Can your poems sail across the page without falling? In writing poems, as in dancing, it's essential to keep track of the music. Our highly visual culture sometimes overlooks the auditory aspects of poems. In this workshop, led by an instructor who is both poet and musician, we will read and listen to poems whose rhythm is either consistent or varied and either overt, subtle, or obscured. Then, participants will draft new poems of each kind and search for their own comfort level (or levels) of music in poetry. Some of the exercises may involve listening to recorded music. Participants may also bring in one or two poems whose rhythm or meter they would like to improve or simply to understand better.
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CLAUDIA GARY is a poet, editor, essayist, health science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal songs and chamber music. She teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, “Poetry vs. Trauma,” “Whole-Brain Poetry,” Persona Poems, and more, at The Writer’s Center, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and of chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism, Let’s Get Out of Here, and others, she is also an advisory editor for the New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music can be found online at Expansive Poetry Online and elsewhere.