Practising Poetic Metre with Cath Drake

This is a small informal fun drop-in session to practice poetic metre. Metre takes practise to get it into your bloodstream and hear it ring out. It's also fun and rewarding, a great skill to add to your poetic toolbox.

We’ll look at the poetic metre and variations in poems sent in advance. Have a go at scanning the poems prior to the session if you can. We’ll discuss the choice of metre and variations given. Ideally, participants in this session will have some knowledge of metre, but even you don't, you'll see us in action scanning poems, so it will give you some insight into metre.

We'll be looking at accentual syllabic metre (e.g. iambic pentametre) only – metre determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet (Poetry Foundation definition). This is the most common metre used in English language poetry. Let's see what we can do in an hour with 15mins overspill for questions and discussion. I teach metre based on the approach and mentoring from Mimi Khalvati.