Ideas - When a poem changes your life

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Poetry can find you when you need it most. It can be life-altering. It was for six IDEAS producers who join Nahlah Ayed in studio to share their favourite poems and why they go back to it year after year. This special episode is to mark UNESCO's World Poetry Day, March 21st.

There's a healing element in salt, in sweat, in tears, in the ocean. In Halifax, being surrounded by salty water and fog is just enough grit to help polish away the pressure of to-do lists. To just make time for things that feel good, to let the salt cure whatever ails you. Halifax could be the break that finally leaves you feeling like you took one, as long as you're willing to rub salt in your wounds. Discoverhellifax.ca.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyat. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open. On the other side, silvery green broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter light, and her bark is a cross between a bay horn. It is poetry to these ears that is never heard, what passion sounds like. You are neither here nor there, a hurry through which known and street, range things pass. Red and velvety like the animal's neck she resembles. Poetry speaks to our common humanity and our shared values,

transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for dialogue and peace. That wording is from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Among UNESCO's roles is to give us a calendar of annual international, National Days, with the aim of focusing the world's attention on some important feature of human civilization and history. March 21st was World Poetry Day. UNESCO describes the purpose of World Poetry Day as an invitation to honor poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry. So in this episode, we take up that invitation and ask Ideas producers to stop what they're doing for a moment and join me in studio to share a poem.

You'll hear some voices you recognize from the show, as well as from some members of the ideas team who've never emerged from behind the scenes before. We begin with a longtime producer of lectures, interviews, and documentaries here at Ideas, Chris Wadskow. Hello, Chris Wadskow, nice to see you. Hello, nice to be here. We know you better through episodes such as Is a River Alive based on your interview with Robert McFarlane and The Mystery of Money, where you tried to help us understand what money actually is. I believe I failed. It was rather poetic, the attempt. Where does poetry fit into your life?

It doesn't so much fit into my life in the sense that it's not like I make it part of my daily routine. I don't purposely read a lot of poetry, although I did, you know, in my years as an English undergrad and grad student, read a lot of poetry. And that stuff always kind of, you know, it kind of constitutes a reservoir. You can always draw on or dip into. And one of my professors in my undergrad days had this great pithy description of what poetry was. He said poetry is natural and new. Natural and new. Natural and new.

By which he meant there's something that you could say is capital T truthful about it and intuitive. It clarifies things and makes sense, but it also is striking. It makes you see things in a different way. And so what I've always found is true of poetry is even if you're not someone who reads a lot of poetry if you're receptive and you hit upon or a poem hits you, the right poem has a way of hitting you at the right time. I like the idea of a poem being a reservoir. A reservoir for what? Well, poetry as a reservoir, actually. There are thousands and thousands of years worth of new ways of looking at the world, of wisdom, this huge pool.

of things that you can always dip into. Reservoir is kind of a weird metaphor because it's not like it's something held behind a dam. It's more like, I don't know, the cosmic microwave background. It's just sort of all surrounding. And I don't know, it's almost like there are these frequencies that if you're tuned to the right thing, it might just hit you at an opportune moment.

So receptivity has a lot to do with it. That's funny. I understood it as reservoir, as in a place, you go to when there is a need. That's how I understood Reservoir. Yeah, I think a lot of people go to poetry as solace or wisdom or I know myself, I've sometimes the one, the poet we're going to hear from Mary Oliver. She's somebody I've gone to from time to time when I've felt kind of untethered

or needed to feel a little grounded or get out of my own head. You know, all those things that we all go through at one point or another. But I've never treated poetry as sort of like a vitamin that you take every day. It's more, or even like a shot of medicine that you take when you're sick. It's more just something that's in the ether that can do amazing things for your mind if your mind is open to it. What is it about Mary Oliver that can answer those questions that you turn to poetry for? Well, she's a funny case, right? Because she is sort of like the most Oprah-friendly of poets in a lot of ways.

Is that good? Well, that depends, right? If you're a serious academic or poetry critic or something like that, no, that's not good because how great can poetry that's super accessible to anybody be? You know, the interesting thing about her is that the range of people that she speaks to. And I first came across her in a meditation class. Oh, wow. And of course, I predisposed me to kind of look down on her

because I thought, this is such a cliche, a poet about nature and a meditation class. And then sort of independent of that, I came across some of her stuff and just, okay, let me. Wow. Yeah, like there's something very accessible about it, but there's also she has the natural and new thing because she'll show you something.

that you've seen a hundred times, maybe a thousand times before it, but never actually seen before because she's paying attention to it. And so she's drawing your attention to it. And I think that's probably why she resonates with so many people is that emphasis on attention. So which poem of hers are we going to hear today? The most cliched of all, I'm afraid, the one that everybody does. Yeah, it's the poem that launched a million Instagram posts, The Summer Day. Yeah. And how are you at reading poems?

