Ian McMillan: Day to find poetic words for the rhythms of life

I WAS once on the train going from Barnsley to Huddersfield and I was reading a collection of poems by Ted Hughes as we rattled along.
Ted HughesTed Hughes
Ted Hughes

The man opposite noticed what I was doing and shook his head like you might shake your head at a child who was doing something daft; then as the guard announced the names of the stations, Denby Dale, Shepley, Stocksmoor, Brockholes, Honley, Berry Brow, Lockwood and Huddersfield, the chap leaned over and said: “Now that’s poetry, kid. That’s poetry, not that stuff you’re reading.”

He was right, of course. And I was right. Ted Hughes can capture the language of Yorkshire in his descriptions of our landscape and wildlife, and the names of those stations make a poetic sound when you read them out. I tried to tell him that, but he got off at Berry Brow, still shaking his head. Behind me, a lad was listening to music on his headphones and muttering along
with the tunes, and he was as much
 of a poet as the guard or Ted, in my opinion.

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That’s why National Poetry Day is important: it gets people thinking and talking about poetry. It gets them arguing and pointing fingers as well, and that’s got to be a good thing. Let’s face it – we’re surrounded by poetry, from nursery rhymes to rap, from the kind of language that politicians and preachers use as they build resonant phrases and clauses up in bundles of three, to the chants you hear at football matches. Poetry is not just the poems you see printed in obscure poetry magazine and slim volumes of verse, it’s in any kind of heightened language that we use.

Mind you, being a poet on National Poetry Day is like being Father Christmas on Christmas Eve; people assume it’s the only day of the year that you work, and they’re determined to make full use of you.

In the past I’ve read poems on trains on NPD (as we in the know call it), I’ve lolled on a bed in a bed showroom reading poems about sleep (and 
almost falling asleep in the process because the bed was so, so comfortable and I’d been up very early), I’ve sat in a studio and spoken to dozens of local radio stations and I’ve perched on the Breakfast TV settee and read a verse about to breakfast to a nonplussed presenter in a suit. And for me the message behind these stunts, if that’s what they are, is always the same: I can write poems and read them out and you can too. Anybody can do this. Have a go. Try it yourself.

That’s the other great thing about NPD: it’s democratic, or should be at its best. It reminds us that we, as speakers and writers and readers, should be in charge of the language we use. It reminds us that language doesn’t have to be functional, that good English needn’t be boring English.

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Think about how flat and unlovely our language is becoming, smoothed out by officialdom’s flat iron.

Every meeting you go to starts with an announcement about the fire alarm, about how we’re not expecting a fire drill so if the alarm goes off it’s a real fire, and we have to assemble out in the car park. And the audience aren’t really listening because they’ve heard it all before, but they would listen if the person speaking used a vivid image about the fire, described the bell as being like the bell they used to have at school, talked about the walk to the assembly point in great detail.

Self-appointed purists would say that the serious point of the message was being diluted, but self-appointed poets like me would say that you would remember that fire announcement more than any other you’d ever heard because it was delivered in poetic language.

Let’s liven up those announcements they make in supermarkets, let’s allow station tannoys to revel in the names of the stations, let’s make official letters
just a little more playful while still retaining the essential information in the letter.

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Let’s face it, we love poetic language because it does something to that 
part of us some people call the soul; listen to wedding vows, either the traditional ones or the ones that 
people make up; read the texts and tweets that people send, full of 
rhythm and jokes and images and observations; hear people on the bus describing their adventures the night before, making a night at the pub into a ballad of lost love and battle that a troubadour would be proud of. Poetry, all of it.

So, Happy National Poetry Day to everybody reading this! Have a go at writing a poem today, or reading a poem or just saying something a little poetic. You won’t be wandering lonely, I assure you.

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