Lost Horse Press and the Sandpoint Literary Collective host a poetry workshop featuring Polly Buckingham to take place on Saturday, Aug. 1, at the Lost Horse Press Studio, 105 Lost Horse Lane, from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.

The fee for the workshop, which will be held outdoors, is $25 and all writers must preregister to attend. Masks and distancing will be required. Please contact losthorsepress@mindspring.com or 208-255-4410 to preregister.

“The Surprise of Poetry: Concentration & Abandonment” workshop is intended to bring participants into that space where everything in language is up for grabs, into a greater state of uncertainty and unknowing.

“Very often intellect is poetry’s enemy because it is too much given to imitation, because it lifts the poet to a throne of sharp edges and makes him oblivious of the fact that he may suddenly be devoured by ants, or a great arsenic lobster may fall on his head,” Garcia Lorca writes in his essay “Theory and Function of the Duende”.

Workshop participants will work on reaching a state of deep concentration and abandonment, that space from which real surprises begin and with them the energy of poetry.

Polly Buckingham’s books include The Expense of a View (Katherine Anne Porter Prize, UNT Press) and A Year of Silence (Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award, Florida Review Press). She is the recipient of a Washington Artists Trust fellowship.

Writers of all levels are invited to join this illuminating workshop: improve your skills, share their work with colleagues, get feedback for their poems, and socialize safely.