IN PERSON: Students in this lecture and discussion class will learn to identify the crafting devices found in the interior design of a poem’s overall structure. While we will examine each poem’s exterior structure, such as ballad or villanelle, and the poem’s meaning, our main issue is how the poem means. A.E. Housman said, “Poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying it.” It is these “ways,” or interior crafting devices, that we will explore. Since music is vital to poetry, we will look to poets who follow musical directions, such as legato and diminuendo, as well as musical techniques in lyrical verse. By studying metrics, rhyme, tone and rhythm, we will unlock the “how” found in crafting a poem. Iambic pentameter, enjambment, rhyme royal, allusion, heroic couplet, slant rhyme and sprung rhythm are a few of the building blocks used by Sylvia Plath, Keats, Shakespeare, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Richard Wilbur, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and Gwendolyn Brooks. | Facilitated discussion.
Max enrollment: 12.
Location: Judea Reform Congregation, 1933 W. Cornwallis Rd, Durham NC 27705
