Lyceum Series: L. A. Johnson – Time & Poetic Structure

Welcome to the lyceum. These free, monthly workshops are held on the third Saturday of the month, and offer writers of every genre and skill level an opportunity to learn, experiment and develop their craft. We hope you’ll join us!

Poems are concerned with time­—the recounting of events and experience—but are also outside of time, existing in a place beyond the limits of linear time. Our lives are made up both by what is happening in the moment, what has happened in the past, and what will happen in the future, but how do we write poems that capture this experience of time? In this workshop, we will explore how to layer multiple times or scenes within a poem, and how a poem can capture nonlinear time. This workshop will be a mix of lecture, guided close readings of poems, and generative writing. In considering time, we will focus on poetic structure, considering the many ways the container of the poem can capture at once the past, present, and future. Although geared towards poets, this workshop will be useful for writers of all genres who aim to grapple with the complexities of time in their work.

L. A. Johnson is the author ofLost Music(Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2027) and an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf Press, 2026). She holds a PhD from University of Southern California, where through academic years 2023-25 she was a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, her poems appear in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is currently a Hughes Fellow at Southern Methodist University. Find her online at http://www.la-johnson.com