The Confluence of Rhythms Begins: Mapping the Sounds of Your Poems

Saturday, June 27 1:00pm – 4:00pm
Sundress Academy for the Arts
195 Tobby Hollow Ln,
Knoxville, Tennessee 37931

“Soon, soon the flesh / The grave cave ate will be / At home on me.”

Sylvia Plath’s images in “Lady Lazarus” are haunting, but they are propelled into nightmare through her expert sense of sound and rhythm. Think about the last poem that pulled you beneath its rhythmic tide. Did it chime with beauty like Elizabeth Bishop’s lines in “At the Fishhouses”:

“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free”?

If you are wondering how to further develop the natural tempos and patterns in your poems to enhance your poems’ images and narrative, this innovative music-poetics workshop is for you.

To combat the old struggles of writing and counting metrical lines, you will learn fresh methods like sound mapping, beat-tuning, and creating nonce forms to follow the sound of your poems to their crescendos. These methods will boost sound play in both free verse and metrical poems.

If you have always wanted to incorporate slant rhyme or alliteration but it seems wooden, this workshop is for you. In this 3 hour course, we will explore contemporary poets’ rhythmic techniques and you will learn to create evolving and enlivening music within your poems. Bring a couple of drafts-in-progress (at any stage) to revise. We will also write at least one new sound-driven piece in workshop. In addition to personalized feedback from the instructor and a helpful list of further readings, there will be a discussion of where and how to place sensual, sound-driven poetry for publication.

Purchase your tickets here!

Sandy Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length poetry collection forthcoming from Sundress Publications, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from George Mason University. Eating Dog Press also published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Her work appears in The Journal, Subtropics, The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Mid-American Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, South Dakota Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere. She currently works as a writing teacher and freelance creative manuscript editor in her hometown of Chicago.