BBC Radio 4 2016-07-02

Good Morning. (Apologies for the voice – it comes from being Welsh on the morning after.)

Poetry… is having a moment. After the shootings in Orlando last month, thousands of people began sharing a poem called Good Bones, by American writer Maggie Smith. It records some of the dark truths in life that a parent would rather their child remain blissfully ignorant of...

‘For every kind stranger,’ she writes, ‘There is one who would break you
Though I keep this from my children...’

The viral acclaim for Good Bones was matched by a poem from Brian Bilston, often called ‘the poet laureate of Twitter’.

Bilston comes up with images to symbolise different countries – ‘England is a cup of tea, France, a wheel, of ripened brie’ - in a poem baldly titled 'America is a Gun’.

The confluence of these troubled times with a vibrant social media, also casts established poets into new light. Philip Larkin’s The Mower was rediscovered after the tragic death of MP Jo Cox.

‘We should be careful of each other,’ writes Larkin, ‘We should be kind, while there is still time.’

In days of uncertainty, when one shock follows another and we find ourselves winded, on the ropes, many of us turn to poetry.

Politicians prescribe, journalists analyse and academics hypothesize... but the poet mainly describes.

She imagines another kind of world, divining good words when most of us are struck dumb.

That’s why we turn to poetry at weddings or funerals.
And unlike politics, poetry isn’t binary. It doesn’t bully you with its either / ors.

Instead, as Geoffrey Hill, who died yesterday, put it - in ‘The Triumph of Love’ - poems ‘console us with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.’

It’s true, that like religion, poetry can become rarefied and pretentious but with a little shove from social media, it’s also finding a new home in the ordinary, where religion once was. When, it too, was a poem.

What are the Book of Psalms, the stories of Genesis or the parables of Jesus if not poetry? Think of it this way, said the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz: ‘For a poet a human being is a mystery and this is a religious feeling.’

In nervy days like ours, poetry takes on a psalmlike quality. Like good religion, it says things we hadn’t guessed were sayable. It becomes a compass to help navigate the stormiest weather.

A Psalm – or a poem – can orientate you, says theologian Walter Bruegemann – it can remind you where you’re going.

And it can dis-orientate you – it can turn you upside down.

But sometimes it will utterly re-orientate you. That’s when it gives us another way of seeing, suggests another road to take.

‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’