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Kei Miller
Kei Miller, author of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Kei Miller, author of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Only connect – poetry's hidden power to break down barriers

This article is more than 8 years old

Poetry’s delicate dance between the said and the unsaid opens up new ways of thinking across disciplinary boundaries, says Ruth Padel

Poetry connects. Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve seen poems making bonds between people and disciplines. At a conference between the Poetry Society and English Place-Name Society, everyone got on like a house on fire, discovering their shared faith in the importance of syllables. Lovers, too, get together over poems, for Orpheus draws everyone towards him and brings his audience together. Whenever the same poem matters to two people, it generates a bond between unspoken affinities, for an effective poem doesn’t put all its wares in the window. It is a delicate calibration of heard and unheard, sound and thought, combining the clarities of day with its mysteries of night which depend on internal and associative connections. On first reading you may only sense these, like catching the glint of lacquerware in candlelight, responding to something you can’t understand unless you’re in shadow.

That’s why King’s College London is hosting a series of events called Poetry and … . Taking place in the extraordinary fusion of byzantine and gothic in Gilbert Scott’s chapel, we have two speakers, usually a poet and someone from another field aware of poetry’s relevance to their work. Each talks from their own perspective, reads poems which bear on the territory, and the ideas fertilise in the middle. Last summer it was Poetry and Climate Change, Poetry and Science, Poetry and Origins. Now it’s Poetry and History with Roy Foster, Poetry and Mapping with Jerry Brotton and poet Kei Miller, author of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, and finally Poetry and Connection with psychiatrist Sushrut Jadhav, who works with marginalised communities – the homeless in London, Dalits in India.

The way psychiatrists listen for connections that open routes for healing bears upon connective processes at work in any poet writing a poem, and any listener making it their own. It is all in the linking. “When we feel several objects at the same time,” wrote Coleridge, “the impressions are linked together.” The poet’s imagination “yokes” images that originally had no connection. The hook of a story snags your attention, you read on to discover what happens next. But the hook of a poem is more emotional, more secret. To discover what it’s about, you need to go back, not on. You find more in it on a second or thousandth reading because it fuses the world and the self, connecting not only outwardly, to something beyond, but inwardly to something deep inside. It communicates before you understand and can strike you, as Keats said, as the wording of your own thought, so readers need it like part of themselves. It is when Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice is desperately trying to track down a poem that she collapses in a public library. Poetry is a royal road out of and into the unconscious, the deepest form of communication, and “poetry of relation” was Seamus Heaney’s phrase for that delight in response which powers the writing of a poem.

Heaney cited the boy in Wordsworth’s Prelude who called to owls and heard real owls echoing back. Echo, like a shadow, is both you and not you: a relationship that starts with you, but depends on an answer. Rhyme (not necessarily at a line’s end, the most potent ones are often buried within the line) is so essential to poetry that the words used to be synonymous. Rhyme comes from rhein, “to flow”. Rhyme is poetry’s connective tissue: flow-back and answer, the echo of something said and more suggested. In Heaney’s poem “Personal Helicon”, the poet says he rhymes “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing”, and remembers calling down wells as a child, hearing the echoes return his voice “with a clean new music”. In the containing recesses of a well-made poem, readers hear a new music of the self.

That is why poetry is hugely popular online, and our new online poetry magazine Wild Court will podcast the Poetry and… talks. We are islands in the sea, said the psychologist William James, separate on the surface but connected in the deep, and poetry is one way of bringing those connections to the surface. Plugging in to every area of life and thought from neuroscience to history, geography and psychiatry, poetry is not only emotion finding its thought, but any thought, finding its own best words.

Poetry and … : free readings, 12, 18 and 25 November at 7pm in King’s College Chapel, Strand, London WC2R.

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