I recently asked my students – who are predominantly Dutch, then German, Belgian, Polish, Turkish, Latvian, Luxembourgian and English – to bring in their favourite poem. Nearly half of the students arrived empty-handed. They had ‘never read any poetry’ and so they had no favourite. (This wasn’t even opportunistic laziness!) ‘But how are you okay with that? Tread softly now, folks, for you tread…’ I made stabbing gestures at my heart. ‘Are you not aggrieved for all that you’ve missed?’ I have very little time for patriotism, but I did feel glad then to have come through the poems-are-in-the-national-guts-whether-ye-like-it-or-not Irish school system. To me, poetry isn’t just educational and sustaining and metaphysical and an aetheist’s proxy to prayer; it’s necessary. I haven’t the slightest idea why, of course, but I’ve recently been obsessed with trying to work out poetry’s value. Perhaps it’s a very small waste of everyone’s time? goes the refrain of the inner villain-elle. In writing, I try to work against that threat of irrelevance all the time (in my fiction too). I feel some foolish responsibility to the adult who has never read a poem, so that, just in case, just on the off-chance that they read one, it pulls its weight. I suppose what I’m saying is that I write for a reader. I believe poems need to be read, read aloud, experienced, and returned to again and again like addictive, mood-altering songs.