The StoryField

The Gift of Poetry

Friday evening I heard the poet David Whyte recite his own poetry, as well as poems by Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, and Stephen Spender. He stood before the window in the Quarterdeck Room at Royal Roads University. The grey stone façade of Hatley Castle was visible below. We could have been in Ireland, assembled before some English lord’s country seat. And with his Yorkshire accent, and fine imitations of John O’Donohue, David Whyte made sure we were certainly somewhere other than the outskirts (the proper skirts) of Victoria, BC. That is the poet’s job – to take the listener away.

The Power of Language

What did she say?

Every day at  Sir James Douglas, an elementary school in Victoria, the principal repeats three phrases after the announcements: “Work hard, learn lots, and do something kind for someone else.” At first, when I heard this gentle admonition coming out of the P.A. for the second or third time, I thought, “Who’s really listening to that message?” Perhaps our parents had similar words of advice or caution for us, which we received on countless occasions and did our best to ignore. It’s easy to tune out the familiar, even when we know it might be helpful. And yet, I think there’s a way that a message like “Do something kind for someone else”, repeated to the point of becoming just a series of sounds, devoid of meaning, actually does carry some latent energy. I don’t know if the principal recognizes the power of her words, but I suspect her intention in repeating the phrases is based on a hunch—an intuition that repetition takes words (and the ideas they represent) into the mind and body, past the conscious aspect of thinking, right into the heart.