🥀 Lush Poetica: Writing poetry of excess, gilding, & ferality 🥀

You’ll receive a weekly packet of poems & prompts starting TBD. You’ll also be able to take part in the online community group.

There is also a Zoom version here.

I am a series of moods and sensations. I am not a thing, a being, a substance. — Anaïs Nin

In this three-week generative poetry workshop, we’ll turn away from restraint and spareness, and cast our gaze upon the indulgent, the abundant, and the wild. We’ll embrace a saturation of language, image, and texture with a focus on tight, polished craft. For example, how do we add more without making a mess?

We’ll meditate on how “big and alive and noisy” poems—as the poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney once said—can free us in writing and in our lives.

We will build an architecture of roses and meaning. We are going to take up space.

🥀 You can expect (in the self-paced version):

• Weekly close readings of poems and excerpts of prose that embrace maximalism, lusciousness, and the emotionally feral in form and language

• Weekly prompts and worksheet, along with a musical playlist

• Guided visualizations to deepen the sensory and emotional experience

• A journaling exercise that asks us to think about our craft as we think about our inner world

• Invitation to take part in a final, luscious exquisite corpse we’ll create together

• A group space on FB for chatting, sharing, and creative inspiration

This workshop welcomes poets who want to push past minimal restraint and explore the craft mechanics of lush, charged prose and poetry. Bring a willingness to take risks. Bring frenzied language. Be willing to get uncomfortable in your process. Bring an appetite.

🥀 What you need
Come with a fever-dream and your writing devices. The community group is on Facebook.

🥀 About me
Lisa Marie Basile is an author, poet, and journalist based in Jersey City, NJ and NYC. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School. She is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine, a journal devoted to lush poetics.

She is the author of a few books of poetry, including SAINT OF (White Stag Publishing, 2025), Nympholespy (Inside the Castle, 2019, finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014), and Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York, 2012). She’s also written non-fiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times.

Her essays, interviews, poetry, and other works can be found in The New York Times, Catapult, Narratively, Tinderbox Poetry, Lover’s Eye Press, Sporklet (edited by Richard Siken), Best Small Fictions (selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler), and Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (selected by Carmen Maria Machado and Joyelle McSweeney).

Lisa Marie has also led workshops or spoken at The Jersey City Public Library Creative Arts Center, Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, Astrolushes, the Radici Siciliane writing immersion, Brooklyn Brainery, The Poetry Society of New York, and more.

Credits: Pinterest, “After my grandmother/despues” (Marosa di Giorgio), “I am at its core” (Clarice Lispector), “And I heard a new song” (Anthony Oliveira), “Dolores” (Lisa Marie Basile), “Scherezade” (Richard Siken).