Tonight in the Art of Craft workshop at Big Blue Marble Bookstore we’ll be exploring meter and rhythm in poetry, centering on these questions:

How does meter construct the sonic richness or density of poem?
How do poets use meter to create deep emotions, such as incantations or elegies?
How do poets use varieties of “feet” to pace the poem and to make the rhythm serve the poem’s purpose?

These are the poems we’ll be investigating:

Terrance Hayes, “Sonnet”
Gerald Stern “The Dancing”
Theodore Roethke “My Papa’s Waltz”
Joan Larkin “Inventory”
Etheridge Knight “Feeling Fucked Up”
Patrick Rosal “Despedida Ardiente”
Elizabeth Bishop “One Art”
Jane Mead, “Lack, the memory”

and some Mother Goose – where the metrics are so much more complicated than the sing-song-iness we remember!