Episodes
Monday Mar 30, 2020
The Art of Freestyle and the Unconscious Mind
Monday Mar 30, 2020
Monday Mar 30, 2020
Lecture and performance:
How do ideas pop into your head? You can think about the answer to this question at a lecture and performance about the art of Freestyle Rap by Hip-Hop artist and spoken word poet, Reveal. Using recent studies in neurology and psychology, theories of memory schemata and ideas about unconscious communication, Reveal will explore the basis of his craft within the resonant environment of the Freud Museum, and in a practical demonstration will improvise a rap to words and questions called out by members of the audience.
Reveal is a London based Iranian Hip-Hop artist, ethnomusicologist and writer. He was born in Tehran, Iran in 1983 and moved to London aged 2 with his parents, mainly to escape the Iran-Iraq war. He was raised in inner city London but continued to travel back to Tehran regularly. Having links to such contrasting urban environments has provided him with a sense of dual identity for most of his life. At a young age Reveal began performing Hip-Hop music and releasing songs under the Artist name "Reveal Poison", and at aged 16 he won the 2000 UK Freestyle Knock-out Battle Rap Championships. He went on to form the group “Poisonous Poets” who were one of the first ever UK Hip-Hop acts to be signed to a major record label, penning a deal with BMG/Arista in 2001. It was around this period that he first became aware of the emerging Persian Hip-Hop scene in Iran and he travelled back to Tehran to begin a series of collaborations with the city's artists. Reveal is currently enrolled on a Mmus Ethnomusicology programme at SOAS where he is studying part-time alongside doing youth work, touring and releasing music.
Monday May 22, 2017
Fourth Person Singular: Josh Cohen in conversation with Nuar Alsadir
Monday May 22, 2017
Monday May 22, 2017
Claudia Rankine described the poems in Alsadir’s first book as 'lawless,' ‘provocative, and 'heart-breaking' as they converse from the inside out… come alive in the back and forth of a mind attempting to understand what it means to be in relation to. ’Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language. As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric – and human relationships – in the 21st century.
She talks to psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen about poetry, dreams, shame and related topics.
Praise for Fourth Person Singular:
‘To read Fourth Person Singular is to fall in love – that’s all I can say to capture the experience of being so scarily and exhilaratingly close to someone else’s thoughts on every vital page. Alsadir’s work is, as ever, full of astute observations and insights driven by a deep intellect, alive to the world and our fears, pressures, dreams and ideas. But there’s something greater here too: a unity of form and content, process and delivery which transfigures the conceptual and the lyric. I don't remember the last time I've read something which is at once so alive and so vigorously smart and ambitious; uniquely self-aware, caustically funny whilst constantly generous and compassionate. The rare joy of a writer finding the exact form for their voice and their mission. Essential reading.’
--Luke Kennard
'Fourth Person Singular is poetry that is neither verse nor exactly prose poetry, but aphorism, perception, quotation, annotation, a squeezing between the gaps in the windows and doorways of experience seeking for air. It is more than its pieces: it is a whole that is a form of understanding. It is that whole that is the complex and revelatory poem.'
--George Szirtes
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014