Poetry, Our Daily Bread

‘What poetry needs is a place at the table,’ begins a recent piece by my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh which I heartily enjoyed and recommend, not just because he goes on to write very attentively and generously about a poem of mine, but because I agree so strongly with the more general point he is making: that poetry has become strange to us, and that this is a tragedy.

The reason for its scarcity in our lives these days, he argues, is not that we do not revere it, but almost that we revere it too much, so that, thus ‘safely exalted and ignored’, it has been forgotten and grown strange.  When we do meet with it, it seems unfamiliar and discomfiting.  We know that it is Important Language, but we don’t know why; we forget, except on rare occasions, what the poetic register is for.  We intuit its sincerity and its seriousness, but not its purpose, even though our forbears throughout the ages understood this naturally.  We think it is perhaps a kind of public therapy session for the poet, an unburdening of his emotions and preoccupations, and listen to it out of politeness if nothing else.  Perhaps we think of it as a porcelain dinner service, kept in the dresser for special occasions.  We think it is only for the solemnest moments, for funerals and centenaries, to be intoned only by professional actors and public figures.

But this is to miss a vital element of poetry.  Poetry is a craft, something that belongs to a community, and is to be shared and enjoyed by many, and often.  We treat music and film in this way; Maolsheachlann argues; why not poetry?  He says,

Whenever I’ve shared my poetry with people (with a very [few] exceptions), the reaction is generally twofold:

1) I like it.

2) It makes me think of X or Y or Z.

But what I was really gunning for is a critical reaction. What is good about it? What is bad about it? What does it suggest to you in terms of meaning and association? Exactly the sort of critique anyone would have about a film, a novel, a painting, a piece of music. I just want my poem to be treated as a piece of work, not as pure sacred self-expression, immune from analysis.

The price of our present misunderstanding is that we hardly encounter poetry at all.  And yet it is an essential vitamin, a vital mineral; it should be our daily bread.  It involves emotion, yes, but also the distillation and disciplining of emotion.  It is elevated language, yes, but not actually sacred.  We should not shrink from its invitation to attentiveness any more than we would begrudge such an invitation from a film or a piece of music.  We should welcome it into our lives.  It should season our speech like salt, deepening its flavour, and, by making us more attentive to our words, make us in turn more mindful of our human dignity.  

But like all good things, like all gifts, it is also an end in itself, to be cherished and rejoiced in for its own sake.

Maolsheachlann’s whole article can be read here.