Remote 6-Week Workshop: Michael Broder: Taking Your Temperament

Taking Your Temperament: Working with Story, Structure, Music, and Imagination

In my favorite craft essay of all time, Gregory Orr identifies story, structure, music, and imagination as the four temperaments that define poets and their poetry. What is your poetic temperament? After reading Orr’s essay, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry,” we will explore Orr’s model, delving into his ideas about finite temperaments (story, structure) versus infinite temperaments (music, imagination) and how the temperaments tend to appear in finite/infinite pairs.

The class will also take the poetic temperament of such poets as Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Diane Seuss, Will Alexander, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Together we will discover what your poetic temperament is, and how you can use your understanding of the four temperaments to take your poetry to new levels. We will write in class and at home, and we will attend to both generation and revision.

Six Mondays  |  Oct 16 – Nov 20  |  6-8:30pm  |  $360 ($320 for Members)

(Oct 16, 23, 30, & Nov 6, 13, and 20)

Click here to watch Michael’s Hard Hat Reading!

All are welcome, space is limited. A limited number of partial need-based scholarships are available. Please email support@poetshouse.org with any questions.

About the educator:

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His work has been published in Columbia Poetry Review, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous others. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in classics from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Learn more about Michael Broder here