Poetry in the parks is re-launched this month.
Avondale Park and Cremorne Gardens have designated seats in them (an idea brought from Gunnersbury and Battishill Parks), and other park benches will have poetry books provided by the Library Service placed on them by the park keepers.
What is poetry? For William Wordsworth it was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ... (taking) its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”; to Steven Fry it is “a primal impulse with us all”; and to most kids on the street probably just a ‘load of old bollocks!’
All of us, I suspect, have a horror story of school lessons spent trying to come up with the answer to the question: ‘So what is the poet trying to tell us?’ Despite having had apparently meaningless nursery rhymes drilled into us as babies (“Ring - a ring of roses ...” signs of the plague! ), I suspect few were ever really inspired to look further than the classroom clock and freedom into which the slowly ticking hands would eventually release us.
I thank my Mum: she used poetry to capture my imagination and encourage me to relocate myself into a world of pea green boats that put out to sea with the owl and the pussy cat, and the like.
But poetry doesn’t just stop there!
It has the power to comment on social disasters such as in Dambudzo Marechemo’s indictment upon Robert Mugabe’s “free” Zimbabwe (The Oracle of the Povo) and even to change the world for the better: Walt Whitman’s “I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth ...” must have provided inspiration for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It has within it music: “Do you remember an inn / Miranda? / Do you remember an inn? And the tedding and the spreading / Of the straw for a bedding ...” (Hilaire Belloc).
And it has the means to capture the very essence of the passage of time as in Rupert Brooke’s “Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes, / And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands ...” or Wordsworth’s “fair lady at her casement ....doth herself divest / Of all her radiant garments, and reclines / behind the sombre screen of yonder pines ...”.
Poetry has the ability to bring order to disordered thoughts through the discipline of its various meters and forms (from acatalectics to Zen haiku). It has inspired writers such as Stephen Fry to write books on the subject (‘The Ode Less Travelled’ came out of a discussion of the components of a villanelle) and, using blank verse (“playing tennis without nets” according to Auden), it has encouraged generations to try to free themselves of one set of bonds in order to just become tied up in others: “Freedom. Freedom. Prison of the free.” (L. Durrell). Poetry can inspire or it can make you just smile; it can uplift (Blake’s Jerusalem) or make us want to weep, as Keats is reputed to have done when reading Spencer’s “sea-shouldering whale”.
So here’s my challenge: using the excuse of enjoying the fresh air that our wonderful parks and gardens provide, stop at the poetry seat and, if you haven’t done so before: read a poem.
It will change your day:
“To see a World in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.” (W. Blake).
