Replay: Maya C. Popa shares Five Things She's Learned about Poetic Form

Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.

“Form is a profoundly useful tool to poets because it organizes thought and emotion. Wordsworth called poetry “the overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Form is essential in containing that powerful feeling. Its limiting constraints help distill and convey our emotions and insights.”

– Maya C. Popa, Five Things I’ve Learned about Poetic Form

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Maya C. Popa

is a poet, a teacher, a writer, and the creator of one of our favorite the Substack newsletters, Poetry Today. She is also the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder and American Faith, as well as two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook Series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave and The Bees Have Been Canceled.

Maya is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She is director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings. She holds degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Maya’s two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Poetic Form, shares all she’s learned about the ways in poets make use of specific structures and forms to convey meaning and summon emotion. Maya details the decisions poets make to employ various poetic forms – sonnets, villanelles, and haiku, for example – and explains the role that pattern and sound play in poetry in language poets and readers can easily understand.

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