In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault writes, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous forms, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.” In this generative writing class, we will begin working with a word or phrase, line or line from another book of poetry. After mapping out ideas, feelings, rhythms, syntaxes and words we associate with the line or lines we have brought in, we will begin work on our own poems. (Throughout we will engage in mini-breaks that can be incorporated into people’s everyday writing rituals in the future, to spur our creativity and collaboration as a workshop). The lines we begin with may be embedded in the poem we write, or turn out to simply serve as the seed or prompt. The process of building a poem in conversation with other poets and poetry is one that will hopefully prove to be a rewarding approach for you to take with you in your writing practice, moving forward.
*One scholarship will be awarded to a QTPOC/BIPOC L.A.-residing individual who would like to join but does not have the means to do so. Please email us if interested at [email protected]
Workshop attendees are expected to participate in a respectful, constructive, and considerate manner. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our workshops, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow participants, or facilitator.
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Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds degrees from Rice and Columbia. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America, New York; she teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.