Shane Koyczan: "To This Day" ... for the bullied and beautiful “I’ve been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself,” he says, beginning today’s talk. “That’s what we were told—stand up for yourself. But that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.”

Koyczan appeared on the TED2013 stage just a week after his spoken-word poem, “To This Day,” went viral as a crowd-animated video. Live onstage, mixing poetry and prose, Koyczan explains to the audience what prompted to him to write the poem, an ode to anyone who felt bullied or left out as a child, and have it animated by people around the world. Koyczan says it wasn’t just overt bullying he was reacting to — but the subtle discouragement kids receive along the path to adulthood, as they’re required to define themselves in narrower and narrower ways.

“At the same time as we were being told who we were, we were being asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” Koyczan’s answers were: a writer, then a professional wrestler. Both ideas were shot down.

“What made my dreams so easy to dismiss?” he asks. “Granted my dreams are shy, because they’re Canadian. My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic—they’re standing alone at the high school dance and they’ve never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too — silly, foolish, impossible.”

To hear more of Koyczan’s motivation, and to hear a beautiful live rendition of “To This Day,” watch this talk. For more of Koyczan’s poems, read on.

A proud Canuck, Koyczan wrote the poem “We Are More” for the Canadian Tourism Commission. He even performed it at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, for a television audience of more than 1 billion people. “We’re more than hockey and fishing lines/ off the rocky coast of the Maritimes/ some say what defines us/ is something as simple as please and thank you,” spits Koyczan in this poem. “But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized.” See a version of the poem with visuals.

Koyczan got some help in sharing these “Instructions for a Bad Day” from a group of students at G.P. Vanier secondary school in British Columbia. They wrote the storyboard for the video, handled the cameras, did the acting and collected the props. The piece was created for Pink Shirt Day — a national day devoted to the discussion of bullying.

Here, Koyczan performs “The Crickets Have Arthritis” at Words Aloud in 2007. A heartbreaking love letter to his 9-year-old hospital roommate, Louis, the poem begins, “It doesn’t matter why I was there, where the air is sterile and the sheets sting. It doesn’t matter that I was hooked up to this thing that buzzed and beeped every time my heart leaped like a man whose faith tells him God’s hands are big enough to catch an airplane, or a world.”

Yes, Koyczan does on occasion write love poems. Here is “More Often Than Sometimes,” in a new video produced by Amazing Factory Productions and posted just two weeks ago as part of the Giants of the Forest series. “I think of her more often than sometimes/ If she ever hears this/ I want her to know that/ Our first kiss tasted like pepper,” he says. “We loved like two games of solitaire/ Waiting to be played by one another.”

In January, during an event to mark the closing of the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver after 63 years, Koyczan performs the poem “Remember How We Forgot.” His words are beautifully backed, as they were on the TED stage, by violinist Hannah Epperson. “Once upon a time we were young/ our dreams hung like apples waiting to be picked and peeled,” flows Koyczan.

The words that begin the poem “Atlantis,” performed here at Words Aloud in 2007, may just get you: “Your entire body shakes when you laugh/ as if your sense was built on a fault line/ and the coast of your heart falls into the ocean of yourself/ and you’re left looking for Atlantis.”

Here, Koyczan’s poem “Educate the Heart,” created for the Dalai Lama Center. In a video about writing the poem, Koyczan stops reciting and talks boldly about how our culture values the wrong things. “Somewhere along the way we got very invested in things that don’t care about us,” says Koyczan. “Money doesn’t love you. Your car isn’t going to sit down and hold your hand if your kid is sick.”

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The adage goes: You learn something new every day. This is especially true if you watch TED-Ed lessons, which bring to life educational topics as varied as “insults by Shakespeare” and “pizza physics” with animation. As a holiday gift, we’re bringing you the TED-Ed’s team’s favorite talks of the year that, despite being amazing, didn’t get the number of views expected. Here, a second look at the lesson: Art of the Metaphor, from Jane Hirshfield.

Poet Jane Hirschfield’s language, evoking so many artful metaphors, is matched with Ben Pearce’s equally endearing animation, somehow coming off as cute, clever and relatable. Watch this lesson to be moved by the profundity of the English language.

Spoken word artist Lemon Andersen begins today’s talk with the poem, “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines in 1994.

My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax.
My suede Starter jacket says Raiders on the back.
I’m stylin’, smilin’ looking real mean,
Cause it ain’t about bein’ heard.
Just about bein’ seen.

