WE WHO ARE NOT APOSTROPHES – MAD POETRY ROOMS
FREE EVENT - Mad Poetry Rooms at ALIVE
EVENT Date
Mad Poetry Rooms @ ALIVE
For World Mental Health Day in collaboration with the Big Anxiety festival, the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation and the Lived-Experience Research Collective will host Mad Poetry creative workshops during the day, and live readings from 4:30pm. A special Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poetry workshop will also be held on the day.
Inspired by the work and life of visionary poet Ben Frater, the workshop facilitators Alise Blayney and Tim Heffernan will guide you through a series of surreal writing exercises that will ensure that the fragments of your imagination take shape and emerge as a fully a developed poem or poems that can be performed at our open mic on Monday afternoon.
Alise and Tim would like to acknowledge that the Mad Poetry workshops owe their existence to the visionary surrealist poet Ben Frater who planned to run poetry workshops while people were receiving treatment with the antipsychotic Clozapine. Only a decade ago people had to wait for hours in the clinic for their blood test results so they could receive their appropriate dose of Clozapine.
Ben was dedicated to exploring the relationship between automatic writing and the schizophrenic vernacular, within which he saw the subconscious mind merging into consciousness. He lived between worlds and wrote in his notebook how he considered the ‘Poet is Priest; Poetry as confession; Performance of Poetry is exorcism’.
Venue
ALIVE NATIONAL CENTRE – 153 Barry Street, Carlton
Creative workshops
from 11-1pm | 2-4pm
Live Poetry Readings
4:30pm – 6:30pm (in the park outside weather permitting)
Conveners
Alise Blayney, Poet and Peer Educator and Tim Heffernan, Poet, Peer Support Worker and Deputy Commissioner, New South Wales Mental Health Commission. Tim and Alise are co-editors of Verity La’s, ‘Clozapine Clinic – The Frater Project.’ They also established Mad Poetry as part of the 2016 Wollongong Writers Festival.
To join the Lived-Experience Research Collective please see here.
Key Dates
Mad Poetry Rooms at ALIVE
10 October 2022
Creative workshops
from 11-1pm | 2-4pm
Live Poetry Readings
4:30pm – 6:30pm (in the park outside weather permitting)
WE WHO ARE NOT APOSTROPHES – MAD POETRY ROOMS
FREE EVENT – Mad Poetry Rooms at ALIVE
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