 Good morning. On behalf of the US Institute of Peace, we are delighted to welcome you to this event on the poetry of war and peace. We will have a fireside chat with poet Padrico Tuoma and moderator journalist, Amanda Ripley. We think this conversation comes at an important and relevant moment in our global context. For those of you who are new to USIP, we are a national institute founded by the US Congress 39 years ago and dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and essential for US and global security. My name is Kathleen Kinness, and I lead the institute's work on women, peace, and security and on gender. So how do we connect the concept of poetry and war or poetry and peace? Irish poet of Belfast, Michael Longley writes that a poet's duty is to warn that poetry is the opposite of propaganda and that a good poem is a good paradigm in which to understand the impact of war and the long journey toward peace. Our guest speaker and our guest journalist will help us weave these concepts together. In the meantime, we warmly invite you to leave your preconceived notions about poetry, conflict, and peace building at the door, and open yourself to an hour of other ways of understanding the power of language as a path toward peace. It is now my sincere honor to introduce our speaker, the poet, theologian, and conflict mediator from Ireland, Patrick O'Toolema. He's a man who has brought both the artist and practitioner to the peacemaking field, a man who has lived many lives, including five years as the leader of Cori Mila, Ireland's oldest peace and reconciliation community, which is how I met Patrick in 2014. In addition to his role in conflict mediation and reconciliation, many of you may know O'Toolema as the host of the very popular podcast, Poetry Unbound. He is also author of a number of books, including In the Shelter and his most recent published book by Norton, Poetry Unbound, 50 Poems to Open Your World. Patrick is currently on leave from his work in Belfast and is in the United States this spring as the poet-in-residence for Columbia University's International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. Patrick will open with comments and ideas that he will put on the table. He will be joined by Amanda, at which time I will formally introduce her. And so without any further delay, Patrick O'Toolema, please join me in welcoming him. Thanks very much, Kathleen and Negar and Chendi for their warm welcome to USIP. And thanks to Amanda, I hope, for what we will be talking about in a while. And thanks to everybody for coming and for those online as well. We're here in Washington, DC on the lands of the Anacostans and the Nacochank and the Piscataway and the Pamunque peoples. And I honor these lands, these nations, their sovereignty and history and language, and their elders, past, present, and future. And the truth of all that is and all that has been taken away and committed to justice and recognition. This quote here from patients like Babby, I write, because my ink must flow like blood, the written must be spoken. It's a reminder to us of the relationship between language and living. And in a way, it's saying that to communicate is to live and to live is to communicate. The underworld of this statement implies, of course, that being silenced is an experience of erasure and death. We're here to talk about poetry, and particularly poetry in war and conflict and peace. Poetry has emerged in every culture. And this isn't quite a scientific statement, but it's pretty close. So has war emerged in every culture and violent conflict. And violent conflict is a form of communication. And it involves language and land and body. And for all its ideological justifications, violent conflict has a simple plot line, which is targeting people's bodies and lives. And poetry, too, is a form of communication. And poetry is a body language, because it involves the body. It involves hands that are signing. It involves somebody writing. It involves somebody speaking. Somebody communicating poetry in some kind of a way. Vocal cords or sign language. So poetry is meaty business. It's sometimes spoken of as a heady art. It's not. It's a body art. It's a literary art, of course. But that doesn't mean that it is removed from necessity. We'll be looking at an Audre Lorde, famous Audre Lorde quote later on. People turn to poetry for purposes of survival and celebration and commemoration and lament and marking and reparation and recognition. Survival is found in strange places. The 23rd Psalm, which I put up here from the Good News Bible, is a very well-known Psalm from the Hebrew Bible. It's pastoral poetry, and this is a translation that's popular with evangelical children in Britain and Ireland. I'm not sure about other places. This famous Psalm starts off by speaking of God as a good shepherd, but then goes on to speak about enemies and safety in the face of enemies. A Psalm is a poem, a lyric form, and it's known for an overworld of praise and an underworld of enmity and rage and fury at times as well. And this one imagines both, your house will be my home as long as I live, as well as a banquet where all my enemies can see me. And in 1984, in Belfast, a young man, William McConnell, he was in his mid-30s. He was gone down outside his home by the IRA as he was leaving the house for work one morning. The terrorists had declared him a legitimate target. And the gunman had taken over a house just across the road and had observed his routine for a few mornings and then murdered him on the morning of March 6th, 1984. And years later, his daughter, Gail McConnell, who's one of the most extraordinary Irish poets writing today, she published a book length poem called The Son is Open. And as part of that book, Gail McConnell imagines a younger self of her a few years after the murder of her father at a church Sunday school looking for an echo of her own life in this very Psalm. And a poem is much more than what the original poet imagined the poem would be. Art is always more than the artist. And we can find in poetry the poetry that the poem didn't need to know it had, as you'll see in what Gail McConnell finds here. And in Gail's book, The Child is Covering Words of the 23rd Psalm, hoping that there could be another message of some kind of recognizability found in the underworld of the text of the experience of her own life. And you see here, enemies see me, know my house, found here as a discovered poem within the context of this simplistic transliteration. So language is often waiting for us to discover it. And in our discovering it, we feel discovered. And language can be a liberation, particularly by the truth that it tells. Especially, I think, when that truth has been both silenced and when that truth is brutal. Somehow there is a strange comfort sometimes in that. Patients like Babby's quote earlier on, the written must be spoken. What happens when we speak, something's made possible. Maybe not definite, but possible, certainly. The American poet Marie Howe has a poem, The Meadow, and she finishes this poem with the following lines, bedeviled human, your plight and waking is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue. And to know that tangled among them and terribly new is a sentence that could change your life. To she too is pointing to the necessity of language. Not just language as a force to destroy the world, of course, it can, but language as something else too, something that might create a possibility. In that last part of the poem there, Change Your Life, Marie Howe is echoing Rilke in who, in one of his famous poems, finishes too with You Must Change Your Life. And that plea or demand in Marie Howe's poem for Change Your Life, I think is an echo of people who were caught up in cycles of conflict, saying change your life to those who are making the decisions about war, to those who are making the decisions about legitimate target or strategic targets. Change your life is an echo to people in power to say, my life seems small, but it's important to me. Change your life so that I can live mine, so that I don't turn into dead meat. Change your life, that is something, it's an event that happens in language in the hope that the event might happen in the body of somebody else. Over years working as a conflict mediator in the north of Ireland, I was a poet in residence for a lot of different groups, people who were trying to find ways towards each other, people who'd taken up arms for groups that were called legitimate or illegitimate, people who had been bereaved or injured, wounded, their lives permanently affected by the aftermath of terrorism and war and other forms of violence as well. And in one group, an argument broke out about the conjugation of a verb, which sounds like a very esoteric conversation, you wouldn't think that would be