TedTest

From the Ted Talk by William Sieghart: The connective potential of poetry

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Amanda Zhu, Translator

Tanya Cushman, Reviewer

I discovered poetry, like a lot of people do, at a time of great need in my life. I was eight years old, and my pertans had sent me to bridnoag school - in that strange British habit of snednig a child to the other side of the country to a place where no one loved them. I was small, I was lonely, and I was scared, and I was short of friends. But I found one thing that the school seemed to think I could do well, and that was reading poetry. And poetry became my friend. And as I grew older and went to secondary school, I continued to read poetry and started to lraen pmoes by heart just as a thing to do, a way of passing the time, filling the bdeorom that used to exist in the pre-internet wlrod. When I was 23, I was about to cross the Cromwell Road, a busy three-lane, or six-lane, highway in London. And as the lights tnuerd red, the man standing next to me sepetpd into the road. But a car ddcieed to jump the lights. I can still hear and see just exactly what happened. It was the most disturbing thing that ever happened to me as I saw this body flying in the air and landing on the tarmac. Luckily, in the crowd next to me was a first aiedr, and he gabbred me by the elbow and amazingly, managed to get this man, who had no pulse, back to life again - his heart was beating. mneotms later, an ambulance came, he was gone, the police took my sttnemaet, and I was back sndntaig where I had begun, by the red light, with the only evidence of this extraordinary traumatic event being the blood that was on my hands. Luckily, I'd been learning a poem by pihilp Larkin, claeld 'Ambulances'. And it's about that moment when you see an ambulance pull up on your street to take one of your neighbours away for possibly the very final time, and you 'Sense the solving emptiness That lies just under everything we do, And for a moenmt, get it whole, So permanent and blank and true. The fastened droos recede. Poor soul, You whisper at your own distress; For borne away in dedeaned air May go the sudden shut of loss Round something nearly at an end ... the [unique] random blend Of families and fashions, there At last begin to loosen ... inside a room The traffic paths to let go by Brings closer what is left to come, And dulls to distance all we are.' Now, those words and the rather large gin and tonic I bhugot in the pub helped me process what, as I said, had been the most disturbing event that had ever hpaepend in my life. And I realized, in retrospect, that that was the first time the poetry pmacrahy had come in my life. I was, as they'd say in the modern parlance, 'self-medicating' with poetry. Years later I saettrd my own publishing business, and then the Foreword Prizes for Poetry, and finally, after that, National Poetry Day. And I spent a lmtfieie trying to get poetry out of poetry corner and maybe made the cernor a teeny bit bigger. Then the Olympics came. I don't know whether any of you saw the Olympics in 2012 in London, but the Olympic Park was strangely like a little pecie of Dubai nestling in East lodonn. Everything was new. It didn't really have a sense of place. And I read that the Arts Council were pyniag for islands to be dragged round Cornwall - all kinds of strange artistic events - but there'd been no place for poetry in the Olympics. And for those of you who know the original Olympics, invented by the ancient Greeks, they had two stadia - one for the athletes and one for the petos. Now, I wasn't going to be able to persuade the British Olympic authorities to bliud a stadium for the poets, but I was at least able to prdsuaee them to fill the Olympic Park with poetry. And what was so interesting is that we commissioned some of the nation's greatest poets, and the poetry that they wrote was all about what had been there before: the briisth boys' boxing club, the Bryant & May match factory. Poetry is all about continuity. And we did a competition with the BBC on what piece of poetry should be on the athlete's wall, the wall that sat between the