Well, let's just say nobody's going to mistake this for Stephen Fry. Without further ado, here's the summer day. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean. The one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth, instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should be? should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? If I had a dollar for the number of times I've seen that line, that question being asked of us, I'd be a very rich woman. I mean, it's been quoted in so many contexts. What does the line mean to you? It changes. When I first read it, I think I had the same reaction that a lot of people do. It was kind of like, okay, time to quit your job and gashing your RSP and just go off and do all the things that you always wanted to do but kept putting off. That's the context it's quoted in often.

Yeah, but I think, I don't know, I think there are a couple keys to it. One is her just saying how she's basically lased around all day, just looking at a grasshopper or a, or a, you know, or, you know, rolling around in a field of grass. She did write this before Lyme disease was a big deal. The three crucial words are plan, wild, and precious. And plan and wild do not work together. You can't plan something that's wild. And so I come to believe that there's actually a gentle mockery in that.

Oh, you're going to plan your life. really. You know, there are grasshoppers waiting to be looked at. And that's, you know, basically, you want to know where God is. God is in a grasshopper moving its jaws from side to side and washing its face. Is that a commentary on uncertainty of life, the unpredictability of life? Yes, but it's also a commentary on, you know, the value of paying attention. It's also a commentary on the impermanence of everything. Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Yeah. And so I think it's also, a commentary of, well, you know the old line, how do you make God laugh? Make a plan. Right. And I think she's drawing on that to a certain extent too. For me, what I've always taken from her stuff and this poem in particular, but also more broadly, is just slow down, get your mind out of that whirl, pay attention, look at what matters, and don't stress about the rest of it. Yeah. Is that partly why

this poem has held up for you over the years? Yeah, and in fact, she was one person that I did purposely read a lot when I felt at loose ends. I don't do that so much anymore, but I keep her book, my anthology of her poetry, on view. And, you know, basically I don't need to read the poem

to get the lesson. Like, it's become almost this mnemonic device for me. I see the book and I immediately feel calmer. It's true. books are amazing technologies for that, right? They are. Look at the cover and you're taken right back into this story or these people or these poems or this wisdom. That's what it does for me.

Like it's a grounding kind of thing without even reading it. Just one last thing. There are people out there who struggle with poetry, who struggle to find meaning in the words, sometimes abstract words of poets. What's your advice? besides the fact that Mary Oliver is so accessible, what's your advice for people who don't often turn to poetry? Not all poetry is complicated.

And sometimes the ambiguity is the point. And sometimes that's an uncomfortable place and sometimes that's a liberating place because you can bring whatever you want to it. And also, you know, there is a kind of freedom in something not having to mean something. You know, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, these are people who are, you know, you don't have to be well-versed in anything to get something from them. Mary Oliver, certainly, there's very little esoteric about her.

There's very little complicated or difficult about her. And some people would say that's to a detriment. And other people would say, well, that actually is part of the power of it. Somebody once said, I can't remember who said this, but some poets obscure Mary Oliver clarifies. And so, yeah, good poetry can also not just complicate things or make it more obscure. It can also crystallize things. And sometimes ambiguity is the point. Words well chosen.

Thank you, Chris Walskeau. Thank you. Producer Annie Bender joins me now in the studio. Hello, Annie. Hi. And just to give you some. sense of Annie's work, if you haven't heard it on the show. She's made episodes on everything from the number zero to the problem of reading in the digital age and about most recently earthworms.

Indeed. Can't wait to hear that one. So it's fair to say that you have a very distinct angle on things. Oh, well, I try. What is your angle on poetry? Like, what draws you in? I've liked poetry always. There's so many layers to the way I feel about poetry, just like there's so many layers to poetry itself. The base layer, I think, that drew me in from the youngest age was just the playfulness of poetry. It's a space to kind of mess around with language and delight in all the different ways you can say something that I always found really fun. I also really enjoy making found poetry, which is when you just kind of cut up a newspaper or any other kind of text and take the words and rearrange them.

