Archives: Courses

Master the world’s most celebrated poetic forms — from haiku to sestina — one form at a time, with guided practice and timeless examples. Write a real poem in every form you study.

What you’ll be able to do

• Write a correctly structured poem in at least 10 distinct forms, from haiku to sestina
• Identify the defining rules, origins, and emotional register of each major poetic form
• Analyse canonical public-domain poems to understand how master poets work within — and bend — formal constraints
• Use meter, repetition, and refrain as deliberate creative tools rather than obstacles
• Develop a personal revision practice to refine drafts of formal and free verse poems
• Build a portfolio of original poems spanning Eastern, Western, and contemporary traditions

f you’ve ever read a poem that made you put the book down and stare at the ceiling, you already know something important: that effect wasn’t an accident. Someone made a choice — about where a line ended, about which word came back, about how many syllables to carry before the breath released. I made this course because I want you to be able to make those choices too, deliberately and with confidence.

I know what it’s like to stand at the edge of a form and feel slightly fraudulent. The sonnet, in particular, has a way of doing that — fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a rhyme scheme you keep misremembering — until it stops feeling like a living thing and starts feeling like an exam you haven’t revised for. What I’ve learned, and what this course is built to show you, is that the rules of formal poetry are not walls. They’re more like the banks of a river: they’re what makes the water move.

What’s Included in Your Course

Every unit in Poetry Forms Masterclass follows the same honest sequence. First, we look at what the form actually is — its architecture, its history, the emotional logic that makes it the right container for certain kinds of feeling and not others. Then we read it, closely, in the hands of poets who knew exactly what they were doing. Then you write. Not a worksheet. A poem. Your own. I believe deeply that the only way to understand a villanelle’s refrain, or the turn of a ghazal, or the way a sestina’s end-words accumulate weight over six stanzas, is to feel those things working under your own hands.

I also want to be honest about what this course is not: it is not a shortcut to genius, and I won’t pretend that writing in form is always easy. There will be drafts that resist you. There will be a sestina that fights back. What I can promise is that you will never be alone with the blank page — every form comes with models, with craft discussion, with a clear framework that turns “I don’t know where to start” into “I know exactly what this poem needs next.”

By the time you reach the final module, you’ll have a portfolio of original poems and a revision practice that’s yours to keep. More than that, you’ll read poetry differently for the rest of your life — as a practitioner, not just an admirer. That, to me, is the real transformation. Welcome to the studio.

https://teachclub.com/@poetry_forms_masterclass

Learn to read Emily Dickinson’s poems with confidence and depth

A close-reading course through 50 of Emily Dickinson’s most beloved poems — demystifying her dashes, slant rhymes, and compressed language so you can finally hear what she’s really saying.

Reading Emily Dickinson Course: What you’ll be able to do

• Read Dickinson’s compressed, dash-laden poems with genuine confidence rather than guesswork
• Identify and interpret her signature techniques — slant rhyme, unconventional capitalization, and syntactic compression
• Recognize recurring symbols (the fly, the bee, the carriage, the door) and explain what they carry thematically
• Analyze any individual poem through close reading, tracing how form and meaning reinforce each other
• Place key poems within Dickinson’s biographical and 19th-century New England context without reducing them to autobiography

https://teachclub.com/@reading_dickinson

What’s Included in Your Course

Maybe this has happened to you. You read a Dickinson poem — maybe it’s the one with the fly, or the carriage, or the slant of light on a winter afternoon — and something in it lands with quiet force. You know something important just happened. And then you try to say what it was, and the words slide away. The poem closes back up like a hand.

That experience — of being moved by Dickinson before you fully understand her — is not a failure of reading. It’s actually the right place to start. Her poems are built to do exactly that: to reach you before you can explain them, and then to reward every careful second look. What I want to give you in this course is the vocabulary and the habits of attention that make those second and third looks possible.

We’ll spend real time on the page together — not rushing past the techniques to get to the themes, but learning to see the techniques as the meaning. Why does a dash land where it does? What does it feel like to expect a full rhyme and receive a slant one instead? How does Dickinson fit an argument about immortality into eight lines and still leave you with more questions than answers? These are not puzzles to be solved so much as invitations to be accepted, and I want to show you how to accept them with confidence.

What’s in the Reading Emily Dickinson Course

The course moves through six areas of her work: craft and style first, then death and dying, then nature, then faith and doubt, then identity and solitude, and finally a module where we build a methodology you can take away and use on any poem for the rest of your life. I’ve tried to arrange the curriculum the way a good seminar unfolds — each conversation making the next one richer, each poem teaching you something you’ll carry forward into the next.

I won’t pretend there are easy answers in Dickinson. But there are better and worse questions, sharper and duller lenses, more and less attentive ways of listening. That’s what this course is about: not solving her, but learning to read her the way she deserves to be read — slowly, precisely, and with genuine wonder at what she managed to put into a single compressed line.

If you’ve loved Dickinson from a distance and wanted to get closer, this is the course I built for you. Come in. Let’s read.

https://teachclub.com/@reading_dickinson