Give Me A Break: The Craft of the Line in Free Verse Poetry, An Online Workshop

Are you uncertain where and when to break a line in a poem? Do you want to learn about ways in which your line breaks can make your poems richer? The aim of this craft course is to explore—through wide reading and the composition of original poems—the sonic, thematic, and intuitive cues that determine where a line of poetry can/should be broken. We’ll discuss how the grammatical sentence interacts with the line to create speed and tension; we’ll imitate a wide range of free verse poets (Robert Creeley, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tarfia Faizulla, etc.) and reconstruct their notable works, observing how meaning shifts with form.