That's cool. How often do you do that? Not as often as I would like, but, you know, like once or twice a year. I like to get out my scissors and my glue stick. Does it work? Do incredible wisdoms kind of emerge of nowhere? Wisdoms, maybe not, but some delight for sure. I find it really fun to just kind of, again, yeah, play around with language in that way.

but of course there's also a deeper satisfaction that comes from reading poetry that almost feels like a shot of mindfulness. Like every poem is so dense and has so much contained in it that I find it can never read more than like one or two at a time. But they just pull you out of the esoteric headspace that it's so easy to find yourself in as you're trying to make sense of everything that's going on in the world and kind of pulls you down. to focus in on one particular moment or idea or thought in a way that I find really healing, actually, like really helpful. I crave it sometimes when it's rainy, sometimes when it's sunny. I think it can be contingent on how much time I have as well. If I have a quiet, slow morning, that's the most opportune time because you can really

read a poem and sit with it in a way that you don't necessarily always have time to do. I wouldn't say that I'm prescribing poetry for myself, but it does seem to find me in the moments when I need it. So before we get into it, what is the name of the poem you've chosen for us, and why did you choose this one? The poem that I've chosen to read is called salvage. It's by a poet named Ada Limon,

who was a two-time poet laureate of the United States from 2022 to 2025. As with all poems, This is a poem that contains multitudes and that I think anyone can find something in that speaks to them, regardless of the intention of the poet. But the poet herself was writing about climate change,

which is a subject matter that I find personally is incredibly difficult to make sense of and therefore a subject that I think poetry is uniquely equipped to help us find our way through. Well, let's have a listen. This is salvage by Ada Limont, read by Annie Bender. On the top of Mount Pisga, on the western slope of the Mayakamas, there's a madrone tree that's half burned from the fires,

half alive from nature's need to propagate. On one side of her is black ash, and at her root is what looks like a cavity hollowed out by flame. On the other side, silvery green broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter light, and her bark is a cross between a bay horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety like the animal's neck she resembles. Staring at the tree for a long time now, I'm reminded of the righteousness I had before the scorch of time. I miss who I was. I miss who we all were before we were this, half alive to the brightening sky, half dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize,

I apologize to the tree. To my own self, I say. I am sorry. I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life. Beautifully, beautifully read. It's a very sad poem. It's a melancholy poem. Yeah. What line kind of speaks to you in all of this? Is a lot there. It's the last line. Yeah. The apology. I'm sorry I have been so reckless with your life. Yeah. You know, it is an apology. Almost like on behalf of us all, I think, in a way. She's speaking for herself to a tree, but she's also speaking on behalf in a sense of humanity in the reckless way that we've been treating our environment.

And the earth. But I think when I first read this poem, and this is getting at the way you can kind of take whatever you want from a poem, on first read, I found myself just thinking about that line, this idea of recklessness in the context of one's own life. And I wasn't even really thinking. about climate change when I first read the poem. I was just thinking about this question of how we spend our time and the way that minutes build up into a life and how easy it is to pass the time without thinking deeply about what it is that one wants from one's life. This kind of ties in actually with another poem that I think was discussed in this episode by Mary Oliver. The Summer Day. Where she talks about this question of what we want to do with are one wild and beautiful life.

I actually found in this poem, even though it is a sad poem and that line can be read, that apology of having been sorry to have been so reckless, there's also an invitation to think about what you want from your life

and how you can, you know, live your life in a way that feels more meaningful and thoughtful. And I think that's actually why I liked the poem. You can read it and just think pure sorrow, but that's not actually how I felt.

when I read it. Poetry isn't for everyone, or so it seems, on kind of the occasion or post-occasion of UNESCO World Poetry Day. What's your prescription to those who maybe don't interact with poetry very much? Yeah, I think I really am a huge fan of poetry. And I think there are maybe kind of gateway poets in the same way that. you can reach for something that's a little bit more accessible. And that would be, I think, what I would generally say to people. And there's a poet I really like who I easily could have brought in today as well named Billy Collins,

who's another former U.S. Poet Laureate. And his poems are, they're very accessible and they're fun, they're playful. But I do think, you know, in the same way that experts say walking in a forest is really good for one's health, I genuinely believe there's something to that with poetry as well. Poetry bathing. Yeah. Kind of like nature bathing. Yeah, I love that.

I love that. Yeah, I think that's true. And I would just say, you know, just have to find, think about what tickles you with language. Like there's got to be, I guess not everyone is like that. But I really do think that language can be fun. And if nothing else, poetry can just be fun. Like it can be goofy too, right? So it doesn't all have to be poems about climate change and, you know, the, the, the, our waxing youth.

It doesn't all have to be that. So finding, you know, even looking at children's poetry where it's really just more about play, it might be a good way in. Wonderful advice. Annie, thank you so much for coming in. Oh, my pleasure. And look who's joining me here in the studio. Hello.

