Burning Bright

I attended a thought-provoking event in the week – organised by the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool.  It was an evening concerned with the self in poetry, the subjective and the unconscious which was introduced by Professor Josh Cohen who articulated that strange relationship between poetry and psychology – also (inevitably) Poetry and Psychotherapy. He started his talk with a reference to Freud’s famous repost, made on his seventieth birthday when declared to be the discoverer of the unconscious; “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious” he said. “What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” (This is from Lionel Trilling’s essay on Freud in his 1950 book of essays, The Liberal Imagination.)

In the lyric who is addressed?  An acknowledgement of the relationship between lyric and shame was at the centre of the discussions and concerns of this evening.  The poets who read were Nuar Alsadir and Kathryn Maris, both engaged with Freud and ideas and manifestations  of the dark and hidden self.  Alsadir is also training to be a psychoanalyst and she presented some of her poems to us as an integral part of a talk which encompassed her disciplined daily practice of writing close to REM sleep.  Kathyn Maris spoke of her interest in intimacy and the ability of a poem to induce shock in the reader.  There is much more to these exciting writers.  I will have more to say when I’ve read their books.