Poetry as Sustenance, with Pádraig Ó Tuama

Pádraig Ó Tuama is the delightful host the Poetry Unbound podcast. He asks people to stop for 12 minutes every day and simply be still and listen to a poem, and some thoughts about it. This is art and spirituality all in one. Stillness and creativity woven together.

Poetry kept Pádraig Ó Tuama alive. Now he’s sharing it with everyone else.

By Julie McGonegal, March 24, 2021 from Broadview

The "Poetry Unbound" podcast host asks readers to slow down their lives for 12 minutes of spoken word

In the early days of the pandemic, when health officials were advising people to sing Happy Birthday twice while washing their hands, poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama knew there had to be something better to recite. So he started scrubbing along to W. B. Yeats’s poem To a Child Dancing in the Wind. “That lasted the right amount of time — and it’s much nicer to recite to yourself,” he says, laughing.

As a gay man growing up Catholic in conflict-ridden Northern Ireland, Ó Tuama turned to poetry as his language of survival. “It never occurred to me that I might want to think about this as a career,” he recalls. “It was so much more important than a career; it was a way of life.” Now, as a critically acclaimed poet and the host of On Being Studios’ Poetry Unbound podcast, Ó Tuama has embraced poetry as his vocation.