12 Feb 2023
EP 26 - William Sieghart
In today’s podcast, I spoke with William Sieghart, who is the author of the Poetry Pharmacy. William is an advocate for the consideration of mental well-being in its broadest possible sense, and he is on a mission to help take ‘poetry out of poetry corner’ and put it back into the public square where it belongs. We talked about the numerous overlaps between poetry and psychedelics, and the ways in which they can both act as societal balms.
In today’s podcast We Discuss;
The genesis of the poetry pharmacy,
The link between attachment theory, disorganized attachment, and residential education,
The importance of reading poetry aloud and the layering of great art,
How hip-hop culture captures the essence of embodied poetry
Hafiz of Shiraz
Poetry as the secular liturgy
The book - ‘Poems of the decade’
Winning Words
The Forward arts foundation and the foreword poetry prize
The “Awful Privilege” of Psychotherapy,
Emily sutton’s illustrations and the book Everyone Sang
How psychedelics and poetry may help young people reclaim rites of passage missed through Covid,
Everything is going to be alright - by Derek Mahon
The work of Ian McGilchrist and how it relates to Poetry
National Poetry Day
BIO - William Sieghart CBE
Author, Publisher Philanthropist.
William Sieghart is a philanthropist and publisher, and former chairman of the Somerset House Trust. William has had a long career in the arts. In 1991 he founded the Forward Prizes for Poetry, the nation’s leading prizes now in their 30th year. In 1993 he started National Poetry Day, an annual celebration of poetry, with the BBC. National Poetry Day is the BBC’s longest standing arts partnership after the Proms. In 2016 he authored The Poetry Pharmacy, the best-selling poetry anthology of the last twenty-five years.
William has toured the country, listening to thousands of people’s problems one on one and prescribing poems and poetry prescriptions for them. He is an inspirational speaker whose platforms have included talks for TEDx, 5×15, literary festivals and corporate events.
William has been a successful entrepreneur, founding Forward Publishing, a magazine publishing company, publishing 80 million magazines a year around the world when he sold it to WPP in 2001. In 2000 he started Streetsmart, a homeless charity that raises its funds by restaurants around the country adding £1 to their bills in November and December. Streetsmart has so far raised over £11m in £1 donations. In 2005 William started Forward Thinking, now one of the world’s leading conflict mediation agencies that works between governments across the Middle East and North Africa. Until December 2021 William was chairman of Somerset House, turning it into the UK’s biggest creative community. Somerset House is one of London’s most visited attractions with as many visitors as the Tower of London.
William has served on the boards of many public institutions and charities including the Arts Council, where he chaired their lottery board for five years, the Royal Society of Arts and the Arts Foundation, which he chaired for 15 years, giving out fellowships to the nation’s most talented young artists. William has conducted two reviews for the UK government on the future of public libraries, hosted a weekly politics show on Bloomberg TV for three years and has been a regular broadcaster on tv and radio, including an appearance on Radio 3’s Private Passions. He has also been a regular interviewer of writers, artists and politicians amongst others, and is a great listener, having listened to the problems of thousands of people since the conception of the Poetry Pharmacy.
