‘In our world of tweets and texts, poets guard against devaluation of language’

Olivia O’Leary, host of a new radio show dedicated to poetry, celebrates its power and how poetry is often used to carry the big occasion

ON my office shelves there are some bulky files, four decades full of party political manifestos and promises. Some promises have been kept but many have not, and the empty words sit there, getting emptier by the year.

So maybe I have reached a stage in my life where I want words to mean something, and to keep their meaning for more than the span of an election or a government term. Good journalism is about truth. Good poetry is about truth. Maybe that’s why I was so pleased to be given the chance to present The Poetry Programme.

Poets think about what they say. They calculate the weight and effect of a word as carefully as a jewellery maker chooses a gemstone. Look at how Colette Bryce describes the early morning city air: “An aftertaste of traffic taints the city’s breath.”

Poets hear the music in a word or in a colloquial phrase. “D’ye mind the sally rod?” shouts Seamus Heaney’s old schoolmate in Senior Infants as the two men, now in their 60s, remember the teacher who used to punish them with a willow cane.

And in a tweeting, texting world where words and sentences are often replaced by exclamation marks, smiley faces and acronyms, and where language is replaced by jargon, poets will often be the ones who guard against the devaluation and degradation of language and explore its full power and potential.

I began to read poetry seriously when I was ill. A good friend brought me some poetry books and I found that the short form of many poems suited my limited attention span. But they did something more.

Poems can make time stand still. They can capture a moment. And when a shadow hangs over you like cancer, a poem can remind you to live in each moment, to realise that life, short or long, is made of such moments. Poems are powerful. When a poet pares down words to fit within a chosen frame, those words have to carry a big weight. They are turbo-charged with meaning. That’s why people quote poetry all the time.

Politicians love Yeats so he was quoted by Albert Reynolds at the time of the IRA ceasefire; by Michael Noonan at the time of the bailout; by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. People quote poetry at weddings, funerals. Poetry can carry the big occasion. It has what every big occasion needs: formality and feeling.

Eavan Boland talks about a poet’s responsibility to formalise the truth; about poets using form to make music of feeling. She, almost more than any other Irish poet, can be credited with extending the canon of poetry to include not only the public sphere but domestic life: kitchens and suburban gardens and children being called in at bedtime and babies being fed in the middle of the night — in other words, the lives of many women as well as of men.

I know I am lucky to have been born into a time when poetry reflects my life as a woman and when we have seen the emergence of such strong women poets in Ireland. Of course, they were always there. You only have to read Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire by Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill to know that. But now as well as Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, we have generations of fine female as well as male poets, and we’ll be featuring both on the Poetry Programme this autumn and winter.

We will fit as many poems in each programme as we can manage, and as many poets reading their own poems as possible.

Yes, we’ll also speak about poetry, but poems must speak for themselves first. You miss the music of a poem if you don’t hear it read out loud, and the best person to read it, it seems to me, is the person who wrote it. I’m thinking in particular of one wonderfully rumbustious poem, Song for a Dirty Diva, read in her glorious Glasgow accent by former Scottish Makar (or Poet Laureate) Liz Lochhead, who features on one of our first programmes.

We’ll also be hearing Northern poet Frank Ormsby read from his new collection, The Darkness of Snow. However, with a view to my twin obsessions of politics and poetry, we’ll be concentrating in our first programme on political poetry, and whether poetry can influence events or merely forecast them, and where the line is drawn between poetic truth and propaganda. Who are my favourite poets? Rather than favourite poets, I think I have favourite poems: Walt Whitman’s A Song for all Seas, all Ships; Louis MacNeice’s Entirely; Moya Cannon’s Lament; Derek Mahon’s Dreams of a Summer Night; Sinead Morrissey’s The Mayfly; Kerry Hardie’s The High Pyrenees; Michael Longley’s Fifty Years; Colette Bryce’s Derry; Joan Margarit’s Woman of Spring; Paula Meehan’s The Pattern; Peter Fallon’s The Company of Horses; Seamus Heaney’s Punishment.

Heaney, who did so much to advance the cause of poetry, talked all the time about its life-giving nature. In a book he kindly signed for me, he wrote: “This is how poems help us to live.”

And writing about Elizabeth Bishop in his Oxford Lectures series, The Redress of Poetry , he says: “She does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life, to that even more profoundly verifying point where it helps us also to endure it.”

And that surely is the power of great poetry: its ability to help us face life’s mysteries of love and loss; its ability to capture in one poem some of the contradictions we have to live with every day; its ability to capture a moment, and, just for a moment, to make time stand still.

‘The power of great poetry is its ability to help us face life’s mysteries’