Why poetry is the perfect weapon to fight Donald Trump | Books | The Guardian

So much for the theory. In practice, an anthology begins as a pile of poems you've read over the decades and kept in a file in your drawer, and on your fridge, your bathroom mirror, your study door. When Don Paterson and I began putting together an anthology a few years ago, The Zoo of the New, the criterion we agreed on was whether a poem was "good enough". As a definition, it's obviously spectacularly useless. But it allowed us to choose only poems we loved, only poems that seemed capable of shaking us awake to some experience, only poems that were getting it down right in words. The remit had to be nebulous: we wanted to throw the net as wide as we liked. Part of the pleasure was sending poems to each other and finding one's own enthusiasms (mostly) returned, and often magnified. Having said that, neither of us will ever get back the hours and hours on Skype spent arguing over certain poems and poets, certain stanzas, certain words, but it is done now - and since we only rather slowly and ineptly herded the thing together, I think we can say without undue pride that these are poems of brilliance from the last 600 years of the English language...