Fewer than 10% of adults read at least one poem a year.

Why does that matter?

Because when we stop reading poetry, we lose a training ground for empathy, kindness, and moral imagination.

This World Kindness Day I was invited to talk at Kindness Unites about how listening is critical to kindness, and how poetry can help us develop our empathy.

I’m not a poet.

But last summer, on the edge of burnout, I was looking for something, some way to connect with myself, to connect with others, to deepen my connections with the world. I began an experiment upstairs at my local bookshop – sharing a poem in quiet contemplation with a group of people.

If I’m honest, poetry at school put me off. I was forced to memorize and recite poems to erase my accent and make me socially acceptable. I can still, if given the right quantities of red wine, wow you with a rendition of Dover Beach. Poetry felt like it wasn’t for people like me.

But then, a series of crises in my personal and professional life led me to burnout. The world felt in perpetual crisis, too. I found myself turning to poetry more and more. And that’s how Unfolding Poetry began.

These sessions combined literature and mindfulness, and an opportunity to build a community with other “poetry-curious” people. We’ve been going for about a year now, unfolding our minds to a variety of poems. You can read more about our reflections on this substack

After the initial few experiments, I realised something else was happening: I began to feel more hopeful, more connected. Poetry was helping me exercise the feeling part of my brain, dulled by endless doomscrolling during lockdowns.

Darwin’s regret

Just as our bodies need exercising, so do our empathetic sides of our brain.

Charles Darwin writing towards the end of his life, reflected on how his mind had changed from a lack of poetry. Up to the age of thirty, he said, he had had great pleasure from poetry of many kinds. But in his later years, he found that he “couldnot endure to read a line of poetry…

 “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use…. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Modern science backs him up. FmRI scanners have shown that poetry stimulates both the emotional processing parts of the brain, as well as the parts which process language. In other words – listening to poetry is both a right and left brain activity.

Poems as empathy machines

Poetry doesn’t just connect us with ourselves – it helps us connect with others.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or share the emotional state of another person. Poet Roger Robinson calls poems “empathy machines.”

“The poet’s job is to translate unspeakable things on to the page,” he said. “Poets can touch hearts and minds;  they can translate trauma into something people can face”

His work, which tackles topics such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, the Windrush scandal, and the legacy of slavery,  helps us to connect and empathise, even if it is outside our experience, or too painful to contemplate.

And it is only through empathy that we can really practice kindness.

Listening is the loudest form of kindness

To do that, I believe that we need to begin with listening.

Sometimes it can take real courage to expose ourselves to the vulnerability which listening to another person places us. Palliative care doctor, Kathryn Mannix, in her book Listen, describes tender conversations in difficult times; conversations about illness, change, death and dying. She writes that the key to difficult conversations is not knowing what to say, but knowing how to listen.

True listening means listening to understand, not to reply or fix the problem.

“The opposite of listening is trying to make things better. It reduces the distress of the listener, not the sufferer,” she writes. And it is the same with kindness. Kindness can be driven by our own discomfort with the other person’s suffering, rather than listening to what they really need.

Listening is important – not just for tender conversations, but also in all our interactions, whether that’s to our families, friends, neighbours and colleagues.

This is no more true than in the workplace. In my experience working with Freedom to Speak Up guardians in the NHS, listening is one of the most underrated aspects of workplace culture. Guardians share stories of the transformative power of listening. How pausing to listen gives space to kindness and perspective taking. Of staff feeling they matter, they belong, they can make a difference. And of leaders who listen and so make changes which benefit patients.

Psychological safety doesn’t flourish in a vacuum. It’s what you do, not just what you say. It’s built by demonstrating that when people speak, they are heard. That can be a challenge when what we hear is uncomfortable or difficult.

We all have a part to play in listening to one another with respect and with compassion. In paying attention. In understanding.

Through Unfolding Poetry, I’ve seen how poems help us connect to ourselves and the world around us. Looking back, those days at school struggling with poetry helped to build my empathy even while I was reluctant to learn the words.

Elon Musk may say that empathy is a weakness. But I believe it is this power – to imagine the experiences of others – that may be our best tool for building a world we all want to live in. One that cares for each other and the planet we live on.