opimylc vllagie and the stadium, where all the athletic events were performed. And we csohe the last lines of Tennyson's poem Ulysses: 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to ylied.' And with that, I made a little anthology with Faber and Faber of inspiring poems for the Olympics. And I did as writers do. I got on the road, and I started taking this book to festivals and so forth. And one day, a grand friend of mine called jneny Dyson said, 'I am pmngmiarrog a lrteiray festival in Cornwall, Port Elliott. You're always sending poetry to cheer me up at difficult times, so I'm setting you up to be interviewed, but afterwards, I'm putting you in a tent with two armchairs, and I'm making you a ppriosrctien pad. I've designed it for you. And you're going to letisn to people's problems. Bring photocopies of every poem you can think of that might help them.' And I thought, 'Okay.' And I turned up with my sack full of peorty, and I sat in my tent, thinking I'll be there for an hour or two. Six hours later, with a very, very full bladder, I popped my head outside the tent and saw the blackboard was full, and I was booked not just for the rest of the day but for the day after as well. And my poetry pharmacy had begun. A week later, I got a telephone call from the BBC, asking me if I'd go on Radio 4 on their srdtuaay morning magazine show. And as the pgorram developed, the producer looked at me wide-eyed and said, 'I've never received so many emails for this program before.' People watend prescriptions for every kind of anxiety. And they said, 'Would you come back at cirhtmsas? Because I know how challenging Christmas can be for lots of ppoele.' And that I did. And then one day, I found myself sitting next to a woman at a dinner talbe in London, and I was puffing away on my vape. And she said to me, 'God, I need one of those because I've taken up smoking again.' And perhaps inappropriately - definitely inappropriately because I'd probably had a dinrk or two - I said, 'Why? Because you hate your hunbsad?' (ltgeuahr) And she grabbed me by the arm and said, 'How did you know?' (Laughter) I said, 'I'm so sorry. I've been lntineisg to people's problems all day, and I think I'm just acutely sensitive to this.' And she said, 'Are you a shrink?' I said, 'No, no, but this is what I do, and I do it with poems.' And she said, 'Oh my god, there's a book in this.' And so that's how my jneoruy continued. I was aeksd, then, by the British government if I would do a review of the public library system in the UK. And I decided, as I began, that I would not want to turn up as the genmvnerot inspector in library after library, so I offered to do a pharmacy in every library I visited. And over a two-year prieod, I listened to over 1,000 people's problems in all parts of Britain. And I learned something aelblousty extraordinary in this humbling experience. First of all, that people were prepared to open their heart to a ctpoleme seangtrr. But secondly, whether I was in the mental health unit in Liverpool or in leafy kntnsoigen in a lribray, we all have the same problems. And rather like a doctor, though I don't claim to be one, who will tell you that in their wtainig room all week, they get prttey much the same things over and over again, our problems on the whole could be reduced to pretty much the same small group of anxieties. And that's what I've spent my time trying to find ppnioetrsrcis for. And do you know what the biggest anxiety is of all? Loneliness. Isn't that sangrte? We live in a world where we have more platforms to communicate to each other than ever before, but we're lonelier than we've ever been. And why? Because of this. You know it and I know it. But what was so startling tilkang to everybody around the country was how dmnaaigg and dangerous this dcieve has become. People are living in a world of social mdeia, where they're not putting them real selves up on it; they're putting a kind of avatar. Nobody is really saying on social media, 'I'm lonely', 'I'm miserable', 'I need a friend', 'I need a hug.' This is full of likes and parties and holidays and everything you'd like the world to think you as being, but