happening. But the verb was murder. Somebody said, I murdered someone. And one of their colleagues who had been part of the same group said, don't use that word, you didn't murder anyone, lives were lost. And so suddenly we're arguing about syntax, but this is not an abstract idea. This is the question about responsibility and the choice of language and what happens in that context. I was in the room as poet in residence and I sat in the corner. Somebody had said, lives were lost and somebody else said they were all legitimate targets. So I wrote down the word legitimate target in my notebook and I wrote the following small poem. Legitimate target has 16 letters and one long abominable space between two dehumanizing words. So does language have the power to break? Yes it does because look at what happens when somebody's labeled something. You know this very well, you don't need me to tell you. And the opposite of that question is, does language have the power to create? Well I want it to. That's what I stand for, I hope, that language has the power to create and it's worthwhile failing even if it's not true. It's easier to start a war than to make it end, unfortunately, and it can be difficult to make because to make is fraught with all kinds of dangers and possible failures. The word poem that we have in English comes from Greek, poemia, and that word means a made thing. So a poem is something made and a poem is an invitation to make something. So in a certain sense an invitation to make something called peace between people is an invitation into some kind of language that is also a poem. Language in Irish is changa which is the same word for tongue, so language is a meaty word. Lots of languages, the word for tongue and language are the same and they can be exchangeable in English too sometimes when people might say, how many tongues do you speak? But a tongue is just a piece of meat in our mouths. It goes down to our throats and together with vocal cords and lungs and air or maybe typing fingers or signing hands or body language, we make language. So language is a meaty thing, language is concerned with the body and all language is body language in that sense and the dignity of the body is linked to the dignity of language and so therefore please to call for the cessation of violent conflict are always body language. In the Hebrew Bible there's a character called Rizpa illustrated here in George Becker's piece of art and Rizpa's sons were murdered and publicly displayed in a desecrating measure with no proper burial rites for the purposes of humiliation of the family they were dead but it was of the family. Rizpa's weak king had been the one to make the decision to allow this to happen and he was doing it to impress somebody who was threatening him in order to create a certain kind of connection with somebody who would otherwise have been his enemy and what Rizpa does and you see it here in Becker's illustration Rizpa makes of her own body a shield and she protects the bodies of her sons and the bodies of other sons as well from the birds of the air by day and the wild animals by night and her body is body language here. It is a protest poem, a made thing not to bring the dead back to life she knows that won't happen but it is a made thing to protest kings and predators and shame and gods who have all abandoned her and attacked her, her actions are a poem and this is what poetry can do. It is to say your action, your body language is linked to the language you use and there is the possibility that we might be able to make something in the face of desecrating actions. Rizpa in this way is like Antigone who you find in other mythologies and when Antigone's weak pride-fueled brother was murdered and humiliated by his dead body being let out for display she goes and rescues that body even though he was a failure she just goes even as a failure I will not leave him there and even if he kill me I'm still going to do that. She made something which was important that's body language that is a poem and that is the link between what art can inspire in us in terms of making something. I'm curious as to whether we can make something before we're trying to protect the desecrated bodies of dead people though. What helps us in advance? Joy Harjo was the US poet laureate for three terms up until last year and I'm going to be talking about her book Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings which is an extraordinary book. I have a long standing connection with Carimela as Kathleen mentioned Ireland's oldest peace and reconciliation community and Carimela's main buildings are right on the very north coast of Ireland right on a small cliff you can look out over to Scotland 14 miles away and there's deep waters there and terrible currents. Once standing up there I looked out and there was a small pot of dolphins making their way across the bay it was utterly beautiful to watch and to moderate conversations about war and murder and legitimate targets and bereavement and pain and terror in a place where all of our windows look out to the sea is a deliberate choice to be in conversation about terror in a place where land reminds you about where you are in a place where sea and climate locates you not just in the underworld of pain that we create amongst each other but in a world that says look at your locatedness look at the view that hasn't changed that much in centuries as you look out over across the bay over to Rathlin Island and over to Scotland so place is not just beauty it is an urgent reminder and in this way I think that's why I want to look at what Joy Harjo says in one of her extraordinary poems the title poem of this book Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings takes a very straightforward spine for conflict mediation the kind of things like set ground rules use communication skills give constructive feedback anybody who's been in a HR process will know let somebody will set some things up like that and you'll go yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah we've got it all lovely and look at a little excerpt from part of the title poem from Joy Harjo's poem here set conflict resolution ground rules that poem begins with these four lines recognize whose lands these are on which we stand ask the deer turtle in the crane make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill the land is a being who remembers everything those first three lines are in the imperative it's telling you it's very demanding language recognize, ask, make sure imperative structure for language they're in single end stop sentences they are not complicated but what they're doing is they're undoing the idea of that rule is the main word in this title set conflict resolution ground rules and instead it's saying who is the who of the ground where is the where of the ground the land is a being who remembers everything the land is a body too is what she's saying it's locating intelligence and agency and accountability with the land and its inhabitants animals and spirits and humans and our children and later on in the poem their children too and location and time are explored the narrow plateau of victory in conflict is expanded through time and location in this brilliant poem and it's a warning it's a way of saying that the promise of conflicts victories is a future is a failure and a hollow promise because you will always in the future have to reckon with the past there's a big question sometimes about what a poem can do I'm just about to finish a PhD in poetry and my dad says about PhDs in poetry like to be a doctor of poems you couldn't help me if I hurt my finger absolutely true I'd write a poem about it but which wouldn't help at all so what does a poem do? I think that is the wrong question though I think to ask the question about art as commodity is to ask the wrong economic question about what art is for I think it puts the imagination of a certain limitation of capital on language and art I hope that poetry is one of the art forms that asks us to bear witness poetry is a form that asks us to turn to language when we have borne witness to the danger of language also Audrey Lord says that a poem is necessity poetry is not a luxury it is a vital necessity of our existence it forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change first made into language then into idea then into more tangible action what she's saying is that art provokes something in us towards creative actions towards a made thing and that art begets art and poetry begets imagination and that imagination might beget some kind of innovation some unexpected alliances that can happen some stopping of a predictable pattern and the making of something new so that we can try and try again and fail and then Samuel Beckett says fail better and then keep on trying and keep on trying to