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Intensive workshops

Beyond Baroque’s intensive writing workshops allow writers from all schools and walks of life to learn from world-class authors in single and multi-session workshops.

Unlock Your Sonnet: The Restraint of a Fourteen-line Music Box Saturday, May 4, 2024 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque In this generative workshop we will attempt to write contemporary sonnets - not traditionally rhymed, metered and structured like a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet - but those with a vestige of the form, fourteen lines with a volta or turn here and there, maybe some internal rhymes. We will look at examples by Diane Seuss, Terrence Hayes, Wanda Coleman, and others, and pay close attention to how they get inventive with the form. Finally, we will follow the discussion with creating our own first and strong drafts of sonnets. To go beyond the tradition, we need to inhabit the ghost of the sonnet. Like the Charles Mingus song, you “better get hit in your” sonnet. William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Southern Indiana Review and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. He has work forthcoming in Indiana Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest and Salamander.

The Ecopoetics of Deep Matter with Amanda Ackerman Saturday, May 11, 2024 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque What are the poetics of fused, aggregate, and interdependent aliveness? Of new community arrangements that decenter and diverge from human-only subject, and that recognize and destigmatize the ways we lean on, into, and remake each other? In this workshop we will create and uncover the syntaxes of symbiosis that exist in relational poetic form: mutualism, commensalism (neutrality), and parasitism. We will gather in the Beyond Baroque garden to work directly with the plants and flowers. Amanda Ackerman is a teacher and herbalist whose publications include the Book of Feral Flora, the scented pamphlet Air Kissing, and the collaborative book Mans Wars and Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies and Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, and Ill-Will, co-authored with Harold Abramowitz. Her work focuses largely on the feralscape, divining techniques that allow for communication across species boundaries and interspecies art-making. With Dan Richert, she has worked with biofeedback and multi-sensory techniques that allow plants to create poems. Their olfactory installation Unknown Giants was part of The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology’s A New We in Norway’s Kuntshall Trondheim gallery.

The Pantoum: Repetition As Magic / Repetition Is Magic with James Cushing Saturday, June 15, 2024 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque “The pantoum is an ancient Malaysian song form, used by children and sailors for their amusement, brought into Europe by Charles Baudelaire in the 1870s and made available to Americans by the “New York School” poets in the 1950s and ‘60s. The pantoum is certainly the most creative pre-existing poetic form I have ever used; every time I write one, I find myself surprised by what I have written. I was first exposed to it in a class John Ashbery taught back when he was a guest professor at UC Irvine in the spring of ‘77. He told the class about it, gave us examples, and encouraged us to try it out. In this one-day Beyond Baroque workshop, I’m trying to continue that work. In our workshop, we’ll begin with looking at some of my favorite examples of the form (I’ll have handouts for everyone). I’ll make sure we all know just how the form works before we try some guided pantoum writing, both collectively and individually. By the end, each person in the workshop will have at least one completed pantoum, possibly more, and a poetic tool to use the rest of your writing life.” – James Cushing James Cushing , a former director of the Beyond Baroque Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop, retired in 2020 after 35 years teaching literature and creative writing in San Luis Obispo, CA, where he served as the community’s poet laureate in 2008-2010. Cushing’s poems have appeared widely and his collections include The Length of an Afternoon, Undercurrent Blues, Pinocchio’s Revolution, The Magicians’ Union, Solace, and Tangled Hologram, all from Cahuenga Press in Los Angeles. He lives in Hollywood with poet-painter Celeste Goyer, with whom he frequently collaborates. His daughter is the New York-based poet Iris Cushing. His website, jamescushingpoetry.com, includes poems and visual art.