Top L-R: Maurice Riordan (c. Mark Granier), Alan Buckley and Kathryn Maris (c. Jemimah Kuhfeld). Middle L-R: Nuar Alsadir (c. Grace Yu), Vahni Capildeo and Dr Sowon Park. Bottom L-R: Beatrice Garland (c. Fatima Garland), Ron Britton and Annie Freud.

Please note that this event is sold out. Please contact the Freud Museum to be added to the waiting list.

The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry and psychoanalysis, including Nuar Alsadir, Alan Buckley, Vahni Capildeo, Annie Freud, Kathryn Maris and Maurice Riordan. 

The programme includes performances, talks and conversation on subjects including the unruly WB Yeats, New York School poet Joe Brainard and the taming of interrupted dreams.

Tickets are £60/£45 students/concessions/members of The Poetry Society or Freud Museum.

Tickets are now available on the Freud Museum website.

There is also a poetry workshop related to this event on 23 August, with Kathryn Maris, and a Psychoanalytic Poetry Pop-up in Edinburgh with Nuar Alsadir, presented in association with the Scottish Poetry Library, on 20 September.

 

 

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival Programme

9.45 – 9.50 Judith Palmer (The Poetry Society)
Welcome

9.50 – 10.15 Gerry Byrne (psychotherapist)
Introduction

10.15 – 11.00 Nuar Alsadir (poet and psychoanalyst)
Night Fragments
In a state of creative impasse, the poet began setting her alarm for 3:15 a.m. to write down phrases from sleep as a way of mining the unconscious. These night fragments granted the poet access to a syntax that, despite being her own was largely unknown to her, thereby creating new poetic possibilities. 

11.00 – 11.30 Morning break

11.30 – 12.10 Maurice Riordan (poet and translator)
‘George, Call the Sheriff: Yeats and the Unruly’
Yeats understood his poetry was equestrian.  It was the exercise of skill and control over the vitality of the unconscious in the struggle to govern the dreamlife of the body and its desires.  This talk explores the force of the unconscious in Yeats’s life, including some of its more amusing manifestations, as well as emphasizing the quasi-violent tension between order and lawlessness in the great poems.

12.10 – 1.00 Beatrice Garland (poet and psychotherapist) & Ron Britton (psychoanalyst) 
In conversation
Dr Ronald Britton talks with Beatrice Garland about the parallel lives that being both a poet and a psychoanalyst involves. She talks about the influence her two analyses, and her subsequent work as an analyst, has had upon her capacity to write; and reads a selection of poems that derive from unconscious mental process. How, coming from a distinguished scientific background, and in the face of some opposition from the parental generation, does one become both a psychoanalyst and a poet?

1.00 – 2.10 Lunch

2.10 – 2.45 Kathryn Maris (poet and teacher) 
I Remember
Kathryn Maris discusses ‘I Remember’, a cult classic poem-memoir by New York School artist and writer Joe Brainard, and other poets such as Louis MacNeice and Lyn Hejinian, who have also written transformatively about memory. Maris will talk about how these poetic models were used in a recent writing workshop, in order to generate poems which draw on hidden or unexpected memories; and invite some of the participating poets to share the work which resulted.

2.45 – 3.30 Vahni Capildeo (poet) & Jeremy Hardingham (performance artist) 
IN TERMINABLE NOISE
Performative reading with unconscious and conscious patternings followed by discussion.

3.30 – 4.00 Afternoon Break

4.00 – 4.30 Sowon Park (lecturer)
Memory and the New Unconscious
The unconscious, in so far as it refers to the processes of the mind that are not conscious, has always been a central concept in the arts. In science, however, the unconscious only found brief legitimacy in models of the unconscious/subconscious developed by Freud and William James before being relegated to the margins by the ascendency of positivist models of knowledge. Behaviorism dismissed ideas about the unconscious because they could not be empirically verified; logical positivist orthodoxy rendered what is not testable and falsifiable as ‘meaningless’. In this vein, Karl Popper famously claimed that psychoanalysis was a pseudo-science. However, new and ongoing discoveries in cognitive neuroscience during the last twenty years demonstrate that very little of what goes on in the brain is actually conscious, making it possible not only to re-examine earlier models of the unconscious but to witness the role of the unconscious in the human mind as the new frontier of knowledge. This paper will chart the relations between the unconscious and memory as they have been configured in psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive neuroscience to consider the innovations that might emerge from the correlation.

