I was introduced to poetry as a child by listening to T. S. Eliot reading his cat poems on record and, later, some of his other work. Like many other young people, I tried writing my own poems. I soon realised I wasn’t up to it and so stuck with drawing and painting.

In the last ten years I’ve read more and more work by poets, both their poetry and their reflections on poetry. I’ve also found myself less engaged with both visual making and with the visual arts more generally. Reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s short essays at the back of her Collected Poems – “Forsaking Kingdoms”: Five Poets, First Loves (I too learned Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome as a child) and the Foreword and Afterword to her Late in the Day – reminds me why that’s the case.

In 1984’s “Forsaking Kingdoms”: Five Poets, Le Guin wrote that: ‘painting seems more the business of stockbrokers than of artists’. An intimation of the dominance, in the visual arts, of the global culture industry? The essay is a wonderful evocation of the importance of poetry, one that in many respects prefigures the current academic preoccupation with relationally, only written with the lucidity of a poet.

I’ve had to relearn the importance of staying with poetry twice, ironically in each case from painters: first from Ken Kiff and then again from Eamon Colman, neither of whose work falls into the “stockbroker belt” category of art collecting. I’ve also quite recently found myself making two paintings in honour of poets – the Irish poet Paula Meehan and the Welsh poet Elinor Gwynn – along with paintings for some of the friends from a poetry reading group to which I belong. Why? Because poetry gives me the clearest sense of what remains valuable in these difficult times.

Currently I’m plowing my way through numerous books that have been densely written and argued in the required academic style because I’m beginning work on what Mary Modeen and I hope will be our second book. As a result I can’t help feeling that art education has suffered from the fact that students are expected to read too much academic theory and little or no poetry. The result, I strongly suspect, is that they internalise the values of what Le Guin, in her 1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address (you can find it online – it’s essential reading) calls ‘the father tongue’.

Not, as it often pretends, the language of reasoning but of ‘distancing’, the ‘language of power’, the ‘language in which “success” is a meaningful word’, the language that: ‘expresses the values of the split world, valuing the positive and devaluing the negative in each redivision: subject/object, self/other, mind/body, dominant/submissive, active/passive, Man/Nature, man/woman, and so on’. She adds: ‘The father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected, or heard’. And, as she also points out, it’s to learn that language that most people now go to college. To which she adds: ‘Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse’.

I could go on, but better you read the Bryn Mawr Commencement Address for yourself.