People's Poetry

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BBC Radio Wales - People's Poetry

People from all walks of life discuss poems that are meaningful to them.

In a special programme for National Poetry Day, poet and performer Clare E Potter invites ordinary people from all walks of life to discuss the poems that are meaningful to them.

In a special programme to celebrate UK National Poetry Day, poet and performer Clare E. Potter invites people from all walks of Welsh life to discuss the poems that are meaningful to them - marking memories, bringing comfort and sparking personal or political change.

Clare also meets people who write poems for pleasure rather than publication and explores the part poetry can play in our everyday lives. Explaining her own approach to poetry as life guidance, she says: 

“We don’t all write poems, or even read them, but in our lives, when we want to celebrate, commemorate, grieve and galvanize, human beings consistently turn to poetry. Why? If no one was looking, I’d say it’s because poetry is sacred. In a poem, we are in the realm of psalm, hymn, heart-song, spell. A poem does something to us, more than the sum of its words and images; the sounds and rhythms breathe, resonate with us because it’s a living thing, a poem, it has a pulse, and like all of us, wants to connect, be heard and understood, cherished. 

"Whether or not we regularly buy a Kate Tempest album or go to a Gillian Clarke book launch, most of us remember being in the junior school hall that stunk of daps and rubber gym mats, reciting a poem for eisteddfod, or studying war poets and being transported to the trenches. And then there were relatives like my Aunty Gloria who used to lean on the gate and entice me to pause with ‘What is this is world, if full of care’ or my Mam who’d give ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ a bit of welly. We all have a memory relating to a poem. Truth is, poetry connects us more than we all realise. It’s a mirror that reflects back to us those most deep and difficult to articulate feelings, perhaps those we hadn’t even acknowledged."

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