With every intention today of finishing my viewing of The Power of Poetry, which I referenced in last week's post on poetry, I stumbled across a 2020 TED Talk by publisher William Sieghart on The connective potential of poetry. I planned to view just a few minutes of the TED Talk, but ended up watching the entire 20-minute address. (The 90-minute Power of Poetry video will have to wait for another day.)

In his TED Talk, Sieghart shares a number of compelling stories, some of which he also shares in The Power of Poetry.

Sieghart says he discovered poetry when he was sent to boarding school at age eight. He was small, lonely, scared and short of friends. Poetry became his friend. As he grew older and went to secondary school, he continued to read poetry and started to learn poems by heart.

At 23, after seeing a man hit by a car and taken away in an ambulance, Sieghart sought solace in Philip Larkin's poem "Ambulances," which he had been learning at the time. Those words helped him process the traumatic scene he had just witnessed, and were a form of self-medication with poetry. Years later, as a publisher, he founded the Forward Prizes for Poetry and National Poetry Day. "I spent a lifetime trying to get poetry out of poetry corner," Sieghart says, "and maybe made the corner a teeny bit bigger."

After putting together an anthology of inspiring poems for the 2012 Olympics in London, UK, Sieghart started taking the book to festivals. As I shared in last week's post, Sieghart's friend Jenny Dyson proposed to set him up in a tent with two armchairs, one for him and one for individuals who would bring forth their concerns. Sieghart would give each person a poem, as a prescription for their particular issue. Thus was born The Poetry Pharmacy. "People wanted prescriptions for every kind of anxiety," he says. This led to a series of books, including The Poetry Pharmacy (2017), The Poetry Pharmacy Returns (2019), and The Poetry Pharmacy Forever (2023).

When the British government asked Sieghart to review the public library system in the UK, he decided to offer to do a poetry pharmacy in every library he visited. Over a two-year period, Sieghart listened to more than 1,000 people. He was struck by two things: "people were prepared to open their hearts to a complete stranger" and "we all have the same problems." He says that our problems can be reduced to the same small group of anxieties, the biggest of which is loneliness. His prescription for loneliness was a 700-year-old poem by a Persian poet from Shiraz named Hafez, who wrote:

Sieghart advised people to print it out, to learn it by heart, to stick it on their mirror.

One final story that Sieghart shares in both his TED Talk and The Power of Poetry video was especially moving to me. It involved a security guard who informed Sieghart at one of his poetry pharmacies that his 3:30 appointment had been cancelled. "Can I take their place?" the security guard asked. Sieghart continues the story:

— "Of course," I said. "Please come and sit down. What's on your mind?"

— He said, "I'm 31. When I was 23, I came out, but I still haven't had a relationship yet."

— "That's really sad," I said. "What do you think that's about?"

— He said, "I think it's because, although I'm a kind person and a loving person and I would be great company and I would be supportive, I'm Muslim and I'm gay. And I don't believe I can be both."

— I said, "I think you've got that wrong."

Sieghart says he shared this Hafez poem with the security guard:

Sieghart says that after sharing this poem, the security guard got up, tears streaming down his cheeks, and gave him a big hug. He adds that the man is now dating.

Sieghart believes that there's a poem for every human anxiety ever created—many, in fact. "And if you find that poem," says Sieghart, it is like what Alan Bennett said: "It's as though a hand has come out and taken yours."