Edel Coffey: Poetry can help us understand the mystery of what it is to be alive
Edel Coffey. Picture: Ray Ryan
Last week I went along to a book launch for the Cork poet, Padraig Ó Tuama’s new book. I don’t often go to poetry readings, but I wanted to go to this one because I am a fan of Ó Tuama’s popular podcast, .
The podcast began just before the first lockdown and has accrued over six million downloads to date. If you listen to just one episode of the podcast you will understand its popularity. Ó Tuama reads a poem of his choosing, talks about it, and then reads it again. It sounds simple, but over the course of about 12 minutes or so he offers listeners a meditation, a therapy session, a conversation, and a spiritual reflection all delivered through the magic of poetry. It’s really quite something.
His new book, (Canongate), is a kind of companion piece to the podcast.
At the launch in Dublin, he did away with the usual formalities and instead held a conversation with the assembled crowd. He asked us to tell him what line of poetry we thought about regularly in our daily lives, what was the line that came to us again and again.
It was fascinating to listen to the people in the room. Most of us were strangers to each other, and of varying ages, but we put up our hands and shyly recited half-remembered lines that maybe we had last said out loud in school. But the lines meant a lot to us.
The lines had stayed with us down through the years. Lines that brought hope or comfort. Lines that made sense of the world or perhaps just spilled a drop of beauty into our day.
I sought a line in my brain, wondering which one would rise up for me, maybe Sylvia Plath’s astonishing “I eat men like air”, from ‘Lady Lazarus’ or “I sang in my chains like the sea”, from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’.
But the line my brain presented was “listen I love you joy is coming”, the closing line of Kim Adonizzio’s ‘To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall’. I say this line to myself a lot, almost unconsciously, like a mantra. It’s a powerful line, one that offers courage, hope, strength and positivity, an encouragement to keep going in the face of, and in spite of, all the bad things that can and do and have happened.
I return to Ó Tuama’s podcast every Monday and Friday with semi-religious commitment. I know, whatever poem he chooses, whatever anecdote he tells to illuminate the poem, will in turn cause me to reflect on my own life in unexpected ways.
The podcast reminds me, and I’m sure the many other millions who listen to it every week, that poetry operates constantly in our lives whether we are aware of it or not. We carry it with us, in us. I’m not a poetry expert but I take a lot of pleasure from reading poetry and am even sometimes prompted to write my own dreadful lines.
Why poetry and not prose? Because poetry serves a different function to prose; poetry treats different symptoms in us and the same goes for hearing poetry spoken aloud.
We have a deep instinct and profound understanding of poetry and hearing it spoken is sometimes like hearing the meaning of life.
Shelley said, “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth”.
Poetry can help us understand the mystery of what it is to be alive. And yet many of us ignore it or think it is not for us.
The late writer Josephine Hart also knew the power of poetry, from its importance in educating children to its value as a balm in our adult lives. She brought her famous Poetry Hour to huge audiences across the UK and Ireland, having famous actors read works of the great poets.
Hart knew the power of poetry, saying, “Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.”
At the launch of Ó Tuama’s book, he told a story about a woman who met a man while she was travelling throughout Europe in the 1980s.
She fell in love with the man and they arranged to meet the following week at an embassy in Rome. The woman went back day after day until she eventually realised that the man wasn’t coming.
She was heartbroken and, as she walked through the streets, a stranger noticed her distress and, on passing her, said simply, “Coraggio”, meaning courage. I think that’s what poetry does for us in our day-to-day lives. It says, listen, I love you, joy is coming. It says, you shall not live in vain. It says, you are the master of your fate, the captain of your soul.
It says, corragio, courage, keep going.
