I sing to use the Waiting

According to the Dublin Evening Herald, people waiting at the Naas Hospital Kildare and other places around the region will have the chance to read a little poetry instead of just out-of-date celebrity rags and old medical journals.

Poems in the Waiting Room is a pilot arts project funded by Kildare County Council. The idea was driven by Kildare-based writer Kate Dempsey.

It was inspired by pieces of public sculpture dotted across the country. The idea is to make poetry an art form that is available in ordinary everyday places.

The project has a web site, too, from which you can download a poster-sized version of Dickinson’s “Hope,” watch Alan Rickman recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (”My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), or read Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kissed Me, a sweet little poem about Thomas Carlyle’s wife.

Similar to the various poems-on-public-transit projects, like the recent Wilkes-Barrie Poetry in Transit or the famous Poems on the Underground in London, the Poems in the Waiting Room project seeks to slip poetry into the fallow spaces of our lives and enrich the unsuspecting with a few well-chosen words. Given the rate at which video monitors and loud music have colonized gas pumps and grocery-store lines, this incursion of verse is certainly welcome.