Joyce Fegan: Poetry is the exact opposite of a reactive, toxic Twitter

Poetry is just a less dysregulating form of news. It can make the world more palatable, can soften the world's blows. Poetry can take us from reactive to active

Elizabeth Mohen of Poetry Ireland as Poetry Day Ireland was celebrated in the same week that Twitter was sold. Picture: Mark Stedman

Is poetry the answer? This week in the Pakistani city of Jacobabad, temperatures reached 46 degrees Celsius. In Delhi, India, a temperature of 43 degrees was recorded.

To try and stay hydrated, India’s government advised its people to wear damp towels, consume homemade drinks such as ‘lassi’ and avoid high-protein foods.

In Ireland this week, a study was published, showing a faster than expected sea-level rise around Dublin. Researchers at Maynooth University found that the Dublin sea level rose by an estimated 1.1mm per year between 1953 and 2016, but between 1997 and 2016 it was 7mm per year.

Similar research published last year found that the sea level in Cork had risen 40cm since 1842 — nearly 50% more than the 27cm expected for the region. A total of 40% of our country’s population (1.9m people) lives within 5km of the coast.

Then there’s the war in Ukraine; speculation this week it could go on for five years and news that its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to be evacuated from Kyiv as Russian
assassination squads parachuted into the capital.

And then there is Somalia. It has just experienced its fourth consecutive failed rainy season, on top of 30 years of conflict. A total of 750,000 people have been displaced by drought. There are water distribution points in refugee camps where robed women drink from shared and muddied plastic containers. The kind you transport extra diesel in.

Sophie Patterson (12) from Balbriggan, Co. Dublin reading the quote ‘How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?’ from 'Badgers' by Seamus Heaney. Picture: Mark Stedman

The United Nations has warned that 350,000 children could die by the summer if nothing is done to help.

There is a poem by Katie Farris called: ‘Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World’.

“To train myself to find, in the midst of hell what isn’t hell,” she writes.

We live in a world where one man can accumulate unimaginable power and execute it just as easily, affecting and destroying the lives of millions of people in the process. We live in a world where one man uses his billions of dollars to buy a global thought forum, one that he can solely shape.

The American civil rights activist and writer Audre Lorde said:

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

It sounds a lot like Twitter and yet, poetry is the exact opposite. Twitter is reactive, not reflective. It can be toxic, abusive, and full of hate. Poetry is often used for the deepest of political reconciliations. Twitter is weaponised by disruptive anarchists. Poetry is and has been used as a tool of social justice.

Twitter was this week bought by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, for $44bn (€42bn). We value Twitter.

We discuss its business model, its longevity, and its role in our world. We take it seriously. Poetry we deride as superfluous, for highbrow people who live in the good margins.

“The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives,” wrote Audre Lorde.

Poetry is the exact opposite of Twitter. This week, in the midst of a burning world, we celebrated Poetry Day Ireland. For all its reactivity and absence of nuance, social media is actually a great place for poetry.

It feels like a subversive little win

A few short lines of black font fit nicely onto the white-backgrounded squares of social media. Actors reciting poems on reels complete with those chunky white subtitles, what social media calls ‘captions’, also works nicely. There was Eavan Boland’s ‘Quarantine’ and that killer line, “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold”, doing the rounds.

Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything Is Going To Be All Right’ and its killer line “the sun rises in spite of everything” featured prominently too.

Our President and poet, Michael D Higgins, used social media on Poetry Day Ireland to recite one of his own poems. The caption underneath read: “Far from being marginal, poetry by its distilled use of language can help to centre us.”

This is where poetry and social media walk, talk, and look the same, but aren’t the same. Poetry distills language to its essence and brings us to our centred senses. Social media, on the other hand, reduces complex ideas to 140 characters or less and provokes reactive rage that is then capitalised to the tune of $44bn.

The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi said: “Heart is a sea, language is the shore.” 

Social scientist Brené Brown begins Atlas of the Heart, her new book covering the science behind 87 emotions, with this quote. Its interpretations are many. 

But the most agreed-upon one is that language can be life-saving. To be able to name, and make sense of, an overwhelming or painful experience via language is a form of release that can lead us to take collective action in the face of apparent powerlessness.

Poetry is not a luxury. And poetry is not to be laughed at.

In a small room in London, a group of 20-something journalists are busy saving news. Truth, in other words.

They work for the newly-founded The News Movement. It is a news network that distributes on social media platforms — think verified facts delivered via TikTok videos in under 60 seconds. Former Wall Street Journal publisher Will Lewis and former BBC News editorial director Kamal Ahmed are among its founders.

Elon Musk: New owner of Twitter. Picture: AP

The core idea is that the way we consume information has changed irrevocably. And those who have capitalised the most on the change have done so with scant regard for truth, ethics, or democracy. It’s time that those with ethics, and led by truth, learned the rules of the new game.

The News Movement is about “rethinking the traditional blueprint of journalism so that future generations are well informed”, says journalist Ian Burrell.

What’s any of this got to do with poetry in a burning world?

Poetry isn’t like Twitter, but it’s a bit like news. People who care about the world like to keep informed. But sometimes keeping informed can mean getting overwhelmed. People who care about the world also seem to care a bit about poetry too, or at least see its merits and respect its value. 

News is about truth. So is poetry.

Poetry is just a less dysregulating form of news. Poetry can make the world more palatable. Poetry can soften the world’s blows. Poetry can take us from reactive to active. In a world where facts, and action, have never been more important, our poems, in whatever form or medium, have the power to transmute our greatest fears into our greatest hopes.

“The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems.”

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