 

4.30 – 5.15 Annie Freud (poet) & Alan Buckley (poet and psychotherapist) 
The Room That Isn’t There
Poet Annie Freud reads a selection of poems which were inspired by dreams. In conversation with poet and psychotherapist Alan Buckley Annie talks about how her poems come into being, her experience of psychotherapy and the influence of her Freud family background.

5.15 End

About the readers:

Nuar Alsadir is a poet, writer, and psychoanalyst. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Grand Street, Poetry London, and The Poetry Review; and a collection of her poems, More Shadow Than Bird, was published by Salt in 2012. She is fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and is on the faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Dr Ron Britton is a training and supervising analyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society. He first trained as a doctor, and as a child psychiatrist was Chair of the Department of Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic, where he was involved in treatment of deprived children and their parents. This experience was influential to his psychoanalytic thinking where he maintains the importance of ‘childhood’ as a formative experience. His theoretical background is that of Freud, Klein and post-Kleinians. Additionally, he brings his own wide interests, including philosophy, theology, science, and particularly, his passion for poetry, which he uses as a basis for psychological understanding.

Britton’s major contributions have been drawn together in two books; Belief and Imagination (1998) and Sex, Death, and the Superego (2003). Throughout his work Britton emphasises the Oedipus complex as the basis of psychic reality, and the clinical relevance of defences against awareness of this. His most recent publication is Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind (2015).

Alan Buckley‘s pamphlet Shiver (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society choice, and he has been commended three times in the Bridport Prize. He works in Oxford as a psychotherapist, and as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story. A link to his essay on poetry, creativity and the unconscious can be found on the Magma website.

Gerry Byrne is a consultant nurse and child and adolescent psychotherapist, working in the NHS and privately in Oxford. He is clinical lead for the Family Assessment and Safeguarding Service (Oxon, Wilts and BaNES) and the Infant Parent Perinatal Service (Oxon). With two colleagues he runs the annual Children in Troubled Worlds conference which promotes the contributions psychoanalytic thinking and the arts can make to work with troubled children and with Janet Bolam, theatre director and writer, he runs Between the Lines – writers and psychotherapists in conversation.www.bolamandbyrne.co.uk

Vahni Capildeo (b. Trinidad) writes poetry and prose. Her latest books are Utter (Peepal Tree, 2013), inspired by her time as a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary, and Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, forthcoming 2016). She has worked for Commonwealth Writers and was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow 2014 at the University of Cambridge. Her poetry may be found in New Poetries VI  (Carcanet, 2015).

Jeremy Hardingham was born in London and raised in Hong Kong and England’s midlands. He got a degree in English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1997. He has worked in a wide range of jobs, from brand consultancy to rubbish collection, but his principle work has been in relation to theatre, poetry and education. After 18 months as a writer and workshop manager for the prisons charity, ‘Escape Artists’, Jeremy became the first Drama Studio Manager of the newly created Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio in the basement of the Faculty of English, Cambridge, 2006. In his residency in the studio, he has developed a body of performance work which combines scholastic studies with physical and sculptural performance experiments. This has produced a series of critical performance essays on violence, song, movement, audience relations and objects in space. 

Annie Freud is a poet and artist. Her first collection The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador 2007) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was awarded The Dimplex Prize for New Writing (Poetry section). The Mirabelles Picador 2010), her second collection, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and websites. Annie Freud has been named by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets 2014. She is renowned for her live performances. Her third collection, The Remains, was published in July 2015 and has been awarded a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society.

After a first degree in English Literature, Beatrice Garland worked as a National Health Service clinician, teacher and researcher in psychological medicine. She has won both the National Poetry Competition and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, and was short-listed for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize.  Her first volume, The Invention of Fireworks was published in 2013 by Templar Press, and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Best First Collection among the Forward Prizes. She lives and works in London, although the poems in her first volume are mainly concerned with life and death in the natural world. She is currently at work on a second volume.

Kathryn Maris‘s most recent poetry collection is God Loves You (Seren 2013). Her poems have appeared in Granta, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best British Poetry 2012 and 2015. She teaches at the Poetry School.

Dr Sowon S Park is Lecturer in English at Oxford University where she teaches Victorian and Modern literature. Previously she taught at Cambridge University and Ewha University, Seoul. She has published widely on cognitive literary criticism including, most recently: in English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, Future (Palgrave, 2014); and Neohelicon (Springer, June 2014). She is the convenor of the Unconscious Memory seminar series (http://torch.ox.ac.uk/unconscious) and President of the Literary Theory Committee of the ICLA.

Maurice Riordan’s poetry collections include The Water Stealer (Faber, 2013) and The Holy Land (Faber, 2007). He has recently edited The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics (Faber, 2014). He is Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University and the editor of The Poetry Review.