For Andersen, hearing this poem was a click moment. As he shares in today’s talk, given at TEDYouth 2011, this poem showed him the power of spoken word. After hearing it, he began following Gaines obsessively.

“I thought poetry was just self expression,” explains Andersen. “[Gaines] handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and ‘The Aural Nature of Poetry’ … What Etheridge Knight taught me was that I can make my words sound like music. Even my smalls ones, the monosyllables — the ifs, ands, buts, whats. The gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear.”

To hear Andersen tell his story with beautiful lyrical flow, watch his talk. After the jump, some others who’ve performed spoken word on the TED stage.

Rives remixes TED2006
Rives’ poem “Mockingbird” is never the same twice. At TED2006, he freestyles a recap of the entire conference with his mockingbird’s lullaby.

Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter
This performance from Sarah Kay got two standing ovations at TED2011. Listen as she shares her poems “B” and “Hiroshima,” and explains how “tricking” teenagers into writing poetry can help them connect with their inner lives and with each other.

Franny Choi: Pop goes Korea!
At TEDxBoston, Franny Choi throws fast-flung words about Korean drinking games, Choco-Pies, karaoke, plastic surgery and Hello Kitty.

Rives: The 4 a.m. mystery
What is it about 4 o’clock in the morning? In this performance from TED2007, Rives combines words, video and music, spinning a lyrical look at this witching hour.

Sarah Kay: How many lives can you live
“The astronaut will not be at work today. He has called in sick. He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock,” says Sarah Kay in this performance from TEDxEast, all about how storytelling can help us slow down and experience life.

Taylor Mali: What teachers make
The poem that Taylor Mali performs in this talk, given at the Bowery Poetry Club, has three titles. You can call it “What teachers make” or “Objection overruled” or “If things don’t work out you can always go to law school.”

Marion Carey: About Time
In this spoken word performance from TEDxBoston, Marion Carey ruminates on our clockwork-like existence. All this while solving a Rubik’s Cube.

Rives: If I controlled the Internet …
In one of the shortest talks of all time, Rives performs a three-minute poem about how he would change the internet. A sample: “If I controlled the internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay…”

Adam A. Andersen: Me, in verse
Adam A. Anderson wanted to be an architect as a kid, but ended up in the performing arts. In this talk from TEDxSMU, he shares how verse satisfied his desire to express himself.

Kemi Alabi: Unlovelies in the Key of C Major
Boston University student and slam poet Kemi Alabi takes us to the world of the unlovelies, where she discovers beauty in the ugly.

Franny Choi: POP!goesKOREA!
Writer and slam poet Franny Choi mixes up fast-flung words and Korean drinking games in an exploration of cute culture in Seoul.

Marlon Carey: About Time
And finally, spoken-word poet Marlon Carey ruminates on our clockwork existence — while solving a Rubik’s cube.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“I’m here to give you your recommended daily allowance of poetry.” So says Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States.

He tells the story of being approached by the Sundance Channel to record his poems and set them to animation. Attempts to set his poetry to music had failed in the past. But he found it an intriguing possibility. And on top of that, “Bugs Bunny is my muse,” so he loved the idea of animating them. So he did. He shows the TED audience five of these animations.

Budapest (above). A poem about writing poems, where he pretends to let the reader in to the process of writing. (Says Collins: “Writing is not as easy as that for me, but i like to pretend it comes with ease.”)

Some Days. About arranging people, or being the one arranged. It can be boiled down to, “Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you.”

Forgetfulness. There is a certain kind of forgetfulness called literary amnesia, where you forget what you’ve read.

The Country: Collins, from New York City, had a friend from the country who would take him hunting, “getting lost with a gun, basically.” Collins would take him around New York City and, “Teach him what I knew, largely smoking and drinking. That way we traded lore with each other.”

The Dead: Inspired by something a preacher said in a funeral, that the deceased was looking down on the proceedings.”That to me is a bad start to the afterlife, having to watch your own funeral.”

Collins closes with a reading of a final poem, “To My Favorite Seventeen Year Old High School Girl,” a cranky love poem from a parent to a daughter, on the subject of accomplishment and cleaning one’s room.

The audience, clearly made of parents, or perhaps simply enamored of his way with words, rises to a standing ovation, even stamping their feet.

“War child” Emmanuel Jal tells the story of his amazing life in words and lyrics:

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Helen Fisher studies the poetry of the brain in love:

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And TED’s house poet, Rives, does 9 minutes of lyrical origami around the wee small hour of the morning:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Find all dozen-and-a-half TEDTalks about poetry >>

Watch Chris Abani’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Chris Abani on TED.com.

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