Conference Report: Therapy & Experimental Poetry Symposium, Birkbeck, University of London, 28 th September 2019

During and following the symposium the concepts of ‘therapy’ and ‘experimental poetry’ were sites for questioning and exploration. Months into the Covid-19 pandemic the practises of therapy and experimental poetry as sites of interpersonal relationships which make these practices possible are emphasised. Relationships and their distance or absence are pressure points registering the micro and macro individual and societal challenges Covid-19 has forced into focus, even for those who previously turned away from the challenges of social injustices. If therapy and experimental poetry, therapies and poetries, arise in the crucible of relationships, what is happening to these relationships during this pandemic? At the Therapy and Experimental Poetry Symposium in September 2019, Scott Thurston advanced the argument that experimental poetries are a political subculture. How are these politics enacted towards each other during the unfolding societal consequences of Covid-19? The questions and ideas circulating before and after this symposium are magnified by global attention focusing on how the politics of care are enacted not only for ourselves but also for each other.


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wellbeing' industrial complex posits wellbeing as the responsibility of the individual rather than a consequence of structural societal issues which crush individual lives. The 'therapy' and 'experimental poetry' in this symposium were not concerning themselves with 'writing for wellbeing', rather, they concerned themselves with interrogating language, signalling where the fakeries which pass as 'wellbeing' in a sick societyand during the Covid-19 pandemic sickness is itself materially present in every aspect of lifewhich emphasises productivity as the measure of value. Of course, an academic symposium on experimental poetry is another site for wringing an institutionalised form of productivity and value from a form of writing which makes claims and gestures towards resisting such co-option.
The symposium took place at Birkbeck, University of London, a well-known node on the experimental poetry 'scene', especially for those fortunate enoughor otherwiseto be based in London. Situating a practice in an academic building positions that practice in relation to the academy. Housing a symposium which presents a consideration of 'therapy' and 'experimental poetry' in an academic building in Bloomsbury in London orientates the terms 'therapy' and 'experimental poetry' towards the practices associated with these spaces and places.
Symposia are situated by the language which puts into motion its circulation prior to the event, its discussion after the event, and the space in which it unfolds. The language positioning the Therapy & Experimental Poetry Symposium reflected an approach of open and collective enquiry, speaking of 'how therapy (in its broadest sense) might be represented, enacted and/or contested through experiments with language and form'. 1 The symposium posed five questions: What the experimental poem can do that the talking cure can't, and how we might conceptualise this as a mode of therapeutic work, or otherwise. Might there be a tension, for example, between the often impersonal lyric subject of experimental poetry and the 3 wounded individual psyche of the psychoanalysand? In addition, what tactics could we deploy to keep the vulnerable self in view whilst thinking about the politics of avantgarde writing? Might the experimental poem's disruption of conventional narrative be thought of as a mode of collective therapy, perhaps with connections to radical care?
As entry-points to the symposium these questions reflect the contemporaneous interest in psychoanalysis as a range of ideas in which experimental poetry engages. The appearance of such a symposium at this particular point in time also reflects the increased literacy in mental and emotional health and an accompanying reduction in the stigma which used to run parallel to mental health and associated social practises, including any sort of 'therapy' as a route to personal change.
Welcoming speakers and attendees to the day Vicky Sparrow offered insights into the origins of the symposium. Sparrow acknowledged the substantial literature on the therapeutic function of the 'narrative' 'declarative' modes of creative writing and expressive arts therapy. The enquiries undergirding this symposium were not aimed at criticising the function of these therapies but rather in trying to explore the gap where the 'lyric I' is not the writing self.
Touchstones for the symposium were identified in Joe Luna's 'Following John Wilkinson', 2 Carol Watts' 'Her Mouth was Sealed' 3 and Andrea Brady's 'The Determination of Love'. 4 Sparrow emphasised the politics of therapy, where consolation is complicity, in becoming comfortable in an unjust world. The real-world context of mental health and therapy takes the form of severe cuts to mental health services, reduced access to health care, and the disaster of practices which form part of day-to-day survival. Thurston's paper provided evidence for creative writing being more helpful, in a wellbeing context, when focusing on technique. The politics of the 'arts for health' field were given attention, explicating the view that in these contexts art/creative practice is viewed as supplementary, the arts are instrumentalised and social barriers to art/writing are ignored. Interdisciplinarity, with a full integration of two or more disciplinary fields offers a route towards multimodal creative practices where different arts media can offer different ways into and alternative perspectives on the issues with which the therapeutic encounter is engaging. This approach connects with the notion of the self as simultaneously multiple and unified and pushes against the instrumentalist methods of using art practices as tools which can be straightforwardly applied to enhance mental health or wellbeing.
Finally, James Goodwin (Birkbeck, University of London) presented, 'Preservation and Decay, Poetics and Pharmakon, Living in the Wake, Blackness and Otherness'. He commenced with a reading of phenomenology which noted the 'critique of intentionality through phenomenological reduction', recognising how 'everything that happens in our world arises from the other world'. Goodwin suggested that if we live 'wakefully' in a 'common' language -although this is not a shared community but separation -we can think of life as relations grounded in difference and separation. He also asserted that language is not made by individuals but forms a community of empathy, and that the function of writing is as a sedimentation of experience which makes the transmission of experience possible. Goodwin drew on Christina Sharp's concept of 'living in the wake' to acknowledge the experience of being under slavery as the literal embodiment of property of the transcendental subject. 10 To live 'in the wake' however is to live black existence as preserving a 'whole ensemble of possible events'living dis/continuous brutality in and with terror. His conclusion characterised black poetics as a work of touching and being touched by languagethat to touch language is to continue the work of putting breath back into the black body and that, in a duplex world, black breathing and breathlessness both enables and ends the world.
Following a break the symposium moved into a different format with Vicky Sparrow facilitating a Round Table comprising Samantha Walton, Sarah Hayden, Fran Lock, Verity Spott and Dorothy Lehane. The Round Table provided space for reflection on aspects of discussion and ideas raised during the ten presentations and also ranged into emerging thoughts. The digressions, cul-de-sacs, non-sequiturs, surprises and serendipity of Round Table   talks are what make looser and live conversation so compelling. By way of placing a few of the ideas discussed on record, the conversation included but was in no way limited to: considerations of communities of experimental poetry, including questioning whether these are therapeutic spaces; the possibility of the vampiric in appropriations of language and experiences of trauma in arts contexts; obfuscatory discourses around therapy, self-care and subjective precarities; career experimentalism; experimentalism outside of the academy and questioning the ethics of excluding the body.
The symposium culminated with poetry readings and performances from Fran Lock, Verity Spott, Dorothy Lehane and Elinor Cleghorn.
Returning to the reflections on Covid-19 which open this report, I think about how gatherings for symposia, Round Tables, lunch, andparticularlypoetry readings and performances provide nodes of physical community and sharing. As I make the final corrections to this report, I hope that we will share these experiences again. Soon. They hold the therapeutic. The experimental. And poetry.