make I want art and poetry to be part of the public conversation about conflict because art bears witness to something not something we can control art is always outside of our control war poetry bears witness to the possibilities of reframed human relationships and it calls for a reset and a reframe and a reimagining of ourselves in the face of an enemy or another or somebody who is victimizing or threatening life I think of this extraordinary new collection of poems worth for war which is edited by Oxana Maximchuk and Max Rosicinski and there's a poem in it from Marianna Savka and you'll see this extraordinary poem is a declaration of a simple ask forgive me darling I'm not a fighter every time you gaze into my face I tell you I have a knife to cut willow twigs I can weave you a basket if you like I can weave you a bird and plant violets in its eyes I'm not a fighter darling I have a knife to prune branches on the young trees you haven't come out to the garden for so long the cherries are coming in darling why have you gone so gray among many many things this gorgeous poem is a meditation on the power of language of appeal in the face of threat a power of language of working together in the face of weaponry and it is an address of you in the face of war and many poems of conflict and sorrow bear witness to what it means in the face of threat to simply sit with the pure desire of what it is you desire a plain statement of desire you can see this also in Langston Hughes very famous poem Island wave of sorrow do not drown me now I see the island still ahead somehow I see the island and its sands are fair wave of sorrow take me there a poem of extraordinary lyric beauty with the repetition of wave of sorrow and wave of sorrow in the first and seventh line and then the repetition of I see the island I see the island it's likely that if I turned this off now you'd be able to repeat it back to me immediately when you say it it can almost sound like it is the sound of the tide on the shores of that island wave of sorrow do not drown me now in out that tide he's imagining the place where he could land pleading with that wave of sorrow part of the question in this poem is who has plunged the speaker of this poem into the sea who's tried to drown him or throw him overboard or denied the integrity of their body or justified such actions throughout Langston Hughes' work he addresses Jim Crow as character and as force and power regularly and when he sees an island still ahead somehow the power of that somehow makes me think of both the personal and the systemic that is being addressed in this somehow the impossibility of saying is this still being kept away from me I don't want to simplify poems like this or poems like the previous one simply by saying oh they're the poems of hope because I think hope is all too complicated regularly when we think of hope we think of Emily Dickinson's first poem about hope hope is a thing with feathers but that was just the first of three poems that she wrote about hope another poem says hope is a strange invention and another poem she says hope is a subtle glutton and so what does hope sing what does it do and what does it want to consume and what's the cost of all of those things and the demand of all of those things hope is a many layered thing if it's going to work at all so I look at Langston Hughes' poem and say that one of the things that art provokes is an excavation of raw desire the declaration that the most vulnerable in us the declaration of the most vulnerable in us which is the desire to make even if it might fail even if it might be small even if it might be humble to make something is more risky than to break something through threat and war and conflict poetry sidesteps language I think that lends itself to negotiation that's a certain usage of language but poetry says that it has a deeper nightmare and a deeper dream about what the possibility of language can be the poetry of desire always lays raw the meat of us and it reminds us of the intrinsic body necessity of understanding what language always is incarnate in us poetry takes the body seriously and it also takes demands seriously and it asks that those who use the dead and despised bodies of others for their purposes could begin to pay attention to a powerful and uncontainable democracy of dignity and desire I look forward to having some questions from you in a while and thank you very much for your attention Thank you Padraic and indeed we are going to look forward to the conversation I had it's my pleasure to also welcome today Amanda Ripley who is a New York Times bestseller author and a Washington Post co-contributor and co-host of the Slate podcast How To she's also the co-founder of Good Conflict a company that creates workshops and original contact to help people get smarter about how they fight Amanda has spent her career trying to make sense of complicated human mysteries from how people get out of dysfunctional conflicts to how countries educate virtually all their kids to think for themselves we know Amanda's most recent book is High Conflict why we get trapped and how we get out so without further delay thank you so much Amanda and Padraic for a conversation we look forward to your questions from the audience here in the auditorium but also online thank you Thank you Kathleen, thank you Padraic what a wonderful day, way to start our day so thank you all for being here online and in person I've been told to remind you to submit your questions for our speakers by using the chat box on the USIP event page hopefully that makes sense I'm just telling you what I was told to say I am actually quite serious about looking forward to getting your questions whether you're in person or online so be thinking about that and we've made sure to save a good chunk of time to make this more of a conversation with you all we know there's a lot of wisdom in the room how many people sort of focus on or think a lot about conflict in their lives for whatever reason wow, quite a few how about poetry, not that these are mutually exclusive you can raise your hand more than once okay, poetry, wow that's great I came to your work through the podcast which I came to through Krista, our mutual friend and her on being show and I came to it during the pandemic which was a great time to come to poetry I think in many ways but I printed out your poem, The Facts of Life and put it on my wall in my office and I still look at it and reminded oh yes, that's right I highly recommend that poem if you haven't seen it so you had a book, Poetry Unbound that came out I think in the US just in December, if that's right yeah, started December okay, and an excellent book that I also recommend and like the podcast, it's been a huge success which I'm not sure everyone would have predicted yeah, I'm not sure that Poetry Anthologies are seen to have something but we've been moved by the attention people have been giving it yeah, so what I wonder is, what do you make of that? like, what does the demand for both the show and the book tell us about the time in which we're living? I think there is a desire for language that can offer you a kind of a raft of a container and often, like people will sometimes send me messages to say look, there's this particular funeral coming up with these circumstances, is there any poem that doesn't quite describe everything that's happening but could be a poem that could help and so I think when people are in circumstances particularly, you know, circumstances of demand there's often a desire to say is there a language that can work here and the kind of public raising of everything that the pandemic did was a hope really, I suppose that there could be language that could work for some comfort, for some critique for some discomfort as well, you know and I think poetry can provide all those things it's interesting because yesterday this is the best part of my job I spent three hours at a workshop that Padre ran on poetry and it reminded me listening to everybody around the room had a slightly different interpretation of the same lines even though we all speak the same language and probably had many things in common but it was a reminder that maybe and I also have this feeling when I listen to your podcast that maybe poetry is really not meant to be read alone do you ever feel like that? I get so much out of hearing you talk about it hearing other people talk about it well it's never read alone because even when you are reading it alone somebody else has written it so there's the person who wrote it and then there's the person reading it now and then there's everything that's happening between the page and the reader or the person and the listener so poetry is always an interpersonal experience and then there's always the question about what's being made in me as I read or listen