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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.

The Prose Poem: a Workshop with William Archila Saturday, March 15, 2025 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque In this workshop we will attempt to write prose poems, a marriage between the lyric and narrative between the image and discourse. To paraphrase William Blake, contraries need each other to exist, just like the narrative and the lyric need each other in the prose poem. We will look at examples of Baudelaire, Simic & Forche, to name a few, and focus on its economy and surprising element. We will then close our circle of prose and poetry by generating our own prose poems. William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. His first collection The Art of Exile was awarded the International Latino Book Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center and was selected for The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Round Up” in Poets & Writers. The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, Archila’s second book, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He is an associate editor at Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.

En-chant-ment: a generative poetry porkshop with Sarah Maclay Saturday, March 22, 2025 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque Ready to give yourself an inner break? To create a little bubble of temporary sanity? In this generative workshop with Sarah Maclay, we’ll come to understand the link between the middle syllable of the word “enchantment” and a key craft technique that has ties to meditative practices and that, in the right hands, can further the sense of magical engagement that the word implies, as well as a temporary suspension from our more distracting and vexing inner narratives. And, fortunately, it’s not that hard to do! A reading and examination of poems that exemplify this effect—from Merwin, Lorca, Stevens and Woloch—will smooth our way toward creating spell-like poems of our own. These inspirations will be followed by a leap into a generative exercise and a sharing of our initial drafts. For good measure, you’ll also be able to review the key points of the exercise in Beyond Baroque’s own The Writing Life: 55 Years at Beyond Baroque. Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, is Sarah Maclay’s fifth collection. Her fourth chapbook, The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance (Walton Well Press), came out in 2024. Her poems and essays, recognized by a Yaddo residency, a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Erotic Poems, Poetry International, where she served as Book Review Editor, and elsewhere. “Fugue States Coming Down the Hall,” produced at Oberlin and the Beyond Text Festival at Beyond Baroque, appears in Scenarios: Scripts to Perform. She’s taught creative writing at USC and LMU, offers workshops at Beyond Baroque and is producer/host of Poetry.LA’s “The Poetry of Night.” Her poems are also the basis for a sequence of classical art songs, “Identity Had Gone,” by composer Kostas Rekleitis.