Hi, Sam. Sam McNulty is our technical. producer. Hi. Hi. Nice to have you on this side of the glass. It is so weird being on this side of the glass. And also weird to hear myself in headphones. You know what? You sound supernatural. Yay. Should we start with your poem? Is this your favorite poem? Is that or is this a poem you like? I mean, I don't know a whole lot of poetry. So I wouldn't say it's my favorite poem because I haven't read enough. But this is one that I think about a lot. So I heard this out on a remote. I was doing a Giller Prize remote. So I was doing a Giller Prize remote. So I I was there teching the show and Rupi Carr. She was doing a live reading of one of her poems called Broken English. And I wasn't really super familiar with her work outside of Instagram and what I saw my friends posting. And so I heard her voice and I happened to tune in and I found that it really spoke to me. It's basically about coming to understand your immigrant parents as an adult.

Oh, yes. I look for it to hearing it. Yes. Please. Okay. Here is Sam McNulty with reading Broken English. Okay. In like two brackets, they faced one another.

To hold the dearest parts of them, their children close, they turned a suitcase full of clothes into a life and regular paychecks to make sure that the children of immigrants wouldn't hate them for being children of immigrants. They work too hard, you can tell by their hands, their eyes were begging for sleep, but our mouths were begging to be fed, and that is the most artistic thing I have seen. It is poetry to these ears that is now. never heard, what passion sounds like, and my mouth is full of likes and ums when I look at their masterpiece, because there are no words in the English language that can articulate that kind of

beauty. I can't compact their existence into 26 letters and call it a description. I tried once, but the adjectives needed to describe them don't even exist. Instead, I ended up with pages and pages full of words followed by commas and more words and more commas, only to realize that there are some things in the world, so infinite, they can never use a full stop. So how dare you mock your mother when she opens her mouth and broken English spills out? Don't be ashamed of the fact that she spit through countries to be here, so you wouldn't have to cross a shoreline. Her accent is thick like honey.

Hold it with your life. It's the only thing she has left from home. Don't you stomp on that richness. Instead, hang it up on the walls of museums next to Dolly and Vango. Her life is brilliant and tragic, kiss the side of her tender cheek. She already knows what it sounds like to have an entire nation laugh when she speaks. She's more than our punctuation and language. We might be able to paint pictures and write stories, but she made an entire world for herself.

So how is that for art? Yeah. How is that for art? How is that for art? Yeah, I find this poem very touching. I think I had a very complicated relationship with my immigrant parent. mom and this poem came to me at a time where I wasn't speaking to her anymore for, you know, reasons.

And I think I just heard this poem at the right time and it made me re-understand the struggles that she went to. There's like this line early on in the poem, they turned a suitcase full of clothes into a life and regular paychecks to make sure that the children of immigrants wouldn't hate them for being the children of immigrants. And I think that's a funny line because in some ways I think it's kind of inevitable that there's going to be a conflict there between an immigrant parent and a child who's grown up in a completely different country and context. And I think I held that against my mom for a long time and not understanding her perspective and how different a world she was stepping into and what world I grew up in and having to consolidate and think about that as a kid. Like that's impossible.

You would never know that, but as an adult looking back, I'm like, oh, wow. It was really hard on her. Yeah. Yeah. Such a personal interaction of the poem. I just wonder if you could just say what that tells us about the power of poetry, what it can do? I think it can call attention to things that you weren't able to pay attention to or don't usually pay attention to. So there's like poems about nature or being present, and this one's about, I think, healing in a way.

coming to a different perspective on something. Yeah, beautiful. Thank you for bringing it. No problem. The power of poetry in action. Our episode today is an honor of World Poetry Day. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

There's a healing element in salt, in sweat, in tears, in the ocean. In Halifax, being surrounded by salty water and fog is just enough grit to help polish away the pressure of to-do lists, to just make time for things that feel good, to let the salt cure whatever ails you. Halifax could be the break that finally leaves you feeling like you took one, as long as you're willing to rub salt in your wounds.

Discoverhellifax.ca. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News Podcast, Frontburner. I got this really cool note from a listener the other day. They wrote, I find myself torn between the desire to understand the world around me and the anxiety associated with the easily access barrage of terrible news. And yet, amidst the torrent, there lies a sweet spot called Front Burner. This is exactly why we make the show. So you don't get swept away in a tide of overwhelming news. So follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. Poetry Documentary is a rare subgenre of ideas episodes, but a genre it is. My next guest has

contributed more poetry episodes than most in recent years, including the story of the first good poem in the English language, also one about a writer who was arguably Canada's saddest poet, Emil Naligand, and a hunt for poems to respond to feelings of generalized yearning during wintertime, an episode called Fire Side and Icicles. He was also once the official poetry correspondent for CBC's The Next Chapter during that show's early years. The person I'm speaking of is documentary maker Tom Howell. Hello, Tom.

