The Importance Of Being Poetry

Ahead of Poetry Day Ireland, Frances Browner explores the history and impact of poetry.

The language of poetry has a soothing, calming effect on the mind, in much the same way that prayer, chanting, or a mantra might. Rhythm, repetition, alliteration, and assonance slow down our thoughts. The subject matter is usually more personal than prose and draws on our emotions. Lines are easier to recall when they rhyme. In times of great stress, poetry can be a balm for troubled souls, as is evident in increased sales after 9/11, and Covid-19. The Pendemic website (www.pendemic.ie) – ‘Not a literary magazine for ordinary times, but a journal for an exceptional one’ – welcomed poems and prose written during lockdown, which are now stored for posterity in UCD’s Department of Folklore.

In 2020/21, The Whale Theatre facilitated a Poets’ Wall and Poetry Trail in Greystones, which I curated. Residents remarked on the lift they gave the town. An anthology followed, Greystones You Are…, comprising 60 poems from locals paying homage to their place. It seemed as if everybody was reading and writing poetry. Of course, they had more time, it can be argued. Yet, a member of our Greystones Writers group writes a poem every day because it puts her in a good place, she says.

April has been deemed International Poetry Month, encouraging us to celebrate this art form. According to the Academy of American Poets, ‘Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. There has probably never been a culture without it’.

As children, we were attracted to sing-song nursery rhymes and prayers. Most of us can still recite a poem from primary school. Mine is Old Woman of the Roads. ‘How my small heart broke at her plea…’ ‘Oh, to have a little house’. I was fascinated by the ‘pendulum swinging up and down’, even though I didn’t know what it was. As for the ‘dresser filled with shining delph, speckled with white and blue and brown’, I was mesmerised by the words and images they conjured. Secondary school soon put a stop to all that. “Oh Young Lochinvar is come out of the west,” the class declared loudly, “through all the wide border, his steed was the best.” And we couldn’t have cared less.

Many of my generation were turned off poetry forever. I reunited with it when I returned to college, as a mature student. There, I rediscovered poems about the ordinary, every day. Kavanagh’s Memory of my Father plucked at my heartstrings – ‘Every old man I see in October coloured weather, seems to say to me, I was once your father’. Pearse’s The Mother laments, ‘We suffer in their coming and their going.” I fell in love with the Romantics, reread Shakespeare’s sonnets, howled laughing at Pam Ayres I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth, and discovered Mary Oliver. ‘Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.’ (The Summer Day). I was hooked.

These poets were talking to me, in my language. Even Shakespeare was making sense, despite one of my pupils complaining, ‘he’s a thick, Miss’. Yet, I didn’t start writing poetry until ten years ago, when I took a workshop with Dublin poet Colm Keegan, hoping it would help with my prose. At a class in Blackrock Library, he invited us to take a walk through the town and come back with ten lines. I couldn’t stop thinking about how my mother loved the boutiques there and described ‘Lisa Perkins and Monica Peters chortling with delight’ when they saw her approach their shops. “Wear your style,” Ma would encourage me and my sisters, “a woman should always wear her style.” She warned me not to write about her, but after she passed, I couldn’t stop. No Reason was my contribution to the Poetry Trail, about coming home from America for no reason that I knew of at the time. Ma died three years later, and ‘then I knew’. It was displayed in Escape Boutique in honour of her love for fashion. When she was dying, she worried that younger grandchildren might not remember her. “I’ll make sure they do,” I promised.

‘So long as men can breathe and eyes can see. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

Poets have searched for the meaning of life since the beginning of time. In The Epic of Gilamesh from ancient Mesopotamia, the hero embarks on a perilous journey to find immortality. Homer’s Odyssey describes a long journey home from the Trojan War. The Greeks introduced epic, pastoral, lyric, the Romans, satire. The Middle Ages saw the rise of romantic and religious verse, Dante’s Divine Comedy taking us through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. In the golden age of the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Donne and Spenser explored themes of love, beauty, and morality.

The Romantics emphasised emotion and nature. 20th century Modernist and Postmodernist poets like Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot broke from traditional forms to reflect the complexities of modern life. Rhyme was abandoned. Today, anything goes. Poems appear on the Internet and social media. Open mics are in demand. Slam and Spoken Word take us back to our oral roots, highlighting performance, and personal expression. In this age of immediate access to information, bombarded by screens, why not take time out every day to read a poem? Attend poetry events.

On May 1st, Greystones will be celebrating Poetry Day Ireland, from sunrise in the Cove with Poems on Stones (the earliest event in the country according to Poetry Ireland) to sunset in The Whale, with Bealtaine Poem Circles.

“Poetry creates a world and invites us in. It has the power to reduce isolation and enhance well-being. A poem connects by expressing something we find difficult to put into words. Reading inspirational poems aloud can be affirming. The act of writing a poem helps to articulate and come to terms with situations and emotions.”
(Shelley Tracey, Poetry Therapy Practitioner).

You can catch Poetry Day Ireland: Bealtaine Poem Circles at The Whale on Thursday, May 1st 2025 at 8pm, tickets here: https://whaletheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873653851/events/128590239