Beauty School | Rachelle Toarmino

About

Beauty School is Rachelle's independent teaching practice. Home of the Poetry as Play workshop, Beaut Camp summer writing challenge, Clamour magazine, Birthday Parties lecture series, and other opportunities for collective learning, collaborative making, and straight-up hanging out.

Est. Summer 2023

X/IG: @beautyschooledu

New

Beaut Camp 2025

Beaut Camp is a summer-long writing challenge where you play against the dealer and earn back your tuition by writing a poem every day.

Clamour

Clamour is a Beauty School publication created in collaboration with the 2024 Beaut Camp cohort. Featuring poems, games, style tips, fashion spreads, and other dead-serious works of literature and art.

PDF of Issue #1:

Summer 2024/Winter 2025

Informals / Fall 2024

A workshop that reimagines to-do lists, ads, bills, emails, headlines, product reviews, demographic surveys, grant applications, and other ordinary texts as sites and shapes for poetry.

Beaut Camp / Summer 2024

A summer-long writing challenge in which you earn back your tuition by writing a poem every weekday. Prompts provided.

Poetry as Play / Summer 2024

A workshop that takes the spirit of playfulness, experimentation, collaboration, and rascalia as our entry into poems.

Poetry as Magic: After Spicer / Spring 2024

A class that celebrates Jack Spicer's legendary 1957 "Poetry as Magic" workshop and the age-old intersection of poetry and magic.

HBD Bob Kaufman / April 2024

A birthday party for Bob Kaufman, the Beat poet, Beatitude editor, and ten-year vow-of-silence taker.

HBD Alda Merini March 2024

A birthday party for the Italian poet and writer Alda Merini.

Untranslation / March 2024

A generative workshop that draws on Jack Spicer's approach to translation as a form of correspondence and friendship with the dead.

Be Mine (Not Like That) / February 2024

A special Valentine's Day workshop for teen writers in which we write passionate—albeit platonic—love poems for our friends.

Roses Are Roses Are Red / February 2024

A workshop designed for poets who'd like to surprise their sweetheart with a love poem on Valentine's Day.

HBD Jack Spicer / January 2024

A birthday party for the Bay Area poet, teacher, and hater Jack Spicer.

HBD James Tate / December 2023

A birthday party for the poet James Tate to celebrate the recent publication of "Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate."

HBD Joanne Kyger / November 2023

A birthday party for the itinerant and "backyard" poet Joanne Kyger.

The Poem Is a House I Build Then Live In / Winter 2024

A crash course on poetic forms and the ways in which form sets expectations—and opens up new possibilities—for sound, shape, and meaning.

The Shape of Sound / November 2023

My chapter on inventing forms (from The Poem Is a House I Build Then Live In) comes to Just Buffalo Literary Center for this free workshop for teen writers.

Real Eyes Revise / Fall 2023

A workshop that frames revision as re-vision: as seeing your poems—and what they're capable of—again.

The Poem Is a House I Build Then Live In / Summer 2023

A crash course on poetic forms and the ways in which form sets expectations—and opens up new possibilities—for sound, shape, and meaning.

Real Eyes Revise / Summer 2023

A workshop that frames revision as re-vision: as seeing your poems—and what they're capable of—again.

Poetry as Play / Summer 2023

A workshop that takes the spirit of playfulness, experimentation, collaboration, and rascalia as our entry into poems.