Hello. You, of all the members of this team, have a relationship with poetry that goes beyond maybe the average persons. What is your relationship to poetry? In my 20s, I decided I was going to marry a poet. Yes. And so I structured my social life around hanging around lots of poets. And in order to do that, I had to read their work. Otherwise, talking to them would be embarrassing.

Did you ever try writing poetry? Writing it myself? Yeah. No, that wasn't necessary. I see. You just have to read. Yeah. Right.

And what is the poem that you're turning to today that you brought to us? You know what's annoying? Because I went looking for my favorite poem, but I've forgotten what it is. All I can remember is it has a line in it about puddles with roofs that are made of glass or something. It's like glass roofed puddles. I googled there. I looked in all. It's in a book that's in my house.

It's this poem I come across every few years and then think, oh, this is my favorite poem. And then I'm going to remember it this time. And then I can never find it when I go looking for it. How annoying. Very. But while looking through anthologies trying to find that, whatever that poem is, I did come across one of my true heroes, William Dunbar, who is the – you know, Chaucer? You've heard of Jeffrey Chaucer, I imagine. Of course.

He was sort of a famous writer in Middle English. It wasn't middle at the time, but it is now. Dunbar followed right on his heels in Scotland at a time when Edinburgh was the cultural centre of the world. He wrote a hilarious battle of words, kind of like distrax with another Scottish poet where they just try to be as rude as possible to each other in verse. And that is a treasured thing called the flighting of Dunbar and Kennedy. Three years later, the poor Dunbar was on his deathbed or thought he was. He actually lived 12 more years. But he thought he was on his deathbed.

And he turned to poetry in just one of those moments like you're supposed to. do, you know. And so he wrote this very profound poem called Lament for the Makers. I'm afraid I don't read it in the spirit in which it was written. I think it's kind of funny. That was not the spirit it was written in. No. No. Not the way, I mean, I suppose we don't know inside his head, but I think he was genuinely worried about dying. Dying is one of those topics that's so serious, but then you've got morbid humor, right? Like you've got this sort of thing where weirdly humor is supposed to do something for us about dying maybe sometimes. I mean, you don't make a joke at a funeral, but we do make jokes about death.

Like, I think that's an interesting little tension. And so when I read someone writing a poem that's just so much about death, it's just so sad. To me, it's sort of funny. And the other reason is that I want to read this poem is that I have this rule about not whenever you're reading something, especially in public, you're not allowed to do an accent. Right.

So you can't read a Seamus Heaney poem, for instance, and put on an Irish accent. Note for Greg Kelly. This is not written in straightforward English. Yeah, it was written in what seemed like straightforward English to Dunbar in the year of 1,508, when he spoke a Scottish dialect of English. And it actually doesn't make sense if you don't put on an accent. Okay. Well, we'll make an exception. So here's Lament for the Makers by William Dunbar, read by Tom Howell.

Well, here's without the accent. I that inhale was in gladness, I'm troubled now with great sickness and feeble it with infirmity. Timor Mortis conturbate me. And what that means is I was in hail. It means you were healthy. Trublet means you were troubled. Feeblit means you were enfeebled. And then the last bit is in Latin, so you're not supposed to understand that.

Do you ever do anything that's straightforward? No. Okay. Just check it. Go ahead. I that in hail was in gladness I'm troubled now with great sickness

and feeble it with infirmity Timor mortis conturbate me Timor mortis conturbate me actually means the fear of death has got me Second verse Our pleasance here is all vain glory This false world is but transitory The flesh is brookle

The feigned is slay Timor mortis conturbate me The flesh is bruckle means that the flesh is frail. And the fiend here is just the devil, everything that's bad. You know, the death haunting you. And our pleasance here is all vain glory.

All pleasure is not going to last. You're going to die. The state of man does change and vary. Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now seri. Seri means sad. Now dance and merry, now like to die. Timor mortis conturbate me. I might be doing an Irish accent.