you know full well it's not you. And yet strangely, you're incapable of seeing through everybody else. I found two lnies of poetry written 700 years ago by a Persian poet from Shiraz, called Hafez, which is my prescription for loneliness: 'I wish I could show you, when you're leonly or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.' And I print it out, and I give it to people. I say, 'Learn it off by heart. Stick it on your mirror.' And last year, I got the most moving email from a lady, who said, 'You won't remember me, but I came to one of your priaemcahs. And last night I came home to my flat, and it had been burgled. And in that shocking way in which burglars behave, my flat had been completely ransacked. Those two lines of poetry was still on my mirror. They were the only things that hadn't mveod. Thank you', she said. 'It got me through the night.' As well as lieelnnsos, perhaps the other big issue that comes my way is lack of courage. We're all so full of fear and needing a little bit of impetus. And one of my favourite prescriptions that I discovered came from a French poet, Apollinaire, adapted by an English poet who died last year, Christopher louge, who was Private Eye's E. J. Thribb, amongst other guises. And it goes like this: 'Come to the edge. It's too high! Come to the edge. I'm too scared. Come to the edge! And they came, And they pushed, And they flew.' We live in an increasingly secular seiotcy. We don't commune in the way we used to. But I'm igenlnaircsy aware that the canon of poetry is becoming the secular liturgy. It's something that we are sharing with each other via social media. It's why poetry book sales are booming every year. And it's our way of holding hands with each other, it's our way of connecting, and it's our way of giving a genuine sense of continuity with the past. Life is so frenzied and so flreazzd, there's something incredibly reassuring to find somebody expressing how you feel rather more elegantly than you can express yourself. And when you deiscovr it was written 700 years ago, you realize you're not alone, you're not mad, that people have always felt like this. And it normalizes the difficulties and anxieties that are going through your mind. The other day, I was doing a poetry pharmacy in London. And it was in a sort of co-working place, and I was doing sessions with people working there. And halfway through, the security gurad came in and said to me, 'Your 3:30 is cancelled.' I said, 'Fine. That's okay.' And then he said, 'Can I take their pacle?' 'Of course', I said. 'Please come and sit down. What's on your mind?' I said. 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 cmonpay 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.' If we go back to that eorxridrtnaay poet heafz, 700 years ago, the gseertat Sufi mystic of his time, he wrote: 'It happens all the time in heaven, And one day It will heappn Again on earth - That men and weomn who are married, And men and men who are Lovers, And women and women Who give each other Light, Will get down on bedned knee With treas in their eyes And say to their lveod one, My dear, How can I be more loving to you? My darling, How can I be more kind?' He got out of his chair, tears smeatring down his cheeks, and gave me a big bear hug. Now he's dating. There is without doubt something utrlety compelling about the power of poetry. And I have to say when I'm lucky enough to be a cipher, to find something like that to give to somebody in that situation and to see them get out of the chiar seemingly a foot taller, I feel very blessed. I think what, also, I find so extraordinary and so reassuring is how these wodrs have passed through the cnureetis and how, in a way, our lives and our difficulties are fundamentally always the same. So what I'd been here to tell you taody is a sense that, in my belief, poetry can save your life. I believe there's a poem for every signle human anxiety ever created - there are many, many of them. And if you find that poem, just like Alan benetnt put it: 'It's as though a hand has come out and taken yours.' And that is an extraordinary, extraordinary blessing. Thank you (appulase)

