Workmates chatting too loudly? This poet says we should enjoy it

The workmates loudly gossiping at a nearby desk may set your teeth grinding, but rock star British poet David Whyte warns we need to embrace the irritations of everyday life – because if we lost them, we would miss them bitterly.

“While we often complain about our lives and what we call the daily grind, if we were taken away from it, we’d be quite heartbroken,” the 69-year-old said.

Whyte is touring Australia performing poetry at a series of live shows, and he wants his audiences to be challenged in similar fashion to a Nick Cave show.

Poet David Whyte in Sydney during his Australian tour. Credit: Janie Barrett

“Where you’re both disturbed and nourished by the art form at the same time,” he said. “Nick Cave is all about difficulty and grief and the beauty of life.”

It is in life’s more difficult moments, he argues, that we find ways to more fully embrace its beauty.

Whyte says emotions such as regret, shame and reluctance are all key to a life well lived.

We need to bin the idea of “no regrets” and reflect on our behaviour – as individuals, friends, parents, colleagues and citizens of the world.

Regret allows us to recognise when we fall short.

Whyte has similar ideas about shame and reluctance, arguing they are essential concepts and our current approach to them needs rethinking. It’s poetry meets philosophy.

They are radical ideas, typical of the Yorkshire-born Whyte, who grew up with poetry from an early age, courtesy of his Irish mother. Now an associate fellow at Oxford University, Whyte is clearly making his mark with more than 1.2 million views of his 2017 TED talk and nearly 100,000 followers on Instagram.

Speaking after sold-out shows in Byron Bay, Whyte said poetry is not an abstract art form.

“It’s something we experience every day,” he said, adding that it can help us find beauty in the prosaic.

Whyte’s Irish mother introduced him to poetry when he was four years old.Credit: Janie Barrett

“Whatever it is, poetry allows you to come to ground in your life, wherever you are, and be both, ‘well, actually, I’ve been missing what’s miraculous about it’, or ‘Jesus, I need to be gone from here’.”

Whyte has hundreds of poems memorised, his own work and others, and his shows involve him reciting them. The performance element is critical, he says, likening it to a good song.

“My job is to get poetry to as many people as possible and doing it through reciting it, not through persuading people that poetry is a great thing: they have to be in the presence of it,” he said.

“You don’t say, ‘persuade me that this song is really good’. If Frank Sinatra is singing it, it’s a good song; if Nina Simone is singing it, it’s a good song. That’s my job, to bring the living essence of [poetry] alive on stage.

“My talks are more like a quiet rock concert, with everyone present listening. If I’m doing my job properly, there should be lots of silence. You can hear a pin drop; when 1000 people fall silent altogether, it’s fantastic.”

Many people have told him they have walked away from his shows and made profound decisions about their lives.

Whyte also has a degree in marine biology and has led naturalist tours in the Galapagos Islands, the Andes, Amazon and Himalayas and his work – like that of many poets – regularly features observations about the natural world.

He says the best way to get into poetry is to go into your local bookshop and browse through the many poetry books on offer until you find a voice that speaks to you.

“The amazing thing about poetry is you don’t even need the whole book. You need one line. One line can change your life forever ... ” he said. “But when you get the one line, you say, ‘Oh, my God, if I can change through that line, what about all the rest that’s there?’”

David Whyte is in Sydney on February 22 and Melbourne on February 25.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers by Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.