It does sound a bit Irish, but it's still a pleasing sounding accent. Well, thank you. That's very kind and not at all true. That line, by the way, does stick with me. Now dance and merry, now like to die. Can you think of a more pithy encapsulation of that tension between joy and the fact that we're all going to die? Like, the turn there. Now dance and merry, now we're happy and we're dancing. Now like to die. And then we die. like it really sums it up isn't it it sure does the fear of death so that was three verses there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve are you actually going to read this whole thing 17 18 19 just a second 20 21 22 23 24 there's 25 of these verses I sort of feel we

might have to cut yes maybe can you do six you've done three do three more Sure. I'll just do them maybe without chatting. Yes. And we can talk about it after. But it is nice, though, because it really is hard to understand what he's saying. So it is kind of nice to have the explanation. He takes us the knifths into the field, enarm it under helm and shield. Victor, he is, of all melee, timur-mottis conturb of me. That strong and merciful tyrant take us on the mother's breast, so can't,

the babe full of benignity timor mortis could tell about me he takers the campion in the stower the cap'nclothes in the tower the lady in bower full of bow tie actually that's a line i might pause on because when i first read it a long time ago i was very confused he take us he is the death-taker he take us the champion in the stower the champion in the stower in the conflict so the champion goes in fights dies the captain closet in the tower the captain who's shut up in the tower. And then the lady in bower full of bowtie, I pictured a lady in a bower wearing a bowtie, which was very poignant. I was like, this nice lady, I assume, did not, you know, it was not common to wear bow ties at the time. And yet she's going to die as well. There's nothing you can do, you know, doesn't matter how quirky you are. It's coming for you. But of course, bow tie is the old Scottish word for beauty. So that's what it means. And the poem then just goes on to list a bunch of poets who he likes and who are now dead. And he makes the point that doesn't matter how much you like poetry or how clever you are or how good your verse is.

You're going to die too. You too. I look forward to you remembering what your favorite poem is and bringing that to us one day. Something about puddles. Tom Howell, thank you so much. Happy Poetry Day. Happy Poetry Day. Next up to help us celebrate World Poetry Day, the newest edition to the team at Ideas.

Maybe you've heard her already on the CBC podcast, see you in court, or in her many years as a journalist and producer with dispatches, white coat black art, and the Sunday magazine. She's recently made documentaries for ideas about the Wizard of Oz and the Matilda Effect. It's Donna Dingwall. Hello, Donna. Hello. Where does poetry live in your life? I've come to poetry a lot, frankly, maybe because of listening to CBC. You know, Eleanor Wachtell, you know, people, like John O'Donoghue, who was on tapestry a lot. Oh, wow.

You know, finding them through fiction to, you know, Margaret Outwood and Chima Amanda and Ngozi Adichie, one of my favorite writers, didn't know that she wrote poetry and then discovered that. Incredible. I didn't know that either. Yeah. What do all those people or poems have in common? Like, what draws you into the idea of poetry and poetry itself? I don't. I think, I mean, emotion and language is what it comes.

comes down to a lot. And poetry is just something that I think it either speaks to you or it doesn't. And I don't mean as a whole, I mean sort of with individual poems that either speak to you or they don't. Yeah. And they tell you different things, don't they? Especially depending on what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Are there moments when you find yourself reaching for poetry? Like you think the only way this moment could pass is with the help of a poet? I don't know. I feel like maybe I stumble into it sometimes. And then I make that discovery. And I do find maybe as I get older, you know, I have a local bookstore that I go to and I do check out their poetry section, which I probably wouldn't have done in the past. Yeah, but I think sometimes poetry finds you when you need it. And it might be social media too. Like I find I do follow some poetry feeds. And so, you know, it's more likely to find you if you're scrolling, which is kind of a strange thing to say about poetry. but it's just the reality we live in now, I guess.

It's called the algorithm. Yes. Somehow I get Mary Oliver all the time. Anyway, we're not going to analyze that. Everybody loves Mary Oliver. It's true. Yeah, it's true. But that's not who you've come in with.

No. So I'd like to know what poem you've chosen and why this particular poem. The poem that I've chosen is called Prayer for a New Mother. It is by Dorothy Parker. I am a fan of Dorothy Parker. And this is quite a deposition. I think from the kind of poetry that people know her for or how they know her. Which is what?

Yeah. I mean, for people who don't know her, she was kind of a member of the famed Algonquin Roundtable where the New Yorker magazine was birthed and she was one of the early writers for the New Yorker contributing both fiction and poetry. And I think drama criticism and other criticism. She had worked at Vanity Fair before that. Famously got fired for being too critical, I think, and too sharp and too biting, which was kind of the hallmark of her work, too. Yeah, part of the job. But, you know, she is known for being very quippy and very ironic. Don't look at me in that tone of voice. Yes, yes. And, yeah, I had a, you know, she says, if you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gave it to. that kind of thing.