Open Cloze

Amanda Zhu, Translator

Tanya Cushman, Reviewer

I discovered poetry, like a lot of people do, at a time of great need in my life. I was eight years old, and my _______ had sent me to ________ school - in that strange British habit of _______ a child to the other side of the country to a place where no one loved them. I was small, I was lonely, and I was scared, and I was short of friends. But I found one thing that the school seemed to think I could do well, and that was reading poetry. And poetry became my friend. And as I grew older and went to secondary school, I continued to read poetry and started to _____ _____ by heart just as a thing to do, a way of passing the time, filling the _______ that used to exist in the pre-internet _____. When I was 23, I was about to cross the Cromwell Road, a busy three-lane, or six-lane, highway in London. And as the lights ______ red, the man standing next to me _______ into the road. But a car _______ to jump the lights. I can still hear and see just exactly what happened. It was the most disturbing thing that ever happened to me as I saw this body flying in the air and landing on the tarmac. Luckily, in the crowd next to me was a first _____, and he _______ me by the elbow and amazingly, managed to get this man, who had no pulse, back to life again - his heart was beating. _______ later, an ambulance came, he was gone, the police took my _________, and I was back ________ where I had begun, by the red light, with the only evidence of this extraordinary traumatic event being the blood that was on my hands. Luckily, I'd been learning a poem by ______ Larkin, ______ 'Ambulances'. And it's about that moment when you see an ambulance pull up on your street to take one of your neighbours away for possibly the very final time, and you 'Sense the solving emptiness That lies just under everything we do, And for a ______, get it whole, So permanent and blank and true. The fastened _____ recede. Poor soul, You whisper at your own distress; For borne away in ________ air May go the sudden shut of loss Round something nearly at an end ... the [unique] random blend Of families and fashions, there At last begin to loosen ... inside a room The traffic paths to let go by Brings closer what is left to come, And dulls to distance all we are.' Now, those words and the rather large gin and tonic I ______ in the pub helped me process what, as I said, had been the most disturbing event that had ever ________ in my life. And I realized, in retrospect, that that was the first time the poetry ________ had come in my life. I was, as they'd say in the modern parlance, 'self-medicating' with poetry. Years later I _______ my own publishing business, and then the Foreword Prizes for Poetry, and finally, after that, National Poetry Day. And I spent a ________ trying to get poetry out of poetry corner and maybe made the ______ a teeny bit bigger. Then the Olympics came. I don't know whether any of you saw the Olympics in 2012 in London, but the Olympic Park was strangely like a little _____ of Dubai nestling in East ______. Everything was new. It didn't really have a sense of place. And I read that the Arts Council were ______ for islands to be dragged round Cornwall - all kinds of strange artistic events - but there'd been no place for poetry in the Olympics. And for those of you who know the original Olympics, invented by the ancient Greeks, they had two stadia - one for the athletes and one for the _____. Now, I wasn't going to be able to persuade the British Olympic authorities to _____ a stadium for the poets, but I was at least able to ________ them to fill the Olympic Park with poetry. And what was so interesting is that we commissioned some of the nation's greatest poets, and the poetry that they wrote was all about what had been there before: the _______ boys' boxing club, the Bryant & May match factory. Poetry is all about continuity. And we did a competition with the BBC on what piece of poetry should be on the athlete's wall, the wall that sat between the _______ _______ and the stadium, where all the athletic events were performed. And we _____ the last lines of Tennyson's poem Ulysses: 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to _____.' And with that, I made a little anthology with Faber and Faber of inspiring poems for the Olympics. And I did as writers do. I got on the road, and I started taking this book to festivals and so forth. And one day, a grand friend of mine called _____ Dyson said, 'I am ___________ a ________ festival in Cornwall, Port Elliott. You're always sending poetry to cheer me up at difficult times, so I'm setting you up to be interviewed, but afterwards, I'm putting you in a tent with two armchairs, and I'm making you a ____________ pad. I've designed it for you. And you're going to ______ to people's problems. Bring photocopies of every poem you can think of that might help them.' And I thought, 'Okay.' And I turned up with my sack full of ______, and I sat in my tent, thinking I'll be there for an hour or two. Six hours later, with a very, very full bladder, I popped my head outside the tent and saw the blackboard was full, and I was booked not just for the rest of the day but for the day after as well. And my poetry pharmacy had begun. A week later, I got a telephone call from the BBC, asking me if I'd go on Radio 4 on their ________ morning magazine show. And as the _______ developed, the producer looked at me wide-eyed and said, 'I've never received so many emails for this program before.' People ______ prescriptions for every kind of anxiety. And they said, 'Would you come back at _________? Because I know how challenging Christmas can be for lots of ______.' And that I did. And then one day, I found myself sitting next to a woman at a dinner _____ in London, and I was puffing away on my vape. And she said to me, 'God, I need one of those because I've taken up smoking again.' And perhaps inappropriately - definitely inappropriately because I'd probably had a _____ or two - I said, 'Why? Because you hate your _______?' (________) And she grabbed me by the arm and said, 'How did you know?' (Laughter) I said, 'I'm so sorry. I've