Poetry on the Couch
Tue 17-07-2018, 19:00
Come to an interactive evening of poetry and sharing on Tuesday 17th July at 7pm at the Existential Academy 61-63 Fortune Green Road London NW6 1DR.
Poetry on the Couch
Please note this is a fee paying event £6 if booked via Meetup and £8 on the evening.
“When we share – that is poetry in the prose of life.” Sigmund Freud
Come to an interactive evening of poetry and sharing on Tuesday 17th July at 7pm at the Existential Academy 61-63 Fortune Green Road London NW6 1DR.
https://www.meetup.com/Society-of-Psychotherapy/events/252148698/
Together, we’ll read and listen to poems, and explore the connection between poetry and psychotherapy.
The evening will be hosted by Jon Sayers, poet and poetry therapy facilitator. Jon will briefly share some of his poetry and experience before inviting readers from the floor.
Please bring some poems,whether written by you or other poets, and be ready to say a few words as to why you’ve chosen them. Your poems might be directly related to psychology or psychotherapy or might touch on some of the themes therapy works with, such as anxiety, depression, addiction, sexual issues, self awareness, loss and grief.
In discussion together, we’ll see what poetry might tell us about the human condition, and we’ll test Freud’s other assertion: “Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”
At the end of the evening, Jon will also offer some links and recommendations to anyone who would like to take their explorations of poetry or poetry therapy further.
Please let us know if you would like to read. If you don’t wish to read but would prefer to listen or join in the discussion, you are also very welcome.
Biography:
Jon Sayers is a poet and creative writing teacher. He has a certificate in counselling and is training as a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator with the National Association for Poetry Therapy in the USA.
Jon has used poetry therapeutically for many years, working with diverse population groups, from prisoners in HMP Pentonville and Barnardo’s care leavers to a church community in his local Lambeth and a group of older women carers through the charity Open Age.
He has had poems, translations and reviews published in leading literary journals in the UK and abroad, and his radio play, A World Full of Weeping, a supernatural thriller featuring the poetry of WB Yeats, was broadcast twice on Radio 4.
Jon is a former chair of Magma poetry magazine and vice chair of The Poetry Society. He regularly interviews leading poets, such as Christopher Reid, Jo Shapcott and Annie Freud, for the Winchester Poetry Festival. He has had a long career working with language, training initially as an actor and working as a copywriter and creative director in advertising and a verbal identity specialist in branding.
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