to the poem so it's always a conversation and it's like a dance I guess yeah or a wrestle it's not always straightforward and sometimes the poem wants to disturb I think yes that's the beauty of poetry right it can do so many things and even at different times in your life if you reread the same poem do you ever have that experience? Totally, I mean I am very lucky to come from a culture where we were learning poems off by heart from a very young age and so I don't know when I was nine or 10 we learned this great poem E en al ag na mam by Sean O'Rheerdon a poem about a mid-life crisis and I had it off by heart at the age of 10 and we all did we had to you know you were in trouble at school and a couple of years ago I reread the poem in mid-life myself right and you know there was parts of it Gheagalok Skreelvach was a great part of this the strength of the language in it about a screaming goose I loved the sound of that language when I was 10 but as an adult it was the sense of conflict in the writer reading it and I you know he's hearing his own he's hearing death be closer to him than it was when he was younger so to read that at 46 is much different than learning it off by heart at 10 and that's a poem that has stood the test of time and has done something to me that I return to now wow so there's almost a grading it was a feeling you got that was very different yeah yeah the same word it's doing different things to me and asking different things of me and also saying other people have been there before that's one of the things that old old poetry does I love the epic of Gilgamesh you know 3000 year old poem and in it there's a tyrant who is given by the gods a number of things a best friend grief and a midlife crisis and you go look at an old story that's 3000 years old and probably 4000 years old in its original form and look at some parts of the human condition that continue in terms of that that power might be interrupted by either friendship or a midlife crisis or grief look at the possibility of that that's such an amazing thing right that feeling of it's like at once reassuring and humbling yeah exactly yeah you aren't alone and you're not that special exactly and we've summed it up and you're not that special could I get a coffee mug that says both of those things so you've worked on conflict resolution for what 20 years yeah focusing on the legacy of British Irish conflict of course in the north of Ireland and I wonder so in general Americans knowledge of Ireland and its history is uneven as you may have noticed which means it can be easy to misunderstand the conflict especially for outsiders what are what are a couple things that it's helpful for people to understand in order to access the poetry of Ireland okay I'm trying to think now but how I can not give you an answer that's going to go on for 25 minutes that's about how much time we've got so it's okay ask me again ask me that question again well I guess where do you begin to tell the story of Ireland what year when it comes to conflict or when it comes to conflict okay so where does it all begin this is a complicated thing you know there was a book that I read years ago that started off by saying everything was fine in northern Ireland until the late 60s when the Catholics started to write and I shut the book because I was like okay that's the wrong measure that's not the moment that's not the moment so the question is is where do you begin you know do you begin with the partition of Ireland in 1921 or to begin with the revolution five years previous to that do you begin with the famine when so much was orchestrated the so-called famine when so much was orchestrated to begin with the act of union in 1801 to begin with the colonizing process that happened a few hundred years before that where do you begin and depending as to who has the power and the so-called objective beginning to know where to start the story so much is set in place about what's possible in interpretation based as to who says this is where the story starts partly why I'm interested in theology is because the Hebrew Bible begins with in the beginning who says and how do they know that's a question that children ask and it's a powerful question who says and how do they know and it's a political question to when somebody says where you need to begin with this is the following who says and how do you know and there's a dynamic of narration that's happening in that and so I do I suppose normally want to begin the question of Ireland and its relationship with Britain in the global context of the age of European empire and Ireland is one of the one of the early British colonies even though colony wasn't even a word that was being used by that but it was expansion of that but that had happened previous to that into Scotland into Wales into Cornwall into Northumberland so it happened locally before it expanded there and in that way then concepts of Britishness or Englishness are also undone because you see that it happened there first before it expanded and that for me is the broader power analysis within which to understand Ireland and its relationship to Britain It's a difficult question I realize but that's helpful you've said it's never occurred to me that poetry and politics aren't engaged with one another what is your earliest memory of encountering poetry oh I encountered poetry before I had memory oh wow yeah of course it's just there like we were I mean my earliest encounter is learning a poem off by heart so clearly we had to had to have encountered it beforehand yeah tell me about that view poetry was infused in schooling totally and I just went to very ordinary schools we were learning poems off by heart in English and Irish every weekend with a certain amount of threat from as to whether you could recite it properly on Friday whether you could write it out in your copy book and then when you were writing an exam at the end of the year just an in-class exam you had to be able to quote from whatever poem you were writing an essay about and lots of Irish poets lots of the well-known Irish poets were also involved in public political life some had been executed in 1916 W.B. Yates was there I knew the Neagonal was a was poet in residence in Cork City and in University of Cork when I was 12 and she came into our class and spoken she uses the phrase and that she she only writes in Irish and she won't translate herself into English other people poem will do and include a translator and she uses the phrase that she lives with the reality that she writes in the language that may well be dead before she is so in those situations you see the the the political implication of language of Irish of English of the ways in which we speak like the language of poetry is always in conversation with public life public life is inherently political so so she came to your class when you were about 12 amazing and you spoke both languages did did everyone in the class did? yeah we have to yeah of course and and so right away she's she's capturing this tension right between by not speaking it in English right yeah yeah I mean yeah and I mean what also another tension that she's capturing she was born in England and then was raised back in Ireland by I'm going to get it wrong I think some relatives I don't think her parents sent her back because they wanted her to be in an Irish language environment and then maybe they followed later or something so there is a way within which in her poetry and in her art she embodied so much she was utterly transformative to see her and it never occurred to me I mean I was writing poetry at that stage it never occurred to me that poetry could be a profession because it just seemed like a whimsical notion to have a profession of poetry but certainly I knew that it was going to be a necessity for my life when did you start writing poetry do you think? I was 11 I wrote a ridiculous poem about a 10-foot dog and my sister said to me my older sister I'm one of six number three of six my older sister said to me that night I found your poem it was hidden so like you find it means she was looking for something and she said I found your poem it's very good but it needed a bit of editing so I've edited it for you and her edits were so good and I loved being edited her edits were so good that the insult of what the hell were you doing in the poem never occurred to me so she was my first editor and she set the way for me to have a really positive relationship with being an editor and also being edited huh wow that could have gone a different way it could have gone all kinds of ways but it didn't all praise to Anya I'm so intrigued by this idea of having childhood and schooling saturated with poetry do how do you feel about having been forced to memorize them I mean is that was that a good idea? Yeah I think so yeah I mean