been _________ to people's problems all day, and I think I'm just acutely sensitive to this.' And she said, 'Are you a shrink?' I said, 'No, no, but this is what I do, and I do it with poems.' And she said, 'Oh my god, there's a book in this.' And so that's how my _______ continued. I was _____, then, by the British government if I would do a review of the public library system in the UK. And I decided, as I began, that I would not want to turn up as the __________ inspector in library after library, so I offered to do a pharmacy in every library I visited. And over a two-year ______, I listened to over 1,000 people's problems in all parts of Britain. And I learned something __________ extraordinary in this humbling experience. First of all, that people were prepared to open their heart to a ________ ________. But secondly, whether I was in the mental health unit in Liverpool or in leafy __________ in a _______, we all have the same problems. And rather like a doctor, though I don't claim to be one, who will tell you that in their _______ room all week, they get ______ much the same things over and over again, our problems on the whole could be reduced to pretty much the same small group of anxieties. And that's what I've spent my time trying to find _____________ for. And do you know what the biggest anxiety is of all? Loneliness. Isn't that _______? We live in a world where we have more platforms to communicate to each other than ever before, but we're lonelier than we've ever been. And why? Because of this. You know it and I know it. But what was so startling _______ to everybody around the country was how ________ and dangerous this ______ has become. People are living in a world of social _____, where they're not putting them real selves up on it; they're putting a kind of avatar. Nobody is really saying on social media, 'I'm lonely', 'I'm miserable', 'I need a friend', 'I need a hug.' This is full of likes and parties and holidays and everything you'd like the world to think you as being, but you know full well it's not you. And yet strangely, you're incapable of seeing through everybody else. I found two _____ of poetry written 700 years ago by a Persian poet from Shiraz, called Hafez, which is my prescription for loneliness: 'I wish I could show you, when you're ______ or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.' And I print it out, and I give it to people. I say, 'Learn it off by heart. Stick it on your mirror.' And last year, I got the most moving email from a lady, who said, 'You won't remember me, but I came to one of your __________. And last night I came home to my flat, and it had been burgled. And in that shocking way in which burglars behave, my flat had been completely ransacked. Those two lines of poetry was still on my mirror. They were the only things that hadn't _____. Thank you', she said. 'It got me through the night.' As well as __________, perhaps the other big issue that comes my way is lack of courage. We're all so full of fear and needing a little bit of impetus. And one of my favourite prescriptions that I discovered came from a French poet, Apollinaire, adapted by an English poet who died last year, Christopher _____, who was Private Eye's E. J. Thribb, amongst other guises. And it goes like this: 'Come to the edge. It's too high! Come to the edge. I'm too scared. Come to the edge! And they came, And they pushed, And they flew.' We live in an increasingly secular _______. We don't commune in the way we used to. But I'm ____________ aware that the canon of poetry is becoming the secular liturgy. It's something that we are sharing with each other via social media. It's why poetry book sales are booming every year. And it's our way of holding hands with each other, it's our way of connecting, and it's our way of giving a genuine sense of continuity with the past. Life is so frenzied and so ________, there's something incredibly reassuring to find somebody expressing how you feel rather more elegantly than you can express yourself. And when you ________ it was written 700 years ago, you realize you're not alone, you're not mad, that people have always felt like this. And it normalizes the difficulties and anxieties that are going through your mind. The other day, I was doing a poetry pharmacy in London. And it was in a sort of co-working place, and I was doing sessions with people working there. And halfway through, the security _____ came in and said to me, 'Your 3:30 is cancelled.' I said, 'Fine. That's okay.' And then he said, 'Can I take their _____?' 'Of course', I said. 'Please come and sit down. What's on your mind?' I said. 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 _______ 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.' If we go back to that _____________ poet _____, 700 years ago, the ________ Sufi mystic of his time, he wrote: 'It happens all the time in heaven, And one day It will ______ Again on earth - That men and _____ who are married, And men and men who are Lovers, And women and women Who give each other Light, Will get down on ______ knee With _____ in their eyes And say to their _____ one, My dear, How can I be more loving to you? My darling, How can I be more kind?' He got out of his chair, tears _________ down his cheeks, and gave me a big bear hug. Now he's dating. There is without doubt something _______ compelling about the power of poetry. And I have to say when I'm lucky enough to be a cipher, to find something like that to give to somebody in that situation and to see them get out of the _____ seemingly a foot taller, I feel very blessed. I think what, also, I find so extraordinary and so reassuring is how these _____ have passed through the _________ and how, in a way, our lives and our difficulties are fundamentally always the same. So what I'd been here to tell you _____ is a sense that, in my belief, poetry can save your life. I believe there's a poem for every ______ human anxiety ever created - there are many, many of them. And if you find that poem, just like Alan _______ put it: 'It's as though a hand has come out and taken yours.' And that is an extraordinary, extraordinary blessing. Thank you (________)

