Poetry Workshop: Focus On Poetic Tone

This workshop will focus on how we create, sustain, and shift the tone of our poems. We will define tone as the weather, temperature, attitude of the poem. Often, the poem shifts line to line or stanza to stanza. But sometimes, it stays the same throughout. We create tone through our word choice, sentence formation, punctuation, overall structure. In short, tone is realized through how we manage our material. We’ll look, then, at the workshop poems and poems by other poets through the lens of tonal management, focusing on the poetic elements utilized by the poet.