English: Poetic Forms

Representative topics include Forms of Journalism and Writing for the Web. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years.

Open to Degree and PACE students

Until just a little over a hundred years ago, poems in English often rhymed, and generally measured their lines by a system of counting that poets learned very early in their reading lives. Since so many of the poems written in the past century have been in free verse (neither rhymed nor measured in this way), most of us have only an intuitive and fairly fallible sense of this technique of measure. In this course, we use practice to develop a more analytical grasp of these techniques. In other words, you can learn how a sonnet works by writing a few sonnets. I think this sort of skill or technical knowledge is useful not only for poets in training, but also for anyone planning to spend classroom time with poems written before the 20th century -- or written by more recent poets who also hear these patterns in the sounds of their words. After all, understanding a writer depends on a sense of the decisions that writer is making.

You can expect weekly exercises in hearing and writing meter and rhyme, plus careful reading of exemplary texts in a variety of forms. A core competence in meter will be established and practiced first. (Since the rest of the semester's work builds on that competence, it's crucial that you approach the early exercises with dogged seriousness.) As we get farther into the semester, the more advanced exercises will have you producing sonnets, villanelles, and other ornate forms.

About two thirds of the grade will derive from your written exercises; about a third will come from class preparation and participation.