What I like in a poem is jokes, and what I hate is a poem that takes itself too seriously. Photograph: Gavin Day/from Ella RisbridgerĮlla Risbridger Editor of the anthology Set Me on Fire: A Poem for Every Feelingġ1) How to Triumph Like a Girl, Ada Limon 12) To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall, Kim Addonizio 13) Goodtime Jesus, James Tate 14) People Are a Living Structure Like a Coral Reef, Heather Christle 15) Poem in Which I Practise Happiness, Joe Dunthorne And when I need to remember happier times I look to From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee, a poem which swells with hard-won joy like a peach ripening on the branch. Which brings to mind Fiona Benson’s gorgeous little poem Caveat (published below), which, read in the midst of tribulations, will surely gladden the heart like an empathetic hand on the shoulder. There is, in so many things, a small crack through which hope can enter. When I find myself whingeing, the best medicine is Roddy Lumsden’s Against Complaint, which affirms that most stoic of maxims, “It could be worse”. The immediacy of desire also suffuses Amy Key’s Brand New Lover, with its woozy soft focus and tense interplay of disclosure and guardedness. I’m particularly moved by poets who sing from the rooftops, as in Donika Kelly’s wonderful poem – a tender though not sentimental pick-me-up for when you are so enamoured of someone that you find yourself playing slow jams in the early hours of the morning. I had a lot of feelings”, Donika Kelly 7) Brand New Lover, Amy Key 8) Against Complaint, Roddy Lumsden 9) Caveat, Fiona Benson 10) From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee Finally, in terms of a strategy for coping with all that the world throws at us, who can better that offered by Roger McGough in his short poem Survivor?Ħ) “The moon rose over the bay. In Aimless Love, through celebrating a wren, a dead mouse and a bar of soap, he helps us fall back in love with life. Of course, laughter can provide the biggest pick-me-up of all, and there are few poets funnier than Billy Collins. And what could be more helpful than a poem that pokes fun at how ridiculous we all are, as presented in UA Fanthorpe’s wickedly funny triptych Not My Best Side, giving voice to the characters in Paolo Uccello’s painting Saint George and the Dragon. Frank O’Hara’s Poem hoicks us up off the floor with its sheer exuberance and breathlessness: we have no choice but to be swept along. But a poem doesn’t have to be explicitly inspirational to do that. Poetry refreshes the parts that other words cannot reach and, like the little bird of Emily Dickinson’s Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, contains the strength to sustain us even in the “chillest land / And on the strangest sea”. 1) Hope Is the Thing With Feathers, Emily Dickinson 2) Poem, Frank O’Hara 3) Not My Best Side, UA Fanthorpe 4) Aimless Love, Billy Collins 5) Survivor, Roger McGough
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