Change your life

… with a poem a week

If poetry is the revolution — if poets really are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, as Shelley said — it’s because poetry can reach into the places other, more easily ordered things can’t reach. Poetry deals with the essence of things. It speaks truth to power, and it also speaks truth to the powerless.

Poetry is about looking — looking at what you really see. Not just what you want to see. But then, poets can also look and see something that isn’t really, or isn’t quite, or isn’t yet, there. Visionary.

Poetry is about both replicating emotion — Wordsworth’s famous quote comes to mind: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.' This is the case for the poet, who writes it. For the reader, it can draw out emotion before you even realise what’s happening. And sometimes you may not even be sure why.

Above all, poetry is about language, taking the language and stretching it, shaping it, using it both expressively, building layers of meaning and colour like a painter, and also using it as precisely as the smallest paintbrush that makes the white glint in the corner of a sitter’s eye.

We know that because of these qualities — truth, looking, vision, emotion and language — poetry is most widely read, most widely needed, at times when things are tough, when hearts are breaking, when we most can’t understand the world. It’s most important when the big things that need saying can’t be said otherwise: under political repression, in times of change, in heavily charged moments when we need to call on symbols, draw out parallels. When we need either the past with its warnings and inspirations, or a future that doesn’t yet exist, to guide us.

Poetry is also, through language, a form of music. And music is always important.

I know on this site I’m preaching to the converted, but of course I’m tugging your sleeve gently in the direction of my rolling Thursday lunchtime discussion sessions, Poem Talk. Each week, for six weeks at a time, we read and talk about one poem. That’s it. Then we have a break of a week or so to fit things like term times, and then we have six more weeks. Although you can be, you don’t need to be a poet, or even feel like you know all about about poetry — you just have to like it, and want to talk about it for 45 minutes a week. We start up again next Thursday, the 2nd, at 1pm.

What do we read? Old poems, brand-new poems, poems from other countries and poems from down the road. Sometimes they’re poems I’ve known and loved (and taught about) for years (and still new insights keep popping up), and sometimes they’ve only just appeared in a magazine. Rhyming, free verse, even prose. Easy or ‘hard’. It’s simple.

I do believe that a simple thing like one poem a week can make a big difference throughout the rest of the days. As Rilke famously wrote in his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo: ‘You must change your life’. Why not try it — one poem at a time?

Drop me a line to sign up or find out more.