Experience in Psychoanalysis and Poetry

Dialogic or talk-based therapy modalities like psychoanalysis engage language to create new and navigate existing pathways into the unconscious. The ways in which these modalities are both language dependent and language transcendent have something common with and to offer poetic praxis. This event brings three poet-practitioners Karen Weiser, Kim Rosenfield, and Nuar Alsadir to read from evolving work and discuss the ways poetry and analysis inform each other in their experience.

Please join us for a reading and conversation with CUNY Graduate Center alum Karen Weiser, who is now developing Mater Matter, which playfully addresses some psychoanalytic preoccupations, including ideas by psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott; Kim Rosenfield, whose recent Phantom Captain explores the poetry of psychoanalysis, feminism and gender, and the accelerating pressures of standardizing capitalism upon the human mind; and Nuar Alsadir whose recent book of essays Animal Joy, to paraphrase Cathy Park Hong in their recent interview in BOMB, builds on Freud's theory of humor to describe the ways laughter, psychoanalysis, poetry, playing, and moments of parapraxis—create pathways into our interior" so that we might access, assess, and befriend its activities.
Free and open to all. Please Register to attend. This event will take place in the Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, NYC.

Books will be available at the event.

PARTICPANTS:
Karen Weiser is happy to be back at the CUNY Graduate Center where she spent a long and fabulous span of time earning her PhD in English. In addition to publishing peer-reviewed essays on Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, she authored two full-length collections of poetry: Or, The Ambiguities (UDP, 2015) and To Light Out (UDP, 2010). After leaving academia, she trained as a psychoanalyst and is now in full-time private practice in downtown Manhattan.

Kim Rosenfield is a poet originally from Southern California. Her first book, Some of Us, was published in 1982 by Ouija Madness Press, Los Angeles. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Phantom Captain, which won the 2023 FENCE Ottoline Prize. She is also a psychotherapist in private practice and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Nuar Alsadir’s most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME Magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

This event is hosted and organized by the Center for the Humanitities at the CUNY Gradaute Center, and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Visit our website for more information:

*Image credit: Sally Ross, The Garden Sisters, 2017 (Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman). Used with permission from the artist.

Event Venue

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, United States