memorization goes in and out of fashion I think it was out for a while and I believe it's coming back in there is a way within which like even that Langston Hughes when we were just looking at it poetry of a very particular form like that calls for it to be taken into the body and there's a relationship with the poem that you can just recite from inside yourself that is really moving so it integrates it in a way by memorizing it I mean like during the pandemic I'm not sure like when you're washing your hands 50 times a day and one of the advices was to sing happy birthday twice which is a form a torture to send a terrible poem and so there's a W.B. Yates poem that I love that I recite and I've known it since I was 11 to a child dancing in the wind and I said it to myself and thought that's the same length as of singing happy birthday Would you say it now? You want to hear it? Do you want to hear it? Dancing in the wind Yeah I'm going to get a line wrong now so it's because I feel a lot of pressure We won't know I won't know Somebody on the internet will Inevitably, someone's grueling air I create some apologies Dance there upon the shore what needs you have to care for wind or water's roar and tumble out your hair that the salt drops of wet Ding Yong, you have not known the fool's triumph nor yet love lost as soon as one nor the best laborer dead nor all the sheaves to bind What need you have to dread the monstrous crying of the wind I said that to myself 20 times a day during COVID Wow, that's beautiful It's so lovely there God, that is so much better than singing the ABCs Next pandemic, I'm going to put that on the list But there's a relationship to the language When you don't have to think it's just Yes It's not my brain Yes Somehow it's my tongue that remembers it It's like song lyrics Yeah, exactly Yeah, where it just happens Yeah, and then you're paying attention to yourself paying attention or not paying attention And I think memorization is a great thing And there's all kinds of ways to trick yourself into it And therefore I think it's a good thing And my imaginary children And I can say this from the luxury of privilege of only having imaginary children My imaginary children also love to memorize books I'm sure they do Of course Because they're very convenient and they don't make any noise Except when you ask them to recite Yeah I do feel like most of our lives at least here in the States today there's not enough poetry And maybe I'm defining poetry too narrowly I know that it can take a lot of forms But I was reading about the scholar Faith Barrett who has called has written about poetry during the Civil War in the United States And she has made a pretty compelling argument that poetry used to be at that point in mid-19th century America ubiquitous That it was everywhere in newspapers and magazines and children were learning it in school Americans were encountering poetry on a weekly if not daily basis And there are all these accounts in newspapers of soldiers dying with a poem in their pockets Poems written on a scrap of paper folded up inside a book Songs or poems being recited to President Lincoln All kinds of ways that poetry was infused in life And she calls the Civil War a poetry fueled war Such an interesting phrase I don't know what to make of this except that I do know that it was the most prolific period in Emily Dickinson's life And so there's a way in which you know obviously we don't want to rely on war to create poetry But there's a way in which like you said about the pandemic when there are times where for which we cannot find words a poetry seems to surface Yeah I mean I do find that the American life of poetry is very alive I think I mean most of my engagement in social media is following other poets and so like I feel suffused and enhanced and challenged and changed by a very vibrant American culture of poetry in big presses and small presses in new journals and well-established journals in performance centers in poetry on Instagram in poetry in publication poetry in all of them page and stage I find that the American culture of poetry is very alive I think I'm just following the wrong people I think on Twitter that might be part of it And it addresses all kinds of things I remember one time I was going to this open mic poetry night in Dublin and I took along a neighbor and afterwards we went back and went down for a beer in their flat and she was saying to her husband who had stayed home with the kids she said like it was amazing people were reading poems about history poems about sex lives poems about the war it was utterly brilliant I think I'm going to go back and maybe start to write and her husband said here don't be writing any poems about our sex lives and there was something amazing about seeing the way within which something was open for her saying poetry can talk about that and that's not new poetry's always talked about that and poetry has said things like that I think of the prophet Jeremiah in Hebrew Bible who was an extraordinary poet who says in one of his poems he turns to his God and says you are to me a deceptive stream and I curse the day when I was born a metaphor a deceptive stream an adjective deceptive how does a stream get deceptive and then that turning back I curse the day when I was born a playing with time too like look at that look at the crisis of self that's present there we can sometimes say that you know the question about who am I is a very modern concept you know this is an extraordinary poem two thousand years older two and a half thousand years old these existential questions about what does it mean to be me in the time that I'm part of under the powers that I'm under these are everywhere in poetry contemporary and ancient and how brilliant what does it mean to be me it reminds me of how you say that we make art but art makes us back you say more about that but I'm always interested as to why like why did I turn to poetry I don't know partly because it was everywhere in school and so I was interested and I like languages so there was that but there's something deeper than that too and I think of whoever it was that chewed a mouthful of whatever ochre that was whatever clay and put their hand on the wall and spat around it and then took their hand off and saw something and said that's part of me and it's not part of me it's a negation it's the emptiness of the of where the hand was that's there and that's one of the powers of what you'd call now negative capability and negative space and the blank space in a poem a person did that without the without what we'd call now the literary tools to analyze it but with the soul that says this means something it might have been marking out space it might have been saying something about themselves they might have thought I wonder if that's going to survive longer than me therefore it undoes them it says and it has undone them they are dead we do not know who they are but all those people who did that they are a reminder to us that somebody needed to make something in order to be able to look at it art is a certain kind of mirror that is a distortion but that too might have some kind of longer life than we do and it also has an independent life and looks back never I get a poem published I'm nervous because suddenly it's wandered off like some kind of animal looking back and I don't know is it growling or smiling at me and it will do what it does like you said about that facts of life poem that poem has gone in ways that I had never imagined it would go and there's something frightening about that takes on a life of its own yeah my limitations are present in that poem as well as my craft and intention you sort of lose control of it it's gone yeah I wonder you said you started your first poem you wrote when you were around 11 but it took you a long time from what I understand to be able to write about what it was like to be gay in a culture where that was not allowed yeah can you talk about what was required before you could write about that um well I suppose I mean I did write in my teens some poems that were in code literally in code and then I forgot I didn't have a way to remember how to decipher like literally in code literally in code and I didn't have a way to decipher my own code oh yes and so they remain there's a metaphor there somewhere yeah I know resistance your sister figured it out she's like here you go yeah you're entirely likely it took years for me to be able to turn attention to what it was like to be gay in the context of an Ireland where the language that was given to us through culture through religion through power was one of shame and I was a very devout young man and so in a certain sense I made choices of devotion that deepened a certain experience of shame I went through some reparative therapies and exorcisms in my late teens early 