Poetry Forms

This course teaches the craft of poetic form using the terms and tools poets actually use: stress-based scansion and the standard metrical feet, rhyme-scheme notation and the difference between perfect, slant, and eye rhyme, the volta and rhyme structure of the Italian and English sonnet, the refrain machinery of the villanelle, the line-as-unit logic of free verse, and the visual grammar of concrete poetry. You will scan iambic pentameter, write a fourteen-line sonnet that turns at the right place, build a villanelle from two refrains, shape a free-verse poem where every line break is a decision, and make a poem whose layout on the page is part of its meaning. Every lesson pairs a concept with a named technique and worked examples drawn from poems like Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow, and George Herbert's Easter Wings.