Poetry Writing Course

Lesson 1 • Defining Poetry as a Form

Examines how poetry differs from prose through compression, sound, and image. Establishes a shared vocabulary for the course.

Lesson 2 • Reading Poems as a Writer

Trains close reading as a craft practice, not just literary analysis. Students annotate poems to identify techniques they can borrow.

Lesson 3 • First Attempts at Writing Verse

Guides students through low-stakes generative exercises to produce raw material. Reduces anxiety and establishes a daily writing habit.

Lesson 1 • Advanced Figurative Devices

Introduces personification, synesthesia, and metonymy as extensions of metaphorical thinking. Builds on simile and metaphor to expand the student's figurative range.

Lesson 2 • Figurative Language: Simile and Metaphor

Teaches simile and metaphor as tools for illuminating the unfamiliar through the familiar. Students learn to avoid cliché and build original comparisons.

Lesson 3 • Revision for Image Clarity

Applies revision strategies specifically to imagery, cutting abstraction and sharpening detail. Connects image-making to the editing process introduced later in the course.

Lesson 4 • Sensory Imagery Across the Senses

Explores visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory imagery. Students practise writing images that engage each sense deliberately.

Lesson 1 • Reading Poems Aloud for Sound

Uses oral performance to diagnose sonic problems and discover unintended music. Students develop the habit of reading drafts aloud as a revision tool.

Lesson 2 • Stress, Syllable, and the Poetic Line

Introduces stressed and unstressed syllables as the basis of poetic rhythm. Students learn to hear and mark stress patterns in their own writing.

Lesson 3 • Introduction to Metre

Covers the major metrical feet and common metres such as iambic pentameter. Students scan existing poems and write metred lines without sacrificing naturalness.

Lesson 4 • Free Verse Rhythm and Cadence

Shows how free verse creates rhythm through syntax, repetition, and breath rather than fixed metre. Students write free verse that feels rhythmically intentional.

Lesson 1 • The Poetic Line and the Stanza

Examines the line as poetry's fundamental unit and the stanza as a unit of thought. Builds on rhythm skills to show how line breaks create meaning.

Lesson 2 • Form as Argument

Analyses how the choice of form makes a rhetorical and emotional argument independent of content. Students revise a poem into two different forms and compare effects.

Lesson 3 • Fixed Forms: Sonnet and Villanelle

Teaches the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets and the villanelle as models of constraint-driven creativity. Students write at least one complete poem in each form.

Lesson 4 • Open and Invented Forms

Explores how poets create original structures through visual arrangement, numbered sections, and hybrid approaches. Students design a custom form for a specific poem.

Lesson 1 • Point of View in Poetry

Covers first, second, and third person as distinct rhetorical stances with different emotional effects. Students write the same poem in all three persons and analyse the differences.

Lesson 2 • Persona Poems and Dramatic Monologue

Teaches the dramatic monologue as a form for inhabiting other voices, historical figures, or objects. Builds on speaker concepts to push students into empathetic imagination.

Lesson 3 • What Is Poetic Voice?

Defines voice as the sum of diction, syntax, tone, and attitude. Students identify their own emerging voice through comparison with published poets.

Lesson 4 • The Speaker Is Not the Poet

Distinguishes the lyric speaker from the biographical author to free students from autobiographical constraint. Enables more adventurous subject matter and perspective.

Lesson 1 • Finding Your Subject

Distinguishes between occasion, subject, and theme as nested layers of a poem's content. Students mine personal experience, observation, and research for generative material.

Lesson 2 • Lyric Argument and Emotional Logic

Shows how poems make arguments through image and association rather than linear logic. Students learn to trust emotional coherence over rational explanation.

Lesson 3 • Tension, Conflict, and Complication

Teaches that strong poems hold contradictions and resist easy resolution. Students revise flat poems by introducing tension between competing ideas or images.

Lesson 4 • Poems in Dialogue with the World

Explores how poems engage history, culture, politics, and other texts without becoming didactic. Students write poems that carry social weight while remaining artistically alive.

Lesson 1 • The Revision Mindset

Reframes revision as discovery rather than correction, separating drafting from editing mentally. Students learn to detach from first drafts and see them as raw material.

Lesson 2 • Knowing When a Poem Is Finished

Develops criteria for recognising completion versus over-revision. Students compare multiple drafts of the same poem to identify the moment of diminishing returns.

Lesson 3 • Using Feedback Productively

Teaches students to solicit, interpret, and selectively apply feedback from readers and workshop. Distinguishes between useful critique and noise.

Lesson 4 • Line-Level and Word-Level Revision

Focuses on tightening syntax, upgrading diction, and refining line breaks at the micro level. Applies all earlier craft skills—imagery, sound, voice—in a single revision pass.

Lesson 1 • Manuscript Formatting and Presentation

Covers standard manuscript format, title pages, and submission conventions for journals and contests. Ensures students present work professionally.

Lesson 2 • Submitting Work for Publication

Introduces the submission process for literary journals, including cover letters and tracking. Students leave with a submission plan and realistic expectations.

Lesson 3 • Sequencing for Maximum Impact

Teaches how poem order creates narrative, tonal arc, and reader experience across a collection. Students arrange and rearrange poems to discover the most effective sequence.

Lesson 4 • Selecting Poems for a Portfolio

Establishes criteria for selecting strong, representative poems from a larger body of work. Students apply objective quality standards rather than personal attachment.