Precisive. Yeah, not the poem that I chose, but the one that she's sort of best known for is, you know, it's very, very dark, I will say. So a bit of a warning. It's, you know, razors pain you, rivers are damp, acid stain you, drugs cause cramp, guns aren't lawful, nuses give gas smells awful, you might as well live. Very dark. Wow. I think that is sort of how people know her sort of very caustic, quite dense. depressive, wrote a lot about her own mental health. So, but the poem that I chose, like I said,

is quite a departure. And I think maybe unfairly she's known in this one way because I don't think that her work is entirely the way that people perceive it. So I'll, I will read you this poem. Okay. Maybe before you start, how would you, how would you like to set it up? So I think this is a later poem of hers. I came to this poem. I can't even remember. but I know that I read it or re-read it after my son was born. And just for context, my son was born a few days before Christmas, actually 20 years ago. Wow. And my own mother passed away a few weeks after that. Maybe this was one of the ones that, I don't know if the algorithms were in play then, but it's something that I, maybe I came across around Mother's Day of that year and I kind of kept coming back to it. So I reread it, you know, around that time. often. So it is called prayer for a new mother. The things she knew let her forget again. The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold, the gaping shepherds and the queer old men,

piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold. Let her have laughter with her little one, teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing, grant her the right to whisper to her son the foolish names one dare not call a king. Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd, the smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red, the thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud that wraps the strange new body of the dead. Let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go, and boast his pretty words and ways and plan the proud and happy years that they shall know together when her son is grown a man. Thank you for sharing something so personal. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, obviously when you hear the poem, this is a poem that is about a mother. And in this case, the mother of Christ, Mary. And I'm not particularly religious. I don't believe Dorothy Parker was. I think she did go to a convent school as a child. Right. believe no harm will come to their child. And I think I also, you know, rereading it thought a little bit about, and certainly this wasn't in play when Dorothy Parker wrote it, just the way that we

think about motherhood now and the pressures that we feel as mothers and that same kind of focus on how we conduct ourselves as mothers, that the pressure that Mary may have felt herself. Like, I don't think it's removed from how we see things today, especially where motherhood is kind of performative online and in different places. And I even think about just that idea of, like, she's kind of the first celebrity mother. It's so true. And that there is now a history of that, too, if you look at people like, I don't know, like Princess Diana or any celebrity you can name, there is this great deal of scrutiny on motherhood.

And just the idea of asking for some kind of protection, like that idea of just having a cocoon with your child where you can just bond one on one and be in the moment is kind of how it spoke to me. And that idea, too, I think, because I was also thinking about loss at that time that It's so fleeting that time that you have with your child and with your parent, right? Yeah. Well, it all comes through. I mean, I have never read this poem before, but even from the title onwards,

and especially the part where it says, let her have laughter with her little one, teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing. It's a prescription, you know, as you say, a protective one. And it's not about Mary. It's about everyone. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Thank you, Donna. Thank you.

It was wonderful. Thanks. So you would have heard the name of my next guest on every episode we do. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, meaning it's really up to him to decide what's on the show and what isn't, including this show. Hello, Greg. Hi, Nala. I know that poetry fits into your life because for the past, I don't know how long, I've seen this big, fat book on your desk. We'll talk about the title in a minute.

But I know it fits into you. Where does poetry fit into your world? Late at night is usually when I can, for you. find the time that makes sense. You're alone with the poem. It doesn't really work if you're driving because you have to pay attention to the road. It doesn't really work if you're on a train either. It's too clanging and too jumpy to you. It needs some solitude. I think Wordsworth was right. It needs some kind of solitude to ingest it. Is this a daily activity? No. If I wake up in the middle of night, I won't crack open a book or read a loose leaf. But I find it's a kind of end-of-day

punctuation mark. How does it serve as a punctuation mark? Even if a poem is about something very disturbing or even if it sketches something painful, it's still cordoned off from the day. It's still, poetry by definition, is not daily language. Biblical Hebrew is not every day, you know, keeping tabs of grain shipments coming in or a number of pieces of wood cut that day. It isn't like that. I remember going to the wedding of a cousin. I have a million cousins and there was a whole spade of them because we're roughly in the same span of age. And my uncle, the bride's dad, got up engineering background and recited a poem he had written for his daughter. And it was absolutely appalling as poetry, as poetry. But that snotty reflex immediately gave way to,

oh, like he's reaching. It is language that is accessible to the everyday experience, but it is not of the every day. You are trying to go somewhere with it and remove it out of time to speak to us in time. It's interesting. That's when we turn to poetry, isn't it? Weddings, funerals, important moments.

Transitional moments. Are there moments beyond the nocturnal habit that you turn? Loss. Moments of loss, which accumulate as you get older. and sometimes beginnings, births, but also sometimes these other harder to define times when it's, one is alone, not lonely, but solitude. And so it could be at the cottage when I'm the only person on the lake, floundering as I try to paddleboard and not make too much noise or hit my foot with the paddle.