20s and to get rid of the gay and all of those kinds of things and it was almost 20 years later when I began to go I want to turn to those in poems I wrote a sequence called Seven Deadly Sonnets and it took a long time and that's the point I think is in answer it was time it had its own work to do Patrick Kavanaugh has a great line in his poem having confessed lie at the heart of the emotion time has its own work to do and there is a desire sometimes to have the therapy to have the thing to have the solution and unfortunately time has its own work to do that can be a bam but it can also be a burden I think and certainly that's what it took for me both in terms of distance from it in order to forget it enough to be able to turn back to it with new eyes in order to be away from the certain kind of trauma and in the ingrained shame that that was but also to think about it through the lens of craft I'm glad I turned to sonnets you know and a very particular 14 line sonnet that kept on asking me to carve things out with a knife because otherwise I could have just written and written and written and the sonnet said no you need to get rid of lines those are too long got too many that really really helped to have that that austerity that discipline yeah it's not the only way to do it but certainly that's what that's what helped me can I ask you maybe this is a foolish question but how do you start such a poem do you just start writing lines and lines and lines and then pair it down or do you I knew when the idea came to me I was on the train from Dublin from Belfast to Dublin and I was going to be in a room with some people who had been witness to the very first public exorcism so I think that was partly was on my mind and the first exorcist and I know not all Americans are exorcists but the first exorcist I had was from the country of America and so you're welcome yeah the line and this in the published Seven Deadly Salads this is the first line I wish you weren't American so and partly for me it was the it was the count of syllables I wish you weren't American boom boom boom and for me it is the music of languages all and the energy behind that music is always the thing that gets me in there can be imagery in that but for me it's always the pulse the thrust the beat the lament at the heart of it is there and it gave me the opening and I knew that that was where it would begin I didn't know where it would go but I knew where it would start not every poet will start with with the musicality of stuff but certainly for me that is so I mean sometimes it might be an image but even the image for me is always going to be linked to music that's fascinating I wonder if we can shift to talking a little bit about peace since we are here in the U.S. Institute of Peace and about conflict I don't know if you feel this way but I notice that one of the great frustrations of journalism in a time of high conflict is that it's extremely boring it's predictable it's rigid it's repetitive I can scroll through the headlines on my phone and I know what the stories are going to say it's like surprise is dead curiosity is languishing it's a terrible feeling and I feel like our conversation about conflict in America is in desperate need of new words right new energy I don't know that there's any word more stultifying for example than polar polarization I can't even say it polarization ah the worst in a way I feel like that's what one thing poetry can do right is to give us new words and new energy yeah and all art can do it in the sense of that it's new words and also new plot lines also what's going to happen not just how can this get worse I didn't think it could get worse that's a very predictable plot line unfortunately but you're looking for for language and plot lines where you think what's going to unfold what is possible and sometimes within that I'm hoping that people are asking the kinds of questions to say person A and person B you two have rehearsed your argument over many years and so we could have a very predictable argument now right tell me something that surprises you about what's happened right I ask that question right my mind that's journalism to my mind that is saying we have people listening here who know what each are going to say and are being put into a situation of in-group out-group side A side B use contempt for them use contempt for them great fantastic nothing is achieved that isn't that isn't a public intellectual life for what should be happening on the radio or the newspaper public intellectual life should be saying like what are you looking for what do you want like for years in conflict resolution to my mind the most difficult question to name when you're in a situation of high conflict is to be able to say that's why I finished with those poems what do you want is to lay that open is profoundly difficult what do you want because you have to then be willing to think about your motivations your goals and what the hell you're willing to do to get there that opens up the possibility of thinking about compromise and what's tolerable compromise what's aligned too far and suddenly you begin to speak about the underbelly about all the dynamics that's affecting the performance of a very predictable conversation yes and often it's hard for people to answer what they want because they've been focused so long on what they don't want or what what what or they've been schooled in terms of saying here's what people want you to want to hear you say say you want that they can stay in your camp and keep voting for you keep giving you their money keep buying the stuff that you sell keep whatever it is that keeps you keeping yeah and to ask the vulnerable question about what do you want that interests me because I might listen to that and go I am I'm curious about what they're going to say I've done a lot of conflict negotiation too with people who would have strong feelings about LGBT people not being public in public life and sometimes in those kind of mediated discussions you'd say to somebody who would come I suppose from a point of view that would say that there'd be cautious about LGBT people in public life is there any question that you know you don't know the answer to about gay life oh I like that and then to say can you ask it and if you can't can you tell us why you can't and something interesting happens then and so you're curious then to say I wonder what you're going to say and there's vulnerability in that because like one time in a room like that somebody said do you love each other mm-hmm and there's an insult in thinking is that where we're beginning oh god like I thought the bar was low like we've just gone into Hades ask that question but he asked it and he exposed himself by asking it somebody answered to say yeah and told a story and he believed the answer and suddenly we were having an exchange where he had said in public I'm telling you about something I don't know that is an intellectual point of view that I admire and I admired his courage for doing it doing so even though I was dismayed as to what he communicated that's such a good question though I collect questions for journalists and when we train newsrooms I'm going to steal that one good post, great post yes exactly and we're going to now bring in the audience for Q&A as promised so I believe we have questions from the internets and we also have questions here so we're going to collect a few of them and we've got a microphone here so raise your hand we've got someone in the back it looks like and someone right here why don't we take a few questions and then you can choose which ones you want to answer should I start go ahead yes okay thank you very much I'm thanks very much I was actually enjoying what you're talking about the relationship between poetry and war because I'm a poet and I'm from Afghanistan so it makes sense a lot for me from the tradition that I'm coming I'm coming from a Persian tradition of poetry in our tradition there is a very serious link between the poetry and social movements to the extent that all the neutral poets in Persian word from Iran to Afghanistan to Tajikistan they are considered as people who are living in ivory tower so and for example Ahmadisham Lou is a famous Iranian contemporary poet he says I prefer my poetry to be trumpet rather than lullaby so you're coming from an Irish background and I know there are similarities I mean the context is a little bit similar in relationships between the war and and poetry and how the poets perceiving this relationship I'm asking what do you think the poetry should be lullaby or a trumpet thank you I love that yes so years ago I think in an on-beam podcast the poet David White described turning away from science and back towards poetry because the language of science was not precise enough to describe what he had seen in