Registration now closed

Discovering and Building on Your Natural Poetic Temperament

What's your natural poetic temperament: Story, Structure, Music, or Imagination? Understand yours and learn which ones to strengthen. All poets and prose writers welcome.

Gregory Orr says we are each born with a natural talent for writing poetry in one of four temperaments: Story, Structure, Music, and Imagination. In this three-session workshop we will examine which temperaments come most naturally to you and play with techniques to deepen, vary, and broaden your instinctive style. Sessions 1 & 2 will explore each of the temperaments with examples to discuss and offer generative writing prompts for experimentation. The final session will include ways to refine and revise poems you’ve created.

Open to all poets who want to explore new approaches to developing their natural skills and prose writers who wish to apply these temperaments to their work or give writing poetry a try.

Session 1, July 23. Following a craft talk introducing Orr’s framework for the four natural temperaments, we will examine and discuss examples in work by various writers and then focus on how to examine the Story and Music Temperaments in our own writing. You will leave with generative prompts to develop and deepen your skills in these two temperaments.

Session 2, August 6. This session will focus on understanding and developing the Structure and Imagination temperaments using example pieces to guide our conversation. We will experiment with fun writing exercises which allows everyone to play with these two temperaments, with choices designed for beginner, intermediate, and advanced writers. The session will close with more generative ideas to try at home related to Structure and Imagination.

Session 3, August 20. In our last session we will reflect and share how Orr’s framework has been useful to us and then a craft talk will offer a dozen fresh and fun ideas to refine and revise work in process with time provided to try out one or two of these ideas during our session.

Marion Starling Boyer is a professor emerita of Communication and has published three full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her book, Ice Hours (2023), won Michigan State’s Wheelbarrow Prize and was named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. She has won Grayson Books Chapbook competition twice, in 2023 for What Word for This and in 2014 for Composing the Rain. Boyer lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, and leads workshops for Lit Cleveland and to support Friends of the Roethke Foundation.