Finding Your Poetic Temperament: Unlock Your Most Powerful Poetry
with L.J. Sysko
January 28, 2026
Length: 4 Weeks
Open to AllText and Live Video
Original price was: $345.00.$295.00Current price is: $295.00.
Original price was: $345.00.$295.00Current price is: $295.00.Enroll Now
What kind of poet are you—an imaginer, a storyteller, a musician, or a builder? In this lively workshop, we’ll use Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments—Imagination, Narrative, Music, and Structure—as a kind of “Myers-Briggs for poets” to uncover your creative tendencies and open up new possibilities in your writing.
We’ll dive into each of the Four Temperaments through close readings of selected poems, guided discussion, and generative prompts designed to help you better understand your process. You’ll identify your own poetic temperament and begin generating new work—first through your strongest impulse, then by experimenting with the temperaments you use least—and explore how shifting your emphasis can bring tension, depth, and surprise to the page.
Along the way, we’ll explore how the Four Temperaments offer a new kind of self-awareness—helping you notice the impulses that shape your drafts, understand where your poems naturally gravitate, and recognize where hidden breakthroughs may lie. You’ll learn to use this framework not only as a generative tool but as a guide for revision, widening the range of choices available to you on the page.
Each week, we’ll ground our work in Orr’s essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” We’ll move from foundational concepts to the “limitless” impulses of Imagination and Music, before exploring how Narrative and Structure shape and refine a poem’s vision.
Each session blends craft talk, close reading, and generative exercises that invite you to draft boldly and experiment with new approaches. A substantial portion of each session will be dedicated to workshop: you’ll submit drafts in advance so we can preserve a true “first read” experience, receive in-depth feedback on three poems, and practice responding thoughtfully to your peers’ work in a supportive, exploratory space.
Playful, practical, and eye-opening, this course offers poets of all levels a fresh lens on creativity—and a structured path for developing confidence and impact in your work.
Who This Course is For
Whether you’re just beginning or returning to your craft, this course welcomes poets of all experience levels who are ready to explore new creative approaches while developing confidence and power in their writing.
Learning and Writing Goals
Learning Goals
In this course, you will:
- Understand how to activate your creative habits of mind to write more powerful poems.
- Develop a deeper understanding of how four aspects of poetic craft can inspire and shape your writing-editing processes as well as reader response.
- Explore the work of historical and contemporary writers whose poetry epitomizes the temperaments in harmonious tension.
- Engage in the act of providing feedback to peers, learning in the process how to better and more swiftly identify opportunity in your own work; you will also receive feedback from peers and the instructor, practicing judicious receptivity.
- Expand your knowledge of poetic craft through readings, discussion/lecture, writing practice, and suggested resources for further study.
Writing Goals
- Write and workshop three new poems.
- Create a queue of potential future revisions from among your finished work, seeing new possibilities for temperamentally minded tension.
- Develop a customized Four Temperaments rubric to motivate your editing practice.
Zoom Schedule
We will meet via Zoom on Sundays from February 1st-22nd from 3-5PM Eastern.
Weekly Syllabus
Week One: What are The Four Temperaments?
We will begin with a reading of Pablo Neruda’s “Horses,” pinpointing how and where the Four Temperaments appear on this poem’s personality profile for each of us. Then, we’ll dip into Gregory Orr’s essay, which originally outlined “The Four Temperaments,” before considering the order in which they tend to appear in our work. We will finish by writing in class, responding to a generative prompt designed to help us both confirm and play with our prevailing poetic temperament.
Assignment: Complete a rough poem draft chosen from among our first class session’s generative writing exercises. Submit your poem to me for workshop during next class session.
Week Two: Harnessing Power in Your Temperament: Prevalence & Latency
Once we begin to acknowledge the pull of our prevailing Temperament on the page, how do we let it sing through more clearly in our poems? During this class, talk will focus on trust in the “impasto:” quick drafting led by our prevailing temperament. We will discuss your favorite passages from the Orr essay before moving into Workshop #1. We’ll conclude with a lesson exploring what Orr called Limitless impulses: Music and Imagination.
Assignment: Engage with a Limitless generative writing exercise designed to result in a new draft or an edited existing draft. Submit your poem to me for workshop during next class session.
Week Three: A Complex Choreography: Writing & Editing Temperamentally
Once we have identified our Prevailing Temperament and practiced with it a little, we’ll be ready to consider its counterpoint–the Temperament that exerts crucial tension. Here, we lean into editing. We will take a look at examples of poems in draft form (Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop), examining how temperament factored into the editorial refinement of the poem. We will then dive into Workshop #2. We’ll conclude with a lesson exploring what Orr called Limiting impulses: Story (Narrative) and Structure. We’ll take a look at poems by Gerald Stern, Todd Dillard, Patricia Smith, Richie Hofmann, Donna Stonecipher, and Victoria Chang.
Assignment: Draft a new poem or edit one of your existing workshop poems using the provided Limiting prompt. Submit your poem to me for workshop during next class session.
Week Four: Harmonious Tension: When's the Poem Finished?
Powerful and memorable poetry, Orr suggested, derives from tension/harmony between limitless and limiting impulses. What do you think is the key? Are the limiting impulses wholly limiting? Are the limitless impulses solely expansive? Let’s talk about how and where The Four Temperaments as discrete units of craft ultimately break down for us. And they do; they must, if we’re lucky. We will hold Workshop #3 and conclude with an invitation to use a Four Temperaments Rubric for analyzing technical opportunities in your work before submitting it for publication.
Original price was: $345.00.$295.00Current price is: $295.00.Enroll Now
Student Feedback for L.J. Sysko:
January 28, 2026
Length: 4 Weeks
Open to AllText and Live Video
Original price was: $345.00.$295.00Current price is: $295.00.
Original price was: $345.00.$295.00Current price is: $295.00.Enroll Now
