Saturday 14 September 2013

Heritage in Poetry

Today and tomorrow see the annual Heritage Open Days, with places of historical interest opening their doors free to visitors. This morning I spent an hour at Gloucester Cathedral in the company of the poet Peter Wyton and it proved an entertaining and enlightening event!

A few years ago Peter published a book entitled "The Ship In The City" - sadly now out of print - and he read from it a broad selection of poems about people, real and imagined, who played some part in the early life of Gloucester and its places of worship. Tradespeople and kings, scribes and stonemasons, Edward Jenner and Henry VIII were brought back to life in his whirlwind review of a couple of millenia. A fascinating morning - thank you, Peter.




Friday 6 September 2013

The Purpose of Poetry?



Diagnosis

The consultant’s room
a gallery
exhibiting the scans.
my head
an apple sliced,
my core on public view.

To launch the show
an invited few
stand round, comment
on the pictures,
discuss design,
flaws in execution.

I have no trained eye
to appraise
the work of art.
My interest more visceral,
I await
their verdict.


(Copyright Gill Garrett 2011)

A couple of years ago I was at a poetry reading by Andrew Motion. After the session a very earnest woman in the audience asked him "What is the purpose of poetry actually? What is its real value?". I can't remember the poet's response verbatim, but I recall wondering why things have to have a value outside themselves, whether some things can't just exist on their own merits. After all, we are human beings, not human doings - sometimes simply being is enough!

But I believe that often poetry does have enormous value in presenting the world in a different light from that in which the reader / listener usually perceives it, making them perhaps rethink beliefs and ideas. Some months ago a Health Poems Project was devised in the North West; although funding cuts (of course!) have since narrowed its scope, some of the poems submitted for that project are now to be used on a forthcoming NHS Research and Development Team website. The organisers hope that "they'll help reseachers, practitioners and patients make more creative links with each other ... help in training nurses (and) enable researchers to understand the patients' viewpoint".  My poem featured above is to represent the neuroscience category on the website; if it goes any way towards meeting those expressed aims I shall be delighted..