THE POEM THAT READS YOU
You did not choose it. It chose you. A line from a poem that has never left — surfacing at 3am, at a funeral, in the middle of an argument. It knows something about you that you have never quite been able to say.
Poems do this. Not all of them. The ones that do are not communicating information or expressing feeling. They are producing an encounter — between the reader and something in themselves they could not have reached alone. Something the conscious mind has been carefully avoiding.
This course takes that encounter seriously. Over four weeks we read poems through a psychoanalytic lens — not to analyse them but to follow what they reveal. What the poems we love say about what we carry. What disturbs us and why. What we reach for in the poem and what that reaching means.
You will bring the lines you carry. We follow what they know.
The poem that has never left you knows more than you do.
This course asks what.
WHO THIS COURSE IS FOR
Readers who carry poems they cannot explain. Writers who find that the poems they are most drawn to know something about them they have not yet fully understood. Researchers and practitioners who want to bring psychoanalytic attention to bear on their own relationship to language and image.
You do not need to have studied psychoanalysis or literary criticism. You need to have been ambushed by a poem at least once — and to be willing to follow what that ambush reveals.
This course works with the poems you bring as much as the poems introduced each week. Your own relationship to specific lines and images is the primary material.
WHAT THE COURSE COVERS
WEEK ONE
The poem that names the unnamed. Recognition before understanding — the line that surfaces before you know why.
WEEK TWO
The poem and the shadow. What the poems we love reveal about what we carry and have not yet integrated.
WEEK THREE
The poem and desire. Lack, longing, the beautiful thing that hurts. What we reach for in the poem and what that reaching means.
WEEK FOUR
The poem as encounter with the Self. The mirror that shows you something you were not quite ready to see.
DETAILS
Four weeks · Four sessions of ninety minutes · Online via Zoom · Facilitated rather than taught.
Places: limited to fifteen participants
Dates: [TBC — Spring 2027]
Price: [TBC]
No prior knowledge of psychoanalysis or poetry required. Bring the lines you cannot explain.
SIGN UP
Places are limited to fifteen. To register your interest, complete the form below. You will be contacted when booking opens with full details and payment information.