You are here

Event

David Gascoyne's Journey Through Madness

A lecture by Dr Jeremy Reed, hosted by the Temenos Academy.

In the characteristically flamboyant and engagingly original style for which Jeremy Reed's Temenos talks are noted, he will discuss not only David Gascoyne's visionary quest as a youthful poet in search of the midnight sun, but also Gascoyne's early attachment to surrealism, his abuse of the drug benzedrine, his alienating homosexuality, and his periodic descents into madness and hospitalisation that ultimately destroyed his creative momentum. A close personal friend of Gascoyne's in the last decades of the poet's life, Jeremy Reed's talk is enriched not only by this retrospective aspect, but additionally by his own experiences of breakdown in a lifetime devoted totally to the pursuit of poetry.

 
Jeremy Reed has been called 'British poetry's glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie', something he has always owned to in both his writing and performances of his work. A prolific author of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent books include Piccadilly Bongo, Sooner or Later Frank, Voodoo Excess, Waiting For The Man, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Asa Benveniste and Trigram Press and Shakespeare in Soho.
Dates and times
6:30 pm | Wed 28 Nov 2018
Where
The Royal Asiatic Society
14 Stephenson Way
NW1 2HD
London
Pricing
£8 | £5 concessions | full-time students free