lesson 2 • Simile and Metaphor

Distinguishes simile from metaphor and examines how each creates comparison. Students practice generating fresh comparisons.

Lesson 3 • Allusion and Intertextuality

Shows how poems gain depth by referencing other texts, myths, and cultural knowledge. Students trace allusions in a selected poem.

Lesson 4 • Personification and Apostrophe

Covers giving human qualities to non-human subjects and direct address to absent entities. Links these devices to emotional intensity.

Lesson 1 • Visual and Spatial Poetry

Introduces concrete poetry and shaped verse as extensions of structural thinking. Students experiment with the page as canvas.

Lesson 2 • The Poetic Line as Unit of Meaning

Examines the line as a breath, a syntactic unit, and a meaning-maker. Distinguishes line from sentence.

Lesson 3 • Enjambment and End-Stopping

Analyzes how run-on and stopped lines create momentum or closure. Students revise drafts by changing line breaks.

Lesson 4 • Stanza Forms and Their Effects

Surveys couplets, tercets, quatrains, and irregular stanzas. Connects stanza choice to pacing and argument.

Lesson 1 • Defining Poetic Voice

Distinguishes voice as the sum of diction, syntax, and attitude. Students identify voice markers in published poets.

Lesson 2 • Writing in Persona

Guides students to inhabit a character fully different from themselves. Builds empathy and expands creative range.

Lesson 3 • Lyric, Narrative, and Meditative Modes

Distinguishes the three primary modes by their relationship to time and argument. Students write one poem in each mode.

Lesson 4 • Tone and Emotional Register

Maps the spectrum from elegy to satire and shows how word choice controls emotional distance.

Lesson 1 • Expanding and Deepening

Addresses under-developed poems that need more specificity or emotional depth. Balances compression with necessary expansion.

Lesson 2 • Cutting and Compression

Focuses on eliminating excess words, lines, and stanzas. Students reduce a draft by at least twenty percent.

Lesson 3 • Reading Your Own Draft Critically

Teaches strategies for gaining distance from a draft. Students apply diagnostic questions to identify weak areas.

Lesson 4 • Workshop and Peer Critique

Establishes productive workshop norms and critique language. Students give and receive structured feedback on drafts.

Lesson 1 • Reflecting on Growth as a Poet

Guides a structured self-assessment comparing early and late course work. Closes the course with forward-looking goals.

Lesson 2 • Selecting and Sequencing Poems

Covers principles for choosing which poems to include and how to order them for cumulative effect.

Lesson 3 • Submitting to Literary Journals

Introduces the submission process, cover letter conventions, and simultaneous submission etiquette.

Lesson 4 • Writing the Artist Statement

Teaches how to articulate poetic intentions, influences, and thematic concerns in prose. Students draft and revise a statement.