Poetry for all

I was talking with Rob Grimsey, our Group Marketing Director, this week. Not unusual in itself, we regularly talk on a wide variety of topics as you would imagine. This particular conversation was a little different from our usual topics.

We had been speaking about the poetry anthology being brought together as a result of the Employee Resource Group (ERG) NASHpride’s great idea of sharing what we love in lyrics and poetry wherever we are around the Nash Squared world. You may recall we did something similarly last year with our global cookbook ‘Life on a plate’.

So, back to poetry… Rob and I were speaking about how we both find comfort and a way of expressing ourselves through poetry. We also spoke though that writing a poem can come with an expectation that what is written has to be at some heightened level of comparison to Shakespeare or Byron, both from a writer’s and reader’s perspective. This elevates poetry for many to a place of being out of reach; something that is for others but not for me. Who needs that pressure when you sit down intending to pour out your heart in the form of a poem!

Music is poetry

I know that many of us, myself included, love music and it’s many different genres. Like many too I love a good old sing along whenever I hear my favorite songs playing. Of course, I love the music but what I find myself tuning in to are the lyrics. The music eliciting the feelings and thoughts brought to life by the poems that are the lyrics of the songs.

I got to think about this some more later in the evening and realised that song lyrics are the most accessible of all forms of poetry. Unless it is opera playing on the radio, I don’t think I apply the same filter to a song being played as I do sometimes to a poem I might read or hear. It would never occur to me that a song was ‘out of my reach’ or something I could never write because people like me don’t do that, right. No, I concluded, that isn’t right at all. Music and song lyrics are in every part of our lives. The first bars of a song become instantly recognisable and take me back to a moment in time and memories flood over me.

I have the same response with poems. I can be in a tough spot in life, or walking early morning with my golden retriever Enzo, and suddenly a much-loved poem or song lyric comes back to me.

I genuinely believe that poetry is for all of us; it’s a way of expressing something important to us. It’s for us yet, at the same time, when shared can offer a perspective to others who read it. It creates a bridge between all of us to understanding and compassion.

You may have seen the email I sent out this week about the NASHpride anthology of poems we are compiling which I mentioned earlier in my blog. I can’t wait to read the poems people have shared that have been written by others and, even more special, the ones we have written for ourselves.

To get us in the spirit here is a little starter for ten:

I sit quietly, contemplating the empty page
Waiting for inspiration for my weekly blog
The moments pass, I take a deep breath

I look back on the week, remember all the conversations
Relive the challenges, the opportunities, the laughter too
I have learnt so much in this week, we all have

What hung loudly over my head
The empty page
The void stood staring back at me

Now, pouring out onto the pages
Creating the connections
Sharing what makes us who we are