Live Encounters Poets on Poetry July 2026
Can one train to be a poet, or is it a divine talent? by Geraldine Mills.
There are poets whose work has endured down the centuries. Think Homer, Enheduanna, Sappho, Shakespeare. Then there are those whose poetry has dissolved into the ether, never to be heard of again because they didn’t possess that intangible quality that makes a poet.
A memorable poem rarely arrives fully formed. Any would-be-poet sitting around expecting Calliope or Erato to fly in with one beautifully wrapped up in a golden box is in for a nasty shock. ‘Inspiration exists but it must find you working,’ Picasso so rightly states. A poet worth his or her salt knows that they must work towards inspiration for it to come towards them. They are forever marrying their gift with the hard graft of revision to coax an image or an idea to be fully realised.
There are, certainly, elements of poetry that can be taught. Someone with the spark and guided by a good mentor can be taught the skills of form, of phrasing, to learn the power of imagery, metaphor, to practise the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum. Even with this knowledge, the poet without talent will write mere statement that is clichéd, vapid. It is the difference between painting by numbers and a vibrant canvas; scratches on a piece of marble and Michelangelo’s David. Between wheat and darnel.
A poet who is at the top of their game understands the felt quality of sound, its fluency. With the scrupulous selection of imagery and sensory detail, they have the innate ability to select the precise language, the music of a line, its turning. The finished work will lift an experience out of the ordinary into a realm that is memorable or startling for the reader.
When written by such a poet, the completed poem is a lightning bolt that ignites a picture in the mind of the reader/listener, and to quote from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Postscript’ ‘…catches the heart off guard and blows it open.’
© Geraldine Mills
Geraldine Mills is an award-winning poet and short story writer who lives in the west of Ireland. She is the author of six collections of poetry, four of short stories and two children’s novels. She is the recipient of many awards including the Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, three Arts Council Bursaries and a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship.
Her fiction and poetry have been on curricula of contemporary literature courses in a number of US universities and the USA summer programme at the Burren College of Art. Her fourth short story collection, Survival Games, was published by Arlen House in 2025. She was recently awarded a Heinrich Boll Residency in Achill, Co. Mayo, Ireland to work on her next novel.