Art of the Septet - New Twists on an Old Form - with Wayne Lee: Sept 20, 2025
Saturday, September 20, 2025
10am -3 pm with Wayne Lee
$85 includes all materials
Septets have been around since at least the 13th century when Goeffrey Chaucer used the rime royal form in his epic poem “Troilus and Criseyde.” Through the centuries, poets such as Byron, Dickinson, Poe, Shakespeare, Akhmatova and Alexie have added to the septet canon, bearing testimony to the enduring appeal of the various seven-line forms, and new variations are being invented all the time.
Join us as we discuss the history of the septet form and study examples of various heptastich variations. Class time to write three different septets (one in free verse, one rhymed and one purely syllabic). Bring writing materials and your laptop (if you choose). What is a septet?
7-line stanza
Sometimes 7 syllables per line
Sometimes one alliteration per line
Sometimes rhymed (aabbccd), sometimes not
May have two or three stanzas
Themes of love, loss, live event, praise, memory, celebration, cultural principles and more
Wayne Lee’s collection Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets, Cornerstone Press, is a hybrid memoir in verse that tells a story of love, loss and recovery entirely in heptastichs (seven-line forms). Among the book’s 80 poems are examples of 20 different septet forms, many of them centuries old.
Suggested reading: A Brief History of the Septet
