Dear friends,
Hallo to you in your own lives. This is just a very short note to say two things:
1 — We have an online launch event for the US release of the Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World book:
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
3 pm PT / 5 pm CT / 6 pm ET / 11 pm GMT
Register right here
The magnificent Lorna Goodison — former Poet Laureate of Jamaica — will be joining us for a conversation about her brilliant poem in the book, and also to talk about the role of poetry in public life. There’ll be chat, some video, some opportunity share the love of poetry. Attendance is free.
2 — For those of you who can come (or who wish you could, but can’t make it!) we would love to include something from our wonderful Substack community in the launch…
Could you reply in the comments below, with one sentence about a time when something from Poetry Unbound was meaningful to you — maybe how it opened something in your world?
Friends, I’ll look forward to seeing as many of you as are able to make it on Zoom on the 6th. My thanks to you for these lovely conversations on this Substack, and to my colleagues at On Being who host these conversations with such elegance and invitation.
I’ll be back again with the normal Substack on Sunday. See you then!
Pádraig
When I returned to face-to-face teaching in 2022, I centered class around the Poetry Unbound podcast, so students could learn how to love poetry and learn they already had everything they needed within them to understand poetry and literature.
Molly Twomey’s poem, and specifically the line, “Mostly I’m sorry I’m not as happy as you raised me to be,” like a bolt of lightning cracked my heart - my wounded-protected-disappointed-and scarred-tight heart - open, and unleashed a flood of compassion (sobbing, the good kind, all night), for my sister, and for my father who “told me to take your good umbrella... this is what you know to do,” for the whole family... for the suffering, the love, the everyone-is-doing-the-best-they-can, for the asking-for-help, for your discussion of who can help, who can’t really help.. for the whole of it. Where there was once a quick road to frustration and resentment, there is now this poem, and your beautiful and wise reading of it, building a new road in my heart-mind, that I can come back to, again and again, to reawaken my compassion. To say thank you isn’t enough 🙏🏾.