Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
To finish this series on fathers and fatherhood, I decided to offer a sort of couplet. Two poems, written maybe a century apart, one by a man who was read by millions when he lived and is now long since dead, the other by a young woman who immigrated to Canada from India with her parents as a young child in the 1990s.
Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England in the 1880s, moved to Detroit, Michigan in the US when he was 10 and later wrote thousands of poems, collected in 20 books, hosted a popular radio show in the 1940s, starred on TV in the 1950s and wrote a popular light column that was syndicated to 300 newspapers around America. His poem here is one of his most serious, I think. His poems were often humorous, poking fun at his subjects, bringing a levity to many a reader’s dark day. This one, Only a Dad, has some of that lightness — a lightness of touch, for sure — but like the best light writers (think of poets such as Pam Ayres or Clive James, who appear in Episodes 43 and 110 of this podcast) the subject matter here will also connect deeply and resonate strongly, I think, with readers everywhere.
Rupi Kaur was born in Punjab, India and is now, as she embarks upon her 30s, reaching an ever-growing global audience through heartfelt, searingly powerful and often tiny poems, many of them accompanied by pencil drawings or animated videos that inject her words with even more meaning. Kaur is, in many ways, the first Instagram poet, and I don’t mean that disparagingly at all. Instagram, and other new technologies for communicating globally, are platforms that can be used for good or exploited for ill. The work of Rupi Kaur and many others there spread goodness, wisdom, truth and beauty through the world and across time and space at the speed of light and with at least some of the power of a thousand real-life poetry readings.
These two poems cover fathers in very different ways, but each of them is, in its way, priceless. With Guest’s poem, we see and praise the ordinary father, doing ordinary things, for the ordinary beloved people in his life. In Kaur’s poem, we get a glimpse of what happens when a father’s love morphs into something damaging. In both of these poems — as I hope in all of the poems throughout this series on fathers and fatherhood — there is something here for all readers and all listeners. For fathers, who might hope to conduct and fulfil that role to the very best effect for your family and all who need them, and for wives and partners of men, and for sons and daughters of fathers too.
So thank you again for being here throughout this series. And I leave you with these two poems, presented together, each offering something different and vital for fathers, for men who would like to be one one day, and for everyone else who yearns for the father in their life to be as strong, as good, as wise and protective and mentoring as he can possibly be.
You can read Rupi Kaur’s poem here
And Edgar Albert Guest’s poem here
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For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
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