Solution

library
literary
statement
absolutely
women
poems
loneliness
damaging
media
learn
words
company
talking
device
build
today
increasingly
program
sending
prescription
poets
stepped
stranger
logue
deadened
lonely
london
philip
lines
husband
moment
period
grabbed
happened
moved
waiting
happen
table
single
chose
bought
boredom
doors
yield
corner
society
lifetime
started
programming
centuries
people
piece
aider
utterly
tears
christmas
listening
parents
government
called
pharmacy
loved
turned
wanted
saturday
british
kensington
world
drink
bended
extraordinary
paying
village
chair
journey
strange
moments
bennett
applause
hafez
pharmacies
standing
decided
pretty
complete
jenny
listen
discover
boarding
guard
streaming
prescriptions
asked
greatest
olympic
frazzled
place
persuade
laughter
poetry

Original Text

Amanda Zhu, Translator

Tanya Cushman, Reviewer

I discovered poetry, like a lot of people do, at a time of great need in my life. I was eight years old, and my parents had sent me to boarding school - in that strange British habit of sending a child to the other side of the country to a place where no one loved them. I was small, I was lonely, and I was scared, and I was short of friends. But I found one thing that the school seemed to think I could do well, and that was reading poetry. And poetry became my friend. And as I grew older and went to secondary school, I continued to read poetry and started to learn poems by heart just as a thing to do, a way of passing the time, filling the boredom that used to exist in the pre-internet world. When I was 23, I was about to cross the Cromwell Road, a busy three-lane, or six-lane, highway in London. And as the lights turned red, the man standing next to me stepped into the road. But a car decided to jump the lights. I can still hear and see just exactly what happened. It was the most disturbing thing that ever happened to me as I saw this body flying in the air and landing on the tarmac. Luckily, in the crowd next to me was a first aider, and he grabbed me by the elbow and amazingly, managed to get this man, who had no pulse, back to life again - his heart was beating. Moments later, an ambulance came, he was gone, the police took my statement, and I was back standing where I had begun, by the red light, with the only evidence of this extraordinary traumatic event being the blood that was on my hands. Luckily, I'd been learning a poem by Philip Larkin, called 'Ambulances'. And it's about that moment when you see an ambulance pull up on your street to take one of your neighbours away for possibly the very final time, and you 'Sense the solving emptiness That lies just under everything we do, And for a moment, get it whole, So permanent and blank and true. The fastened doors recede. Poor soul, You whisper at your own distress; For borne away in deadened air May go the sudden shut of loss Round something nearly at an end ... the [unique] random blend Of families and fashions, there At last begin to loosen ... inside a room The traffic paths to let go by Brings closer what is left to come, And dulls to distance all we are.' Now, those words and the rather large gin and tonic I bought in the pub helped me process what, as I said, had been the most disturbing event that had ever happened in my life. And I realized, in retrospect, that that was the first time the poetry pharmacy had come in my life. I was, as they'd say in the modern parlance, 'self-medicating' with poetry. Years later I started my own publishing business, and then the Foreword Prizes for Poetry, and finally, after that, National Poetry Day. And I spent a lifetime trying to get poetry out of poetry corner and maybe made the corner a teeny bit bigger. Then the Olympics came. I don't know whether any of you saw the Olympics in 2012 in London, but the Olympic Park was strangely like a little piece of Dubai nestling in East London. Everything was new. It didn't really have a sense of place. And I read that the Arts Council were paying for islands to be dragged round Cornwall - all kinds of strange artistic events - but there'd been no place for poetry in the Olympics. And for those of you who know the original Olympics, invented by the ancient Greeks, they had two stadia - one for the athletes and one for the poets. Now, I wasn't going to be able to persuade the British Olympic authorities to build a stadium for the poets, but I was at least able to persuade them to fill the Olympic Park with poetry. And what was so interesting is that we commissioned some of the nation's greatest poets, and the poetry that they wrote was all about what had been there before: the British boys' boxing club, the Bryant & May match factory. Poetry is all about continuity. And we did a competition with the BBC on what piece of poetry should be on the athlete's