Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is a literary arts center located at 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, Los Angeles, California, founded in 1968.

George Drury Smith started publishing the magazine Beyond Baroque in 1968 from a storefront in Venice, which soon became a meeting place with workshops and space for readings, art, and music. Although 10,000 copies of the first issue were printed offset, subsequent issues were printed in-house using a four-color process. Later the magazines were printed on bound newsprint and distributed free. The workshops, over the years, have generated numerous writers, presses, and some of the leading poets in Los Angeles. The facilitators have included founders Joseph Hansen and John Harris, Leland Hickman, Bob Flanagan, John Thomas, Will Alexander, Jeff McDaniel, Philomene Long, Simone Forti, Sarah Maclay, liz gonzalez, and others. The Center’s first librarian was Exene Cervenka of the "X", which was formed when Exene and John Doe met at the Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop. Some of the LA artist Mike Kelley’s first performances were at the Center, and the cover of one of the Center’s early issues of Beyond Baroque, featuring an array of experimental filmmakers, was displayed in the Pompidou’s 2006 show on LA art. The Center's reading series, featuring over 200 writers a year, has included such names as John Ashbery; Amiri Baraka; Raymond Carver; Jerry Casale from the band Devo; Wanda Coleman; Ed Dorn; Allen Ginsberg; Leland Hickman; Philip Levine; Lewis MacAdams; Viggo Mortensen; Harry Northup, original member of the Wednesday night poetry workshop; Alice Notley; Graeme Revell, from the band SPK; Patti Smith; James Tate; V Vale, who formed a tabloid format zine focusing on various counterculture and underground topics named RE/Search Publications documenting punk subculture; and CK Williams, among thousands of others both famous and infamous.

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