Winning the UK Olympic bid provided some interesting and irresistible challenges, that I felt poetry should be part of. Our greatest cultural contribution to the world, our language and poetry, needed to be celebrated in 2012, not least in order to create some kind of legacy. Poetry from the ancient world has left us information about the games and its competitors. But in 2012, which poetry should we turn to?
I have spent many months looking for poetry that might resonate with Olympic values. A new poetry anthology, Winning Words, has now been published. Some of the verses reflect sporting qualities like ambition, potently captured by Robert Bly in Watering the Horse: "How strange to think of giving up all ambition! / Suddenly I see with such clear eyes / The white flake of snow / That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!" Or resolve, with Leonardo Da Vinci’s simple observation from his notebooks: "Obstacles cannot crush me./ Every obstacle yields to stern resolve./ He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind."
But while Olympians can benefit from such a unflinching mindset, it is also worth remembering the Olympics is unusually cruel, offering the highest rewards but only appearing every four years. Many Olympians will only have one opportunity to take part in their career. Many face heartbreak, most will not win medals.
So our poetry collection for 2012 (and beyond) needed to be nuanced, to understand that winners also know what it’s like to lose. Elizabeth Bishop puts it beautifully in One Art: "The art of losing isn’t hard to master." The Medieval Persian poet Hafez offers a tantalising glimpse at consolation that cannot be reached: ‘I wish I could show you / When you are lonely or in darkness, / The Astonishing Light / Of your own Being!"
How should such an anthology be arranged? By date, or theme? I chose to do something else. There are no dates next to the poets’ names or their works, and the timeline darts from ancient to contemporary. This book is intended as a companion to everyday life, and I wanted it to be a source of unpredictable inspirations for readers.
It means, for example, that John Dryden’s Happy the Man can sit opposite Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone Sang. Dryden describes a happiness based on fulfillment, "Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today." As you progress to Sassoon, you discover a completely different type of happiness, an involuntary explosion of it overcoming the narrator as he is surrounded by unexpected singing.
Inspiration works most effectively with an element of surprise. At this year’s Port Eliot Festival I’ll be dishing out poetry prescriptions from a makeshift pharmacy – listening to people’s complaints and prescribing three poems that they have to collect from the counter. I believe that in many cases a dose of poetic inspiration will have better health-giving effects than the drugs people are using.
And around the country I’m encouraging people to put poetry into the landscape. Visitors to the Olympic Park will encounter installations of specially commissioned poems about the history of the site. Is there poetry you’d like people to encounter where you are? For inspiration, visit our Winning Words website, www.winningwordspoetry.com.
"Winning Words" is published by Faber & Faber. William Sieghart has founded Forward Publishing, the Forward Poetry Prizes, National Poetry Day and Forward Thinking, a London-based NGO.
