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| Image courtesy of the Irish Times |
Poet Maria McManus created the Poetry Jukebox in Northern Ireland. You would see these big thick jukeboxes in parks and on sidewalks and you could listen to the words of Northern Irish poets as they tried to put this particular trauma and history and war and memory and healing into words.
This article about her project is now almost a year old, but still a tremendously powerful statement on the psyche of a country two decades into an uneasy peace. "It is as if we are the children of warring parents," McManus writes. "lying in bed at night, hearing the row (argument) going on downstairs, all over again. We want it to stop. We want everyone to be happy and just get along. We want love to win instead -- but we have no choice but to lie there, still and quiet, waiting for it all to stop. And tomorrow, we will get up and carry on -- get on with the business of not making things worse, knowing all is not well -- but still feel unable to do anything about it."
McManus then makes a powerful argument for the place of literature in all of this, that really paying attention to poetry can be a way to heal. In this week in which we see still more evidence of the power of angry words--usually absorbed on the internet--to spur violent actions, I offer this article in which Maria McManus reminds us that words can also heal us, if we are willing to be sensitive to them.
McManus's article is linked below:
