Poet Course

Lesson 1 • Imagery and Sensory Detail

Teaches how concrete sensory language creates vivid experience on the page. Students practice generating and refining original images.

Lesson 2 • The Building Blocks of Language

Covers denotation, connotation, diction, and syntax as poetic tools. Connects word-level choices to larger emotional and thematic effects.

Lesson 3 • Figurative Language Essentials

Introduces simile, metaphor, personification, and synesthesia as core devices. Students identify and deploy each device in short exercises.

Lesson 4 • Close Reading Practice

Applies all foundational concepts to annotating and discussing published poems. Develops the analytical habit essential for self-revision.

Lesson 1 • Free Verse Rhythm and Cadence

Examines how free verse creates rhythm through syntax, breath, and repetition without fixed meter. Students draft free verse with deliberate sonic shape.

Lesson 2 • Traditional Metrical Forms

Covers iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic meters with scansion practice. Students write short metered passages to internalize each pattern.

Lesson 3 • Rhyme: Types and Functions

Distinguishes perfect rhyme, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, and internal rhyme. Explores when rhyme serves the poem and when it constrains it.

Lesson 4 • Introduction to Prosody

Defines syllable, stress, and the concept of the metrical foot. Provides the technical framework for all subsequent rhythm work.

Lesson 1 • Fixed Forms: Sonnets and Villanelles

Introduces the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet and the villanelle as constraint-based structures. Students write one complete poem in each form.

Lesson 2 • The Art of the Line Break

Analyzes how end-stopped and enjambed lines control pacing, tension, and meaning. Students experiment with breaking the same passage multiple ways.

Lesson 3 • Visual and Spatial Form

Explores how white space, indentation, and page layout function as expressive elements. Students design a poem whose visual form reinforces its content.

Lesson 4 • Beginnings, Middles, and Endings

Teaches strategies for opening lines, sustaining momentum, and closing with resonance. Students revise weak openings and endings in workshop drafts.

Lesson 1 • The Speaker and the Poet

Distinguishes the biographical poet from the constructed speaker in a poem. Students practice creating speakers who differ from themselves.

Lesson 2 • Persona Poems and Dramatic Monologue

Teaches writing fully inhabited persona poems and dramatic monologues from non-self perspectives. Students draft a complete persona poem.

Lesson 3 • Developing a Signature Voice

Synthesizes voice elements into a recognizable, consistent poetic identity. Students revise a portfolio of three poems toward a unified voice.

Lesson 4 • Second and Third Person in Poetry

Examines the effects of using 'you' and 'they/he/she' as the poem's subject. Students write the same poem in three different persons and compare results.

Lesson 1 • Poems of Place, Time, and Memory

Focuses on landscape, elegy, and nostalgia as thematic territories with distinct craft demands. Students write one poem grounded in a specific place or memory.

Lesson 2 • Subject vs. Theme

Distinguishes what a poem is about (subject) from what it means (theme). Students practice locating and deepening the thematic layer in drafts.

Lesson 3 • Ekphrasis and Cross-Art Inspiration

Explores writing poems in response to visual art, music, and other media. Students produce an ekphrastic poem from a chosen artwork.

Lesson 4 • Finding and Generating Material

Covers observation, memory, research, and imagination as sources for poems. Students build a personal subject-matter inventory for ongoing use.

Lesson 1 • Line and Word-Level Revision

Focuses on tightening diction, improving line breaks, and eliminating dead language. Students apply a word-by-word audit to one complete poem.

Lesson 2 • Workshop Feedback and Self-Revision

Teaches how to receive, filter, and apply workshop critique productively. Students revise a poem using peer feedback and document their choices.

Lesson 3 • The Revision Mindset

Reframes revision as discovery rather than correction. Students learn to read their own drafts with the detachment of an editor.

Lesson 4 • Knowing When a Poem Is Finished

Develops criteria for recognizing completion versus over-revision. Students compare draft versions and articulate what changed and why.

Lesson 1 • Modernism and Fragmentation

Analyzes Imagism, free verse liberation, and the fragmented modernist poem. Students experiment with juxtaposition and the image-based lyric.

Lesson 2 • Confessional and Postmodern Poetics

Traces the confessional turn and subsequent postmodern challenges to the unified self. Students write a poem that interrogates its own speaker.

Lesson 3 • Classical and Pre-Modern Traditions

Covers epic, ode, pastoral, and lyric traditions from antiquity through the Renaissance. Students identify how ancient conventions persist in contemporary poetry.

Lesson 4 • Contemporary and Global Voices

Surveys diverse contemporary movements including ecopoetry, diaspora poetics, and hybrid forms. Students write a poem informed by a non-dominant tradition.

Lesson 1 • Preparing Poems for Submission

Covers manuscript formatting, cover letters, and submission etiquette for literary journals. Students prepare a complete submission packet.

Lesson 2 • Sequencing and Ordering Poems

Teaches how poem order creates narrative, emotional, and thematic arcs across a collection. Students arrange and rearrange their portfolio and justify each choice.

Lesson 3 • Selecting Poems for a Portfolio

Establishes criteria for choosing poems that represent range, depth, and thematic coherence. Students curate a long list and reduce it to a final selection.

Lesson 4 • Public Reading and Performance

Develops skills for reading poems aloud to an audience with clarity and presence. Students perform their portfolio poems in a final reading.