the Galapagos Islands and that the language of science took the eye out of it I suspect the audience here in Washington DC is a bit more familiar with the language of policy which also has a tendency to be a bit imprecise and to take the eye out of it and I'm wondering if you could help us think about or share how you think about the language of policy and the imprecision at times and taking the eye out of it and how we might what we might need to do to create a different world the kind of democracy of dignity and desire that you described earlier thank you if I may add here there are a few questions from our live stream audience that are somewhat related in particular there are a set of questions about the relationship between propaganda and hateful rhetoric and the poetry of peace so Emma asks how do poets who want to write about war avoid being dogmatic or pedantic or agitator propagandists in their work and Amanda asks can poetry lie can poetry be corrupted into something that we feel deeply but the experience is a lie go okay so I'm going to give inadequate answers to extraordinary questions like the the Audre Lorde quote there about you know poetry is not a luxury it is a necessity I think addresses the first question in terms of that like there can be an idea that poetry is in an ivory tower but it isn't true there are some ivory towers that have poetry in them but poetry is everywhere poetry is amongst the people and poetry emerges from people somebody will be writing something now that they'll share with just a handful of people and those handful of people will remember those words for the rest of their life because they will have put something onto it and that sharing might just have been in a text message to one person or a group text message to a few people where somebody will go that helped me something was created something was made in the container of that language and so I think there is a helpful recognition about the the broad pluralities that poetry is rather than thinking that poetry is only what is the first thing you'll see on the poetry bookshelf in the shop I like the poetry bookshelf in the shop but I also like finding out poems and poetries that come from all kinds of other places when I think of the language of policy I think so often art and public language are held together in the complexity about the particular in the so-called universal and whose universal is defined as the universal is a big problem within that and one of the things that interests me in policy is can policy have enough story to be recognized as a human experience to the population to which it's speaking does policy tell the truth enough that its propositions therefore have muscle and that's of interest to me about how that can work and everything occurs in the context of story and therefore within the context of story how can we find a story that holds enough of what it is that's trying to be addressed in order for something to be for an agency of change to be engendered that can then be used forward in that way and then picking up on that the question about can poetry lie yes it can Edmund Spencer the author of The Fairy Queen wrote this thing for the British government called a treatise on the state of the Irish and so much in all as I admire Edmund Spencer and The Fairy Queen extraordinary timeless poetry in a certain sense it came from a very time constrained man who said terrible things about language Irish language and knows that if you want to decimate a country kill the language don't learn it make them learn yours make them negotiate for their safety in a language in which they're not fluent that's how you do it take away vernacular make people have to work in a third or fourth or fifth language to talk about the first language which is the body therefore poetry is as open to lying and violence as any other language art as any other human communication and the idea that just because it comes in a in a package of form that it doesn't need to be probed and that the question of the literary quality of it is the only question that is really limited and Paul Solan an extraordinary 20th century poet had huge critiques rightly so about Heidegger because he was saying to him you seem to have forgotten the impact that your language has Solan stands and they had exchanges Solan stands as a challenge to the kind of language of highfalutin phenomenological philosophy that wasn't taking its impact in any way seriously and wasn't being accountable for what Heidegger knew was happening as a result of that you know how to avoid propaganda Stretterich I think I mean I don't know because if I knew that I could write the book called How to Avoid Propaganda Stretterich but I I suppose the way to do it is to write in community and community who are not just interested in your craft but who are going to say is it true you're just trying to be clever are you exercising contempt for a population because it makes you feel better about yourself what are you creating and that that too is a literary critique about what's being put forward and there we are those are some responses to some of those questions those were not easy questions I've watched you for two days answer really hard questions one after the other with great grace and humility it reminds me could you just and I want to take more questions maybe we could get the mics going of people yes thank you could you quickly just add a beat about community poetry oh yeah so I part of my job in Corrie Miller as a freelancer for about nine years was working with groups of people who were speaking about their experiences of terrible terrible division and pain and bereavement and I was facilitating but part of the role of doing that is to go away at the end of a session and write a poem over the course of a week and then bring that poem the next week back to say what do you think of this does this poem speak about that and sometimes people were like oh wow that that lines about me it was kind of creating composite characters that was in the space between people and then also that group of people would say you got this wrong and I loved that kind of editing because it was an editing that wasn't just about saying well you know how many poems have you published in order to be able to offer me that it was a poem to say this language is trying to do something else and we own this poetry emerged from the space we created together and therefore the editing of this poem can go forward go further so I loved those projects and more recently I was poet in residence for Vox Lemonis a great Scottish group that does work with people who've been affected in all kinds of levels by the criminal justice system in Scotland and we went through a similar process of writing community poems and then editing them together and then publishing them where nobody's attributed as the final author because they all emerged from the space between us wow is thrilling to be part of that yeah I just wanted to make sure we flesh that out a little bit because there are a lot of policy people here and that seems like one way in which you could get to that intersection right is to do more collaboratively I think the best journalism has now done that way too yes hi just wanted to thank you so much too for your conversation I'm also queer in a Irish descent so whoo go us and I wanted to ask you how how would you like to see poetry used in the future in order to advance peace and peace conflict resolution and acceptance specifically you mentioned for LGBTQ people and I would love to see how you hope to see it used in the future thank you so much thank you we're gonna take a couple more can I go okay yes please thank you so much for this I'm working with a team that's based in Ukraine well they're Ukrainian and I'm wondering about the use of day-to-day language to recognize and make an impact I suppose from afar we all just met in Krakow in Poland well at least the women did the men couldn't join but I felt like we missed so much we were super productive we got a lot done it's about restoring restoring essential services but we didn't we didn't really I feel like delve into how these folks are living day-to-day second-by-second hour-by-hour and I don't know if it's specifically about poetry but you talk a lot about language and the power of language and I'm wondering about using day-to-day day-to-day language just to recognize you know the situation people are living in in which a lot doesn't happen for a lot of folks who are internally displaced for a long time and then a lot happens really quickly in a short amount of time thank you thanks let's take one more yes Nega go ahead Nega oh it's okay go ahead go ahead yes thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation I'm originally from Scotland and I've always felt really sad that I never learned Gaelic as the