Falling in Love With Poetic Meter

Finding Homes for My Teaching Passion

This is a heartfelt story that leads to some pretty exciting news for poets & poetry lovers at the end. If you only want the news, feel free to scroll down to the CAPS at the end!
love, Annie

I am often moved, sometimes to tears, when I ask people to introduce themselves at the opening of one of my meter classes. That’s when poets and poetry lovers share their excitement, relief, and gratitude that they’ve finally found a place to learn this precious craft, among others who care about it too. As more and more people chime in, it can feel as if a group of shipwreck survivors have found themselves washed up safely ashore.

Creating this rare safe space for meter has long been a challenge. Finding places to share the sensual, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures of poetic meters in all their diversity—and the exhilaration of channeling them through skillful scansion, attentive body, and attuned voice— hasn’t been easy. One might expect that such foundational poetic information would be required learning in every undergraduate poetry class, let alone for people earning a graduate-level degree in poetry writing. But Noooooooo!! Meter has been almost entirely shut out of Big Creative Writing. Having been lucky enough to learn meter thanks to the vision of my Yale undergraduate professor Penelope Laurans, I have hardly ever known another department that “got” the importance of meter. Even during my years as a tenured professor holding a Ph.D English and an M.A. in Creative Writing, I had to be ingenious, sneaking meter into other classes: carving a week out of Introduction to Literature, two weeks out of Introduction to Creative Writing, a month out of Intermediate Poetry Writing.

Once, under the rubric of theory, I was permitted to develop a combined graduate/undergraduate class with its own proper title— “Versification: Theory and Practice.” The students adored it—as they always adore meter!—but thanks to the devaluing of meter that pervades most English department curricula, I was allowed to teach that course only once in a dozen years.

In 2004, I gave up a tenured job to move back to the East Coast to direct the Stonecoast MA program in Creative Writing in Maine. As Director of this program, I finally brought meter teaching out of the closet: enough students requested my meter classes that I eventually made “Introduction to Poetic Meters” a required class for all entering poets. I was nervous doing this at first, afraid it might scare students away. But guess what? Instead, in a highly competitive environment, this requirement turned out to be catnip for the most talented student poets, helping land Stonecoast a place as the 4th highest ranked low-residency program in the USA.

Poetry at Stonecoast thrived during those years, as we graduated poets such as Amy Alvarez, Joshua Davis, Amanda Johnston, Lissa Kiernan, Erica Vega, Quenton Baker, Adeeba Rana, d g nanouk okpik, and Patricia Smith. If other creative writing programs had been paying attention, they would have noticed that many of the best young poets were EAGER to be required to learn meter and metrical diversity. But that didn’t happen. And after I left Maine, even Stonecoast stopped offering meter classes. Today I am hard-pressed to advise my students where they might enroll if they want to learn about meter in an academic poetry writing program.

Yes, it’s frustrating to see academia still not “get it” about meter. But the good news is that many wonderful poets are smart enough to still want to learn meter anyway. Since I began offering meter classes online on my own, I have taught a steady stream of poets who have graduated from MFA programs in Creative Writing without learning meter and want to remedy that central lack. Once I was approached by a group of six poets who had just graduated from one of the top-ranked low-residency creative writing programs, asking me to offer them a special summer course in meter—so they could make up for the gap in their poetry education and pass meter along to the students they would soon be teaching. They were a joy to teach, nd I still smile when I think of their determination and resourcefulness.

Taking the long view, there is an even more exciting silver lining to this whole teaching saga. After leaving Maine, I moved to Washington DC where I developed my meter classes into workshops at Politics & Prose Bookstore. In a confluence of technology and pandemic, I moved to Portugal during Covid, transferred all those classes to my website, and taught them on Zoom. And then in 2022, I moved them to a private teaching platform called Meter Magic Community.

During those years of transitions, something magical happened: the quality of poetry in my classes blossomed. Since I was now teaching online and unconstrained by academic regulations, the poets in the group could do what my university students had never been allowed to do: repeat the classes as often as desired. What a gift! Many poets enrolled repeatedly in my “Formal Feeling” workshops, diving into the opportunity to develop advanced metrical expertise. And poets from around the world who loved and valued writing in meter joined in as well. Soon I was teaching beginning and advanced level metrical poetry workshops as well as classes on reading and scanning meters.

As you might expect, the level of poetry written in these classes has been stunning! Finally, metrical poets are able to have the same experience that free-verse poets have had for years in Big Creative Writing programs: a peer workshop among poets who are experienced in and excited about the same craft you are practicing. How thrilling to be in a workshop where everyone can discuss the scansion of a line, the variability of a foot, the weight of a syllable in a certain metrical context, the different kinds of structures or patterns that could be used and what their effects might be! Moreover, since my teaching focuses consciously on “metrical diversity”— reading, scanning, and writing a range of several different meters—I developed a system of spiraling through the meters that has proven a powerful way for poets to share their various energies together.

Where else on earth could this level of collective international meter expertise be gathered? (the only other metrical community I know of is Rhina Espaillat’s Powow River Poets in Massachusetts). What a novel experience for metrical poets: to share one’s work with an entire group of poets who speak your language, who are just as committed to writing in meter as you are. And as this shared knowledge base of metrical poets around the world became richer and richer, the quality of the poetry produced in those workshops grew better and better. The fine poets who have been part of these workshops include Abigail Zammit, Autumn Newman, Barbara Egel, Cath Drake, Debra Bruce, Diane Lee Moomey, Erica Hunt, Jen Schomberg Kanke, Joanne Godley, Kate Ravin, Pratibha Kelapure, Rebecca Foust, Richelle Lee Slota, Sapphire, Sunni Wilkinson, Tamam Kahn, and Wendy Sloan (yes, in case you’re wondering, my teaching community during these years was offered to women and gender-nonconforming people).

Most exciting of all for me was how much I learned. The more I have taught what amounted to post-graduate level writing workshops in meter and scansion—regularly guiding what I am convinced have been the most advanced discussions of poetic meter in English nywhere in the world— the more I myself attained an understanding of the full “compass” of meters that I could never have found otherwise. Working with the variety of different meters through the voices of so many different poets has gifted me with a profound sense of meter (and poetic form in general) in all its interwoven possibilities of meaning and emphasis, its wordless languages of depth and subtlety.

Now, at age 68, as I look back on the whole trajectory of my teaching, I am profoundly grateful for how it has turned out. No, I never got to teach the meter classes in the academy that I dreamed of. But I was given the opportunity to nurture and grow a profoundly complex and eloquent collective understanding of meter—a culture of metrical knowledge that I feel is quite likely completely unprecdented—among an amazing group of poets.

And now I am preparing to share this knowledge with the wider world in two exciting ways: I am writing a new book that will lay out my full understanding of meter and metrical diversity (more news anon). And, starting in February with “Falling in Love with Poetic Meter,” I am moving my online teaching to a beautiful new teaching platform, Randolph Lundine, where it will be available to a wider group of poets and poetry lovers. This will be the first time that I have partnered up with a true “home” (they call it “Annie’s Cottage”!) since I left academia a decade ago—and I am SO EXCITED, RELIEVED, AND HONORED TO HAVE A HOME FOR MY TEACHING AT LAST!

If you’re interested in “Falling in Love with Poetic Meter” or my classes at Randolph Lundine, please check them out. I’d really love to meet you there to continue the journey!

Yours in love, meter, and magic,