Poetry is a way of articulating the human condition, which absorbs both headline news and the small print of our daily lives.  FIONA McCANNreports on the DLR Poetry Now festival

'POETRY Makes Nothing Happen, Obama Tells Congress. Poetry Makes Nothing Happen, Poll Reveals." In her opening lecture for this year's DLR Poetry Now festival, its curator Belinda McKeon imagined newspaper headlines built around Auden's famous line, from In Memory of WB Yeats.

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” quoted McKeon, adding that taken alone the line was the province of “a newsroom, a soundbite, a headline, of the search for a phrase to fit in the right number of column inches, to sum up the right handful of raced-through notions and squeezed in voices, to catch the eye and lure the reader”.

Given that the primary function of a newspaper of record is to record events, specific happenings, it would seem, if Auden’s soundbite is to be taken as such, that poetry doesn’t belong on the pages of this publication. At least, that the consequences of poetry have no place in newsprint.

So what happened in Dún Laoghaire last weekend, when poets took their poems to packed audiences in the Pavilion theatre, and words spilled out onto windy streets and travelled home with the listeners, transforming?

Surely the appearance of 20-odd (the hyphen there, the poets will agree, being all-important) poets in one seaside theatre venue over the course of a spring weekend could be considered an event in itself worth reporting, not to mention the appearance of 17 of them on one stage at the same time, all reading the words of Seamus Heaney aloud and giving them new resonance as they were articulated in accents and with emphases varied.

And what of the magic in the room when poet Tomas Venclova took to the stage, of the cadences of his words as he recited them, spectacles glinting at the middle distance, in his native Lithuanian, with their English translations as counterpoint? Can’t the music in a poetic moment be considered enough of an event to merit, if not a front page story, then at least a column inch or two on a slow news day?

Not if one former Irish Timescolumnist is to be believed, as this paper's managing editor Gerry Smyth reminded festival goers when he spoke on the presentation of the Irish TimesPoetry Now Award to Belfast-born poet Derek Mahon. "'There is no excuse for poetry'," Smyth quoted Myles na Gopaleen's words as they once appeared in this paper. "'Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always prompts illusory concepts of life."

Illusory concepts of life do not come within the stated purview of this newspaper, which would seem to suggest once again that poetry must find other outlets.

And Smyth reminded his audience of poets, poetry readers, and the long-suffering family members of both these categories, that na Gopaleen went one step further, decrying the effect poetry had “on the negligible handful who read it, of stimulating them to write poetry themselves”.

THE “NEGLIGIBLE handful” packed out the 230-seater theatre day in, day out at the festival, no doubt stimulated by the words of Harry Clifton, Adam Foulds, Ian Duhig, Colette Bryce, Frank Bidart and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin among others, as they attended readings, bought books, sought signatures and absorbed the words and voices and asides of all the gathered poets, and nothing happened.

Nothing happened in the intimacy of the numerous readings, where poets spoke their written words out loud and gave them presence in that present. Nor did anything happen when Robert Pinsky delivered his keynote address in a smooth, sonorous voice and reminded us that we are born to die. "We may love Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, we may even get it by heart, but we do not intend to dwell only in that poem," said Pinsky, as he spoke of the need to both remember and forget the legacy of our poetic ancestors. "We get on with our business."

And if this business is poetry, then on we go, remembering, forgetting, consulting our ancestors, celebrating birthdays (Seamus Heaney’s upcoming 70th made for plenty of raised glasses and spilled words) and making noise.

"It is often said of a successful poet that he or she has found a voice," said poet Kit Fryatt during the festival, speaking as a judge of the Irish TimesPoetry Now competition. "The truth is at once more basic and more complex. A successful poet has not so much a voice as a noise."

Yet after the weekend’s cacophony, can the record show – this newspaper of record at least – that nothing happened? To answer that, it’s back to Auden, who elaborates on that all-important line by reminding us that poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth”. A mouth full of noise, that may not, as McKeon pointed out, “be the reason for what happens; poetry is, rather, the means by which something happens. Poetry is the means by which a happening thing reaches us as a thing more lasting, more vital, as a thing whole and full and graspable by each one of us in a different way”.

A poem, then, is not a war or a crime or a political assassination (though some might argue, poetically, that a poem can be all three), but a way of articulating and understanding the human condition, which absorbs both headline news and the small print of our daily lives.

“So then, what happens will not be understandable if we insist on seeing it as an event, as a fact or a rumour, as a story we might read about in the news,” said McKeon. “What happens, I am suggesting, in the ‘happening’ that is poetry, is a way, a possibility, of making sense of such things. Of making them mean something. Through language, through rhythm, through metre, through metaphor, through line.”

In doing so, poetry, as it was celebrated at last weekend’s festival, may not make the news so much as make sense of it for us. “Poetry, I think Auden is telling us, does not make things arise,” said McKeon. “It makes things ours.”