Using Image to Control Pacing in Poetry

Time slows down, speeds up, moves differently depending on the character of our perception.

Details

This idea has entered our language idiomatically—"time stood still," we say when we were so horrified or amazed it felt like time stopped. "It happened in the blink of an eye," we say when a child grows up or we were barely aware of something that was occurring around us.

As with our subjective perception of time, our perception of time in poems depends on the density of images we deploy and how they are deployed. In this single session course, for writers with all levels of poetry experience, we'll read poems that use image to control the passage of time and consider how the speed of these poems affects their larger emotional impact. Do the poems build speed and, therefore, tension or anxiety? Or do they move deliberately slowly, forcing the reader into meditation?

We’ll also experiment with writing our own poems, speeding them up and slowing them down.

What you will learn

Students will gain an understanding of how image is time in the case of the poem and how expanding or contracting image controls pacing. Students will be able to start various poems that experiment with speed.

Workshop takeaways

Drafts of poems experimenting with image/time, new poets to read on their own.

Additional info