Joyce Fegan: A Cork poet in New York is all the therapy I need

The girl lies on the bed with a smartphone, listens to an audio book with his eyes closed

A few weeks ago a friend was making two pots of curry on a Saturday night in her home place. Her husband was putting their one-year-old baby down for the evening. The baby was being christened the next day. The curries were to feed the well-wishers. In the kitchen as she cooked, her father kept her company, both of them listening to a poetry podcast in the background.

I came to know the details of this night because we were discussing the intricate strategies of how other people, not just the mother, can get a breastfed baby to sleep.

As she painted the whole scene in detail, I was most struck not by the sleep strategy, but by her and her father’s casual listening of poetry together, and more struck again by the fact that there was a podcast about poetry that people would choose to listen to over say a true crime serial, or some music, or indeed a talk show of a Saturday night.

I have not stopped listening to that poetry podcast since.

So when I read about the B.1.1.529 variant, or children aged nine having to wear masks, and having their Christmas plays cancelled, I play an episode of Poetry Unbound to rebound. It is presented by Cork man and Irish poet, currently in New York, Pádraig Ó Tuama.

Forget the apps called Calm, or Breathe, or Mind, or the videos where your eyes follow a contracting or expanding black dot or a guided meditation where it’s suggested your exhale be longer than your inhale, Poetry Unbound is a place of body-felt solace.

It’s in the poems chosen, and in the unassuming timbre of Pádraig’s forgiveness-filled voice.

In school my husband learned to hate poetry. His English teacher’s ingenious method of pedagogy was fear. One student would begin reading and all of a sudden another boy would be called upon to continue reading. The stop and start points were arbitrarily applied and often occurred mid-sentence. There was even a boy appointed as “class corrector”. I imagine this classroom scene wasn’t a unique one.

“I think sometimes people think that poetry is this lofty art, to which the ordinary, everyday experience bows down in a sense of ineptitude and inadequacy, when really, it’s the other way round,” says Pádraig as he introduces an episode

Poetry bows down to unexpected human encounters, to unexpected moments.

This is how it goes. He introduces himself, the poem, he then reads the poem in his dulcet tones, he goes on to share his human interpretation — making it accessible to all and relevant to everyday life, and then he reads the poem again. The episode could last eight minutes or 15. There’s instrumental music plaited throughout. No one ever feels stupid or scared.

This time last year we were locked down, the vaccine was in development. Our wiser, more experienced citizens who had survived the Second World War and who had lost siblings to TB and to emigration pre-Ryanair, told this newspaper about how things got better and how they had seen vaccines “change everything”.

Here we are a year later, most of our adult population is double vaccinated but there’s a new variant in town and things feel even more uncertain than this time 365 days ago.

I’ve tried everything these 20 months: I’ve walked, I’ve crafted, I’ve swam in the sea, I’ve meditated and I’ve done yoga, but all of them combined do not compare to listening to this Cork man read a poem into your ears, and hear him confess his own human, but universal struggles, to fit in, to forgive or to bother finding hope.

My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and all my life, I’ve wanted to fit in, to fit into a nationality; to gender; to a religion; to a group of friends. And I never really felt like I did. And poetry didn’t answer that by saying, ‘Oh, I fit in with poets.’

“Poetry answered that by putting me in company with other people who put language around the idea of not fitting in and thinking that maybe there’s other questions I can ask myself rather than ‘Where will I fit in?’,” is another of the Cork man’s introductions.

In one episode that I have shared widely with friends, their partners, in-laws and others, there is a poem about what you learn when you’re alone. It’s had universal resonance with people doing lots of texting back from wherever they are in Ireland or in their day, when they’ve listened to it.

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” by Brad Aaron Modlin, is the poem, and here are its opening lines:

Extract from What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind,

how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer.

She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheetsthat covered ways to remember your grandfather’s voice.

Those words are much better consumed through your ears, via Pádraig’s voice, rather than on this page or screen.

Another poem he treats us to is about what comes with age. It’s called “My Mother’s Body” and it is by Marie Howe. Here are its opening lines:

Extract from My Mother’s Body

Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear, grew louder. 

From inside her body I heard almost every word she said.

Again, this Cork man’s voice is a far more potent medium for this poem than this page.

In these heavy days art can offer an escape from reality, watch a movie about the Gucci dynasty, see Lady Gaga shape-shift once again, take in another biopic of Princess Diana, or enjoy Ryan Tubridy tog out in a Christmas jumper.

But what Pádraig Ó Tuama and Poetry Unbound does, is offer us a close-up confrontation with reality. He talks about loss, longing and belonging, loneliness, the times we haven’t been believed, the times we haven’t been forgiving, how to face violence with tenderness and the tenderness of married love.

Poetry Unbound is a pretty big deal in America, and it’s hosted by one of our own, but I’ve no idea of its place in the Irish aural landscape. I only know that when all else fails to calm my frazzled nervous system, eight minutes of reality with Pádraig Ó Tuama never fails to save the day.