What poetry does (even if you don't like poetry)

Amanda Gorman’s reading of her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris saw my timelines light up with people who found that this young woman was saying exactly what they needed to hear at that moment. If I had asked those people an hour earlier whether they liked poetry, most would have demurred: too difficult, too clever, too fancy-pants, too niche. “Don’t you have to have a degree in English to get anything out of that stuff? It all goes over my head.”

And yet.

Poetry has this ability to emotionally ambush us. It cuts to the heart of things, so it cuts to the heart. Novels have moved me to huge, ugly, wracking sobs countless times, but there is a long slow process of immersing ourselves into their world first. By the time you’re weeping, you’ve often spent hours if not days or weeks in the company of the characters. Not so with poetry. Wham! Bang! Poets go straight in without any polite preamble and take your breath away. It’s the reason we turn to poetry at weddings and funerals and other times fraught with feeling. Poets are professionals. They can say the things we can’t, without a four chapter warm up.

When I edited a collection of poems about motherhood, I got this feeling a lot. In the early days of parenthood we’re peeled raw with exhaustion and shock and wonder. Our skin is paper thin. We’re exposed and there are so many chinks in our armour through which emotion can suddenly pierce us. (Yes, I’ve cried in a supermarket. Yes, I’ve bawled at a mawkish television advert. Yes, I sobbed for twenty minutes at a story in the local newspaper about a man being reunited with his lost tortoise.) So poetry does its thing. Poets are able to say something that rings so sharply true in those moments that we suddenly feel we are not alone but part of a great, eternal, generations-old community of raw, mad, knackered women.

The world is raw, mad and knackered at the moment. Amanda Gorman knocked us all out because we are all so thirsty to feel something hopeful and bright. Her poem wasn’t difficult to understand. It wasn’t pretentious. It didn’t require any background reading. It spoke to millions in that moment, whether they like poetry or not. That’s what poetry does.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood is published on 4th March 2001 and available to pre-order from your local bookshop.