And a line will come into my head or you're ready to hear it. And it's like you've just stilled yourself and are now open to what can course through you. Wow. And there is one particular poet. Again, I'll reference this fat book on your desk that you turn too often. Who is that? That's Seamus Heaney. This is the big, recently published, big, big, ultra collection of his works. Originally from a collection called The Spirit Level, and it is appropriately the last poem in that book, and it's called PostScript. Appropriately as well. Yeah. Well, here is PostScript by Seamus Heaney, read by Greg. Kelly. From memory. And some time, make the time, to drive out west into County Clare.

Along the flaggy shore in September or October, when the wind and the light are working off each other, so that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter. And inland, among stones, the surface of a slate gray lake is lit by the earth lightning of a flock of swans. Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white. Their fully grown, headstrong-looking heads tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, a hurry through which known and strange things pass as big, soft buffetings come at the car sideways and catch the heart of guard

and blow it open. Why do you know that by heart? Because you have to. The first time I read it, it was like, oh, it almost feels like it's knocking on the door of your psyche to come on in. And I still find it. There's something new. Every single time I go back to it. It's astonishing.

I got the sense that you weren't just recalling the poem, but you were feeling it. Yeah, I think Haney is known for his sensation-inducing. way with words. I know every one of those words. They're totally comprehensible and I could never arrange them that way. And part of the appeal and part of the power is the way that he'll do these doublings and sometime make the time. County Clare, Ocean on one side, inland lake, white on white, roughed ruffling, that crucial and deliberate and beautiful ambiguity where the it refers, of course, to the car and to the heart being blown open. And there's always something that. there. It is so rich, and yet it reads, if you rearranged it on the page, it could read like a

paragraph if you really wanted to do that, right? So, and I think it embodies that which it talks about. It has movement and speed in it and then catch the heart up and blow it out. And it's got this kind of, you can almost feel the wind coming at you. Is that what was expected from reading poetry? Should it always be felt? No. Or is the aimed to have it felt? I don't have a way to answer that question. I don't think anybody does. I think it's, there's probably an infinitude of reasons that you could go to. But at its most powerful, at least for me, there's something that seeps under the skin that you might not even be able to articulate, but you feel that E. Cummings with, you know, anyone lived in a pretty how town with upside floating many bells down. I don't really know how to translate that,

but it just, it's almost got the power of a nursery rhyme where the rhythm, there's a cellular response to it, you know. What do you think he means by catching the heart off guard and blowing it open. You'd have to ask him that. What meaning do you draw from it? What I draw from it is to me it feels like an invitation to be the car, that there's so much of life that you can't make sense of loss that springs itself upon you unexpectedly and unjustifiably a traffic jam.

And yet, and yet with these divergent, disparate and sometimes even oppositional forces that can enact themselves in your life, there can be, on occasion. this magical effect where the car door against your will will open. And that is what the heart can do if it itself is prepared to be open. Not just open, but blown open. Blown open. Yeah. Last two questions.

It's titled PostScript, and it starts with the word and. Ah, yes. I'm glad you noticed that. Postcript to what? Well, exactly. Exactly. It's continuous. One definition of a myth is that it's a story that is always happening.

and it is as though this poem takes place in a continuous moment and some time. Part of a conversation. It's part of an internal conversation. What is it that brings you back over and over to Seamus Heaney? Oh, because even a cursory reading in a bookstore, I'll get something from it. And years later, even after I've memorized or tried to memorize it, there's still something being offered. And when I say new, new feeling, it's not like a new piece of data, but a feeling anew from it, that there's something like afresh and the experience of doing so. And I think it provokes, inspires, and fosters and engenders the feeling of wonderment itself, which is what it's pointing us towards.

And if you go through the poem and speak the words out loud, the wonderment is in your skin. World Poetry Day, for those who don't read poetry, what should it mean to the average person? Well, what should it mean to the average person? Well, if you're finding poetry difficult, find something that's not so difficult. And you'll see why, even nursery rhymes, not even, or hallmark cards, which are bad poetry, but it is reaching to something. It's out of the ordinary. And rhyming couplets, even a limerick.

A limerick can do something, even if it's foul or ribald or coarse or vulgar even, but you can't do what a limerick does with just ordinary speech. You can't. Yates, W.B. Yates, the famous dictum, you can refute Hagell, but you cannot refute sing the song of Sixpence. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And it's a mess that he's in charge of anything. Thank you, Greg. Thank you. That's wonderful. And thank you for listening as we took a pause to Mark Unesco's World Poetry Day. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Tom Howell. You can find all those poem recommendations on our website,

cbc.ca.c.com. Ideas. Technical production, Sam McNulty and Emily Carvasio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the exact. executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.