Finding What You’re Looking For: “Poems that Make Grown Men Cry,” by Anthony Holden

 

 

Poetry, I think, makes our search easier.  Poetry is a signpost when we’re lost, and a lighthouse in the darkness.

Poetry can inspire.  Poetry can provoke.  Poetry can make us laugh.  Poetry can even make us cry.

Poetry is both a beacon of hope and a band-aid to a wounded spirit.

 

For many years, poetry seemed headed the way of Latin.

It appeared destined to become a dead language.  After all — most people don’t use it, practice it, nor understand it.

If poetry appears in our popular culture at all these days, it’s almost exclusively the domain of modern music.  Words and ideas which at one time would have been published in best-selling books of the day that were widely read and openly discussed by just about everyone increasingly became accompanied by instrumentation and voices.  Starting in the early 1960s, transformational “poets” such as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan gradually morphed into modern-day expressionists with names like Eminem, Jay-Z, and Lady Gaga.  Indeed, these artists with mass appeal are the contemporary poets of the 21st Century.

Perhaps what this really means is — don’t be so quick to dismiss a rap song.  Instead, try listening to a lyric sometimes.  If William Butler Yeats had been born in Detroit during the 1960s rather than Dublin in the 1860s, the provocative words so filled with angst sculpted by urban frustration are likely what he would have written.  After all, poetry is a reflection of both people and their times.

Just perhaps, poetry isn’t dead, after all.  Indeed, poetry hasn’t died.  Rather, it’s evolved.

And so, now seems as good a time as ever to return to the classics for a new retrospective, so long overdue.

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Most of us are perpetually in search.

We’re all searching for something.  Sometimes, we don’t quite know exactly what it is.  This idea was famously captured in a popular rock lyric a generation ago so perfectly and concisely by the Irish band U-2, “I still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

Yet universal pursuits exist within us all.  We all search for common aspirations — most of all happiness.  Peace.  Truth.  A better tomorrow.  We search for things that evade us.  Things that don’t come easily.

Poetry, I think, makes our search easier.  Poetry is a signpost when we’re lost, and a lighthouse in the darkness.

Poetry can inspire.  Poetry can provoke.  Poetry can make us laugh.  Poetry can even make us cry.

Poetry is both a beacon of hope and a band-aid to a wounded spirit.

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Last summer, I became aware of highly-accomplished British author Anthony Holden’s new book project.  Even though he’s already written close to 30 books, Holden remains trapped within his own zenith of enlightenment, liberated by ceaseless inspiration, and grounded in a constant state of self-awareness.  His life has is the very pursuit of intellectual curiosity, manifested in actions.

READ MORE ABOUT ANTHONY HOLDEN HERE

Over dinner and wine (two bottles, in fact), he told me of his new writing venture which was to be about poetry.

“Poetry?” I thought to myself.  “No one reads poetry anymore.”

Holden’s finally lost it.

As I said, these were my initial thoughts, incubated in ignorance.  I didn’t say anything out loud of course, which is a good thing since Holden proceeded to pretty much destroy my misconceptions by the time the second cork was popped.  The man touted as the “royals’ biographer” managed to completely win me across to his side as an enthusiastic cheerleader of his new venture by the time he got stuck paying the check.

What if someone really special, someone with the extraordinary contacts and superlative writing skills of, let’s say, Anthony Holden, were to go around to lots of famous people around the world and ask them which poems were most meaningful to them, and why?  How would that go over?

Intrigued yet?

I was.

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Poems That Make Grown Men Cry:  100 Men on the Words that Move Them (2014 Simon and Schuster), is a newly assembled collection of poems and reflections by Anthony Holden and friends.

Holden asked 100 accomplished people (most well-known) from many fields which poems had the greatest impact on their lives.  Just as moving as the poems which were chosen by each contributor were the explanations behind why they were selected and precisely which emotional chords were touched within when those words were first absorbed into the human soul.

Some of the names you might recognize include John Le Carre (the writer of spy novels), Kenneth Branagh (actor), Ken Follett (novelist), Patrick Stewart (Royal Shakespeare Company), Jeremy Irons (actor), Carl Bernstein (journalist), Chris Cooper (actor), Salman Rushdie (writer), Stanley Tucci (actor), Ian McEwan (writer), Colin Firth (actor), and many others.  One of the most prized contributions comes from the late Christopher Hitchens, who picked his own favorite poem and wrote the reasons why it was chosen, just five days prior to his death.

There’s a lot here to digest.  Not only the most profound poetry ever penned, but the essence of what makes these works so influential to so many great contemporary minds.

However, perhaps most intriguing are the many obscure poems that were chosen, which otherwise might have been lost forever, trapped within the dusty literary canon of the unknown, stuck on high shelves somewhere inside archives, on pages which no longer bask in a ray of sunlight.

Indeed, this is what Holden has managed to accomplish with Poems That Make Grown Men Cry.  He’s opened up the archives once again for us all, luring us to peek inside and frolic amidst all an abundance of lost treasure.

Of course, it’s been there all along.  Poetry in hibernation.  Awaiting re-discovery.

Anthony Holden has pulled back the curtains of a new spring.

READ:  My thoughts on Tony Holden writing the best poker narrative of all-time