Poetry Workshop / The Four Temperaments + The Forms of Poetry

with Ben Gucciardi
In Studio
Sunday, November 22 | 2:00 - 4:00pm

How do you know when a poem is finished? What makes a poem successful? Astonishing? Timeless? Using Gregory Orr’s essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” as a guiding text, this workshop will offer participants new strategies for editing of their own work, and moving poems towards greater balance, complexity and ultimately, completion. Temperament comes from the Latin temperamentum ‘correct mixture,’ from temperare ‘mingle.’ Together, we will do a close reading of several poems, looking at the temperaments and techniques the poets are mixing together. Participants will also analyze some of their own poems and the work of a peer in the class to identify which of the temperaments--story, structure, music and imagination-- are most prominently at play, and which could be introduced to strengthen the poem. Participants will leave with a new framework for looking at their own work, developing new tools for revision while becoming more nuanced readers.