The power of poetry
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What is the significance of poetry in our lives?
Six Minute English from bbclearningenglish.com
Hello, this is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil. And I'm Pippa. In this episode we're discussing poetry. For some, poetry is what you study at school, then forget, while for others it becomes an important part of their life. Have you ever read or written any poetry, Neil?
Well, I haven't written any poetry since I was at school. I would love to read more poetry, but I just don't get it really. I find it difficult to understand.
A good place to hear poetry is an open mic night, a live event where anyone is allowed to stand up on stage to sing or recite poems. Here BBC reporter Maria recites her open mic poem about a friend who suffered a stroke for BBC World Service programme People Fixing the World. This poem, I wrote it about a friend who I love dearly. It's called Stroke.
You're awake and trying to grasp who it is. I pull my mask past my lips and you study my face. Eyes wide. I've enough stuff to tell you, I say, sinking into a chair. I stare. Sometimes if you go to an open mic night, people can really touch your soul with what they're saying. And even if you're having a bad day, life can feel so much better after going to an open mic night.
For Maria, poetry has the power to heal emotions and touch your soul, meaning to affect you deeply on an emotional or spiritual level. In this episode we'll hear more about the positive power of poetry and as usual we'll learn some useful new words and phrases. And remember you'll find all the vocabulary plus a quiz and worksheet on our website bbclearningenglish.com.
But first I have a question for you, Pippa. Just now you used the phrase the positive power of poetry, repeating the same initial p sound across a string of words. Doing this is a common feature of poetry, but what's it called? Is it a. assonance, b. alliteration or c. simile? Finally my English degree might come in handy and I'm going to say b. alliteration. Well, we'll find out at the end, and I hope you don't get embarrassed, Pippa. Poetry helped Maria overcome sadness, but could its power to heal work in other areas too? Hot Poets is a group helping people understand the science behind global issues like climate change. They go to meetings like the UN Climate Conference and listen to scientific papers being presented. Then they write a poem about it all and perform that back to the audience. Here's Hot Poet Liv Talk reciting her poem to BBC World Services' People Fixing the World.
It starts with an adventure at sea. A big blue murder mystery where the killer is not the whale, but an epic humanity fail of overfishing and polluting at unimaginable scale.
Liv's poem is based on a study into biodiversity. It's a complex research project that many find hard to understand. Here Liv discusses this with Myra Anubi for BBC World Service programme People Fixing the World. And Liv, I mean, so what you've identified is that there is an issue around the communication of science. Yes, a lot of this jargon is really hard to understand or a lot of the science is quite impenetrable to normal people. So it's instantly a turn off.
How can poetry help in emotional healing?
Science uses lots of jargon, specialist or technical vocabulary, which is quite different from everyday language. For example, a scientist might use the word precipitation, while in everyday English we would say rain. Jargon can make scientific papers impenetrable, an adjective meaning impossible to understand. And worse, it makes science a turn-off, something that people dislike or find uninteresting. Hot poets try to change all of that by making complex environmental ideas easy to understand through poetry. And it works, says Kat Bruce, the environmental scientist whose study Liv based her poem on, talking here with Myra Anubi for BBC World Services, People Fixing the World.
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