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

In an influential 1988 essay, poet Gregory Orr identifies story, structure, music, and imagination as the four temperaments that define poets and their poetry. What is your poetic temperament?

In this class, we will explore Orr’s model, delving into his ideas about the interaction of finite temperaments (story, structure) and infinite temperaments (music, imagination).

Reading poems by Julia Alvarez, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Frank O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, James Wright, and others, we will observe how the four temperaments allow poets, in the words of Orr, “to forge language into the convincing unities we call poems.”

This class is suitable for writers and readers alike. Poets will gain new insight into their own poetic temperament and how they can refine it to achieve their creative objectives. Readers will deepen their engagement with poetry by acquiring a new interpretive framework.

A segment devoted to generative writing will allow writers and non-writers alike…