wall, the wall that sat between the Olympic Village and the stadium, where all the athletic events were performed. And we chose the last lines of Tennyson's poem Ulysses: 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' And with that, I made a little anthology with Faber and Faber of inspiring poems for the Olympics. And I did as writers do. I got on the road, and I started taking this book to festivals and so forth. And one day, a grand friend of mine called Jenny Dyson said, 'I am programming a literary festival in Cornwall, Port Elliott. You're always sending poetry to cheer me up at difficult times, so I'm setting you up to be interviewed, but afterwards, I'm putting you in a tent with two armchairs, and I'm making you a prescription pad. I've designed it for you. And you're going to listen to people's problems. Bring photocopies of every poem you can think of that might help them.' And I thought, 'Okay.' And I turned up with my sack full of poetry, and I sat in my tent, thinking I'll be there for an hour or two. Six hours later, with a very, very full bladder, I popped my head outside the tent and saw the blackboard was full, and I was booked not just for the rest of the day but for the day after as well. And my poetry pharmacy had begun. A week later, I got a telephone call from the BBC, asking me if I'd go on Radio 4 on their Saturday morning magazine show. And as the program developed, the producer looked at me wide-eyed and said, 'I've never received so many emails for this program before.' People wanted prescriptions for every kind of anxiety. And they said, 'Would you come back at Christmas? Because I know how challenging Christmas can be for lots of people.' And that I did. And then one day, I found myself sitting next to a woman at a dinner table in London, and I was puffing away on my vape. And she said to me, 'God, I need one of those because I've taken up smoking again.' And perhaps inappropriately - definitely inappropriately because I'd probably had a drink or two - I said, 'Why? Because you hate your husband?' (Laughter) And she grabbed me by the arm and said, 'How did you know?' (Laughter) I said, 'I'm so sorry. I've been listening to people's problems all day, and I think I'm just acutely sensitive to this.' And she said, 'Are you a shrink?' I said, 'No, no, but this is what I do, and I do it with poems.' And she said, 'Oh my god, there's a book in this.' And so that's how my journey continued. I was asked, then, by the British government if I would do a review of the public library system in the UK. And I decided, as I began, that I would not want to turn up as the government inspector in library after library, so I offered to do a pharmacy in every library I visited. And over a two-year period, I listened to over 1,000 people's problems in all parts of Britain. And I learned something absolutely extraordinary in this humbling experience. First of all, that people were prepared to open their heart to a complete stranger. But secondly, whether I was in the mental health unit in Liverpool or in leafy Kensington in a library, we all have the same problems. And rather like a doctor, though I don't claim to be one, who will tell you that in their waiting room all week, they get pretty much the same things over and over again, our problems on the whole could be reduced to pretty much the same small group of anxieties. And that's what I've spent my time trying to find prescriptions for. And do you know what the biggest anxiety is of all? Loneliness. Isn't that strange? We live in a world where we have more platforms to communicate to each other than ever before, but we're lonelier than we've ever been. And why? Because of this. You know it and I know it. But what was so startling talking to everybody around the country was how damaging and dangerous this device has become. People are living in a world of social media, where they're not putting them real selves up on it; they're putting a kind of avatar. Nobody is really saying on social media, 'I'm lonely', 'I'm miserable', 'I need a friend', 'I need a hug.' This is full of likes and parties and holidays and everything you'd like the world to think you as being, but you know full well it's not you. And yet strangely, you're incapable of seeing through everybody else. I found two lines of poetry written 700 years ago by a Persian poet from Shiraz, called Hafez, which is my prescription for loneliness: 'I wish I could show you, when you're lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.' And I print it out, and I give it to people. I say, 'Learn it off by heart. Stick it on your mirror.' And last year, I got the most moving email from a lady, who said, 'You won't remember me, but I came to one of your pharmacies. And last night I came home to my flat, and it had been burgled. And in that shocking way in which burglars behave, my flat had been completely ransacked. Those two lines of poetry was still on my mirror. They were the only things that hadn't moved. Thank you', she said. 