local language I really wish that I had and so I suppose what I'm asking is that something that we should be trying to kind of go back to learn our native languages as a way to understand better the culture yeah thanks thank you this might be our last round of questions so I'll sneak two more in from the online audience there are so many wonderful questions one question it's from a mediator a peace builder and it says it's a privilege to be able to put the parties to a conflict in the sphere of peace do you consider it necessary to insist on communication on both sides of the conflict and then there's a question from Logan which asks to what extent is poetry an avenue for sharing and reinforcing universal truths what is the role of established shared truths or lack thereof in conflict mediation we got the mediators in the house there at the end no the philosophical mediators yes right the best kind the best kind how would I like to see poetry used to advance safety and democracy and participation for all kinds of communities LGBTQ communities and others so partly I suppose I'd like to see the possibility that that question could evolve or change a little bit so poetry used to advance art I don't think can be used to advance like really good art can be turned into propaganda by its interpretation we know that and so the question for me is how is it what does it mean to bear witness to art and then see what happens and then to go what's happening and what do we think about what's happening and how do we push back on that and that for me is a way of using the mind to always be alert that the interpretation of things can sometimes have negative consequences that need to be paid attention to and yeah that is of interest to me to look at how even art that's coming from a propositional point of view about hoping to give voice to a community of people how is that participating in contempt and if it is not we're able to withstand critics of itself well then how how can we how can we ask more questions about art that is of interest to me when it comes to the role of art I don't think art ever belongs to the artist or to the community I'm glad when art of any form upsets rather than says great here's the strategic plan and here's how to do it art can sometimes comfort but it can also discomfort and I think that's one of the reasons why I turn to it is because it isn't convenient in terms of thinking of the day-to-day language I remember hearing once a conversation between people who were talking about what's the best time to go shopping during a war like for bread or milk or whatever it is you need and I learned so much about war based on how it is that people said oh I've tried this time I tried that time here's the evidence I collected that said this is the worst time and then somebody said what I always learned was that it was just before dawn was the best time to go and there was something about the particularity of time and place and attempt and failure in all of that and something so universal as when do you go to the shop and then within that you think who works in the shop where do they get where do they supply and the day-to-day language of that and there was the particularity of it it wasn't trying to say describe to me the experience of living seven months under a particular under seven months of sustained armed conflict in your city it was just saying when's the best time to go shopping and the one thing became more than one thing I am cautious about the universal Claudia Rankin writes brilliantly about the the idea about who gets to define what the universal is a universal truth this will come up in the next question too so I'm cautious about that and within it I know that the particular sometimes is more than just the particular Elizabeth Bowen a great writer Dublin writer in the 20th century says to turn from everything to one face is to find one's self face to face with everything and I don't think that's entirely scientifically true but I think it's helpful to think sometimes in trying to look at a massive experience about seven months of sustained conflict or a year of sustained conflict to ask a single question about something might open up doors that actually means you suddenly see a labyrinth underneath it and but the simplicity of the opening question can contain much should we learn languages that are indigenous to the lands which we are I'm cautious about saying yes in that simply because I'd rather speak from the point of view of Ireland I'd love it that everybody who lives in Ireland either spoke it anyway or was open to learning some but I'd love that I think that would be great you know imperatives you should you must I don't know that those will help but there's something about what would it mean to create a culture where there's the possibility of loving the language and not being ashamed whether you have 50 words or 5000 words I'm aware that in the context of this country who is it that would decide that that should happen and could that too be a contemporary face of a new colonization to say we're going to learn your language we're going to be better than you are that would be the implication it'll be everywhere and I think there's all kinds of manifestations of power dynamics in that that could be unfortunate and that could actually contribute to a further sense of being publicly shamed so I think it's always good to know more about language but in the context of a place where language has been systematically decimated I think that what there needs to be is courtesy and communication and the question about consent and all of those questions would need to be asked and I wouldn't I would be the one to ask them and to learn as a result of that is it necessary to insist on communication on both sides? It was one of the questions from one of the mediators there's such a broad background to that question it's the kind of thing where we in person I'd probably be saying tell me more about where the question comes from because I'm curious about it because there's so much information necessary insist those are powerful words both sides also that I mean obviously plenty of conflicts have more than two sides and implications of both sides can sometimes imply equivalence of power in both sides and all of those things are cautions to me of course cautions to all of us who work in conflict to not imply that conflicts occur between two sides who have equal but opposite power and privilege so I'd be curious to look at the power lines behind the question because I'm sure that there is a phenomenal amount of experience in the questioner and I'm interested in that but one of the things I do think is there is an importance of privacy in the context of dialogue that you don't have to lay everything out but there's the question as to power and safety and usually when you're trying to build trust you can bring some things into an experiment in risk and trust in safety in a group and normally you're looking for people to communicate something that they're hoping won't be exploited and hoping might deepen the possibility of some kind of resolve to the betterment of their cause so that occurs to me but I'd want to know a lot more and is poetry the sharing of universal truths? again what is a universal truth? I mean perhaps you could say we're all alive okay great but the dead are also alive in a way aren't they? you know this morning I was talking to some dead friends and wondering what they'd say back so in a broad sense I don't want to be too pedantic about the universal in a broad sense I don't know that poetry is about trying to come up with some new secular form of scripture some new version of pronouncements to say here's how you should live your life and I don't know that it's there for guidance I think it's there because it keeps on coming and then the question is to say what's happening in response to it and that's a phenomenological question it's a question that asks me to take pay attention to experience and it's a question that rather than thinking what's the truth this poem is declaring sometimes I want to think what's the hunger that it's evoking in me and then to follow that hunger that's what interests me it isn't to say that there aren't universal truths being put in poems or something like a universal truth of course there are many poems like that and so many people follow along so many but there are there are other things that a poem is doing too and it's particularly those other things that I'm really interested in thank you I feel like the answers you just gave in a way capture what poetry does like it refuses to be pegged it refuses to be linear right sometimes it's uncomfortable and sometimes it's challenging and sometimes it's funny and you did all those things today so thank you very much for being with us and thank you all of you for coming