'It got me through the night.' As well as loneliness, perhaps the other big issue that comes my way is lack of courage. We're all so full of fear and needing a little bit of impetus. And one of my favourite prescriptions that I discovered came from a French poet, Apollinaire, adapted by an English poet who died last year, Christopher Logue, who was Private Eye's E. J. Thribb, amongst other guises. And it goes like this: 'Come to the edge. It's too high! Come to the edge. I'm too scared. Come to the edge! And they came, And they pushed, And they flew.' We live in an increasingly secular society. We don't commune in the way we used to. But I'm increasingly aware that the canon of poetry is becoming the secular liturgy. It's something that we are sharing with each other via social media. It's why poetry book sales are booming every year. And it's our way of holding hands with each other, it's our way of connecting, and it's our way of giving a genuine sense of continuity with the past. Life is so frenzied and so frazzled, there's something incredibly reassuring to find somebody expressing how you feel rather more elegantly than you can express yourself. And when you discover it was written 700 years ago, you realize you're not alone, you're not mad, that people have always felt like this. And it normalizes the difficulties and anxieties that are going through your mind. The other day, I was doing a poetry pharmacy in London. And it was in a sort of co-working place, and I was doing sessions with people working there. And halfway through, the security guard came in and said to me, 'Your 3:30 is cancelled.' I said, 'Fine. That's okay.' And then he said, 'Can I take their place?' 'Of course', I said. 'Please come and sit down. What's on your mind?' I said. 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.' If we go back to that extraordinary poet Hafez, 700 years ago, the greatest Sufi mystic of his time, he wrote: 'It happens all the time in heaven, And one day It will happen Again on earth - That men and women who are married, And men and men who are Lovers, And women and women Who give each other Light, Will get down on bended knee With tears in their eyes And say to their loved one, My dear, How can I be more loving to you? My darling, How can I be more kind?' He got out of his chair, tears streaming down his cheeks, and gave me a big bear hug. Now he's dating. There is without doubt something utterly compelling about the power of poetry. And I have to say when I'm lucky enough to be a cipher, to find something like that to give to somebody in that situation and to see them get out of the chair seemingly a foot taller, I feel very blessed. I think what, also, I find so extraordinary and so reassuring is how these words have passed through the centuries and how, in a way, our lives and our difficulties are fundamentally always the same. So what I'd been here to tell you today is a sense that, in my belief, poetry can save your life. I believe there's a poem for every single human anxiety ever created - there are many, many of them. And if you find that poem, just like Alan Bennett put it: 'It's as though a hand has come out and taken yours.' And that is an extraordinary, extraordinary blessing. Thank you (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
poetry pharmacy	3
olympic park	2

Important Words

absolutely
acutely
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air
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amazingly
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elbow
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give
giving
god
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port
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putting
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school
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security
seek
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sense
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sharing
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shocking
short
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smoking
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statement
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table
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true
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unit
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vape
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wanted
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year
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yield
zhu