Translator: Martina Cavallo
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Let's begin with an icebreaker. It's called think-pair-share. The instructions are really simple. First, think. Begin with a moment of reflection. Close your eyes,
and recall a very personal secret. Preferably, one you have never shared
with anyone, not ever. Second, pair. Choose a partner. Ideally, someone you do not know
or have just met. And finally, share. Share your very personal secret
with your partner. Sharers, use specific,
preferably sordid details to really bring the experience to life. And listeners, listen close. Your next step will be to roleplay and replay the scene
in front of the audience for catharsis and,
of course, entertainment. (Laughter) Are you ready? Okay, I don't really want you
to think-pair-share. (Laughter) And thank you for not
immediately fleeing for the exits. (Laughter) I begin with this icebreaker because I want to show two things
that connect all of us: the experience of life
throwing us off balance and the need to communicate
these experiences. I threw you off balance with my terrible,
probably stomach-turning request. And had I actually proceeded
with the think-pair-share, you would have later felt the need
to communicate this experience, whether when a friend asked you,
"What was the worst part of TEDxUTSC?" (Laughter) or in an angry e-mail to the organizers
about letting a maniac on stage. I'm a poet and a poetry teacher, so I spend my time
thinking about these experiences that knock us off balance. Both the good: love, birth, joy; and the devastating: loss, death and pain. I explore how we poets give form
to these experiences with our poetic tools utilizing poetry's precision,
vision and play to move, console and inspire. One of the lessons
that teaching has taught me is that not only are we all linked by these experiences
that knock us off balance but we're also linked by the fact that we could all explore
these experiences in poetry and gain from our poetic explorations. The first half of the title of my talk is
"Everything you need to write a poem" because the goal of my talk is to show you that you already have everything
you need to write a poem. The experiences of love and loss,
of joy and pain, and the tools. To put a twist on one of the world's
most famous poems, you're a poet and I'm about to show it. How do I know you're a poet? I know this because I know
you use language the way poets do. To express sensory experience,
to make comparisons and to sound good. This is what we poets do when we create with imagery,
metaphor and music. I want to give you
a deeper grasp of these tools so that you can employ them
more self-consciously, the way a poet does. To stir our senses, move our emotions
and lead us to share in your world and see our own in the new way. Since poetry is such a hands-on process, I will introduce you to the tools
through the process, both my own and yours. In order to do this,
I first need to introduce my friend. This is Blair. This picture was taken
on my parents' farm where Blair and I performed songs
for family and friends. I first met Blair in 1992
when we started high school together. We formed a strong and enduring friendship
around the creative life. Together we performed in plays
and improv games, we wrote and made movies, and we learned covers
and composed original songs. This, to give you a sense
of the weird stuff we made, is a picture of me, in makeup, as the villain of the not-yet-released
Plastic Face 4: Plastic Faces Revenge. We wrote, shot and edited
the short horror film in two days. We actually hadn't made
Plastic Face 1 through 3, we just thought it'd be awesome
to skip straight to the later sequel. (Laughter) In January of 2009,
Blair took his own life. Beyond the life and art,
Blair and I had shared something else, a struggle with mental illness. A struggle that brought us closer together but also had the power to push us apart. I think about him and miss him every day; which means I write about him,
and to him, and because of him often. To go along with the eulogy poems
and novel I've written for Blair, I've written a two-line poem
as a part of this talk. I will walk you through my process
as a way of introducing you to the process and, I hope, power of poetry. The power to help us
remember, grieve and celebrate. Before doing so though, I want you
to join me in this writing process and take a moment
to remember someone you have lost. This might be someone
who passed away recently or long ago. This might be someone
you've lost touch with or broken from. Take a moment to remember. Now, throughout the remainder of my talk,
I invite you to write down your lines or compose in your mind as we share this process of writing,
remembrance and revelation together. So, one of the first things I think of
when I think of Blair is his laugh. The punch of the sudden burst
followed by a rapid rippling, often with a wheezer too, as he had to toss back his grinning face
or curled it forward. There was a real materiality to it. You could feel his laugh in your body,
both the physical vibration and the joy, as you inevitably started laughing too. This description of my friend's laughter
brings us to our first tool, imagery, and our first step, compose an image
with a word, phrase or line. Imagery is language
that represents sensory experience and in turn stimulates
the senses of the reader. This is one of the core powers of poetry: to preserve and share
this sensory experience. There are many types of imagery:
sight, sound, smell, taste, touch; and more internal sensations,
such as hunger or movement in the joints. Let's take a moment
to explore imagery together with the writing exercise promoted
by the comics artist Lynda Barry. I will ask a few questions to prompt you, and I invite you to write down your lines
or compose in your mind. When you remember the person you lost,
what sights and sounds come to mind? What smell do you associate with them? What food or drink
did they most love to taste? What was the feel of their touch? In composing your image, one of the most fertile approaches
is to ask yourself a simple question: what about this individual
do you miss the most? I miss Blair's laughter; the sweetness of the decadent lattes we treated ourselves to
at the cafe where we wrote; the burn of cigars on poker night; and the chords we struck
when we rehearsed and recorded. You may also consider giving form
to the unexpected sensations you miss. The odd sight, weird smell
or strange sound. For an example of the unexpected touch, I can return to the day
Blair and I filmed Plastic Face 4. During a fight scene, he hit me so hard
right here with a plastic gun that I nearly passed out. And this goose egg was so big
that I basically looked like a unicorn. Of course, we had to keep
the shot in the movie so viewers would understand why my character had suddenly grown
a throbbing third eye. Alternately, you may write
about more serious ideas and emotions through the absence of sensory experience. I say this because what I am
most ashamed of in relation to my friend, what brings me the most pain,
is characterized by this absence. The silence of his phone. The silence of his phone
after he last called me and I didn't call him back. I will take this lack of sound
as my opening image: "Your silent phone
when I did not return your last call." When I asked you
to remember the person you lost, what sight, sound, smell, taste or touch
returned to you the strongest? If you haven't already,
I encourage you again to write it down in a word, phrase or line. Other powers of poetry are the capacity to reveal truth,
give form to the unseen and stir wonder. One of the main ways poets accomplish this
is through comparison; whether through a simile,
a comparison that uses "like" or "as," or a metaphor, a more direct comparison
that doesn't use "like" or "as." In his poem Fork,
Charles Simic receives the fork as "the strange thing
that must have crept right out of hell a bird's foot hung
around a cannibal's neck." Langston Hughes in his poem Harlem uses simile to meditate
upon his opening question. "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it fester like a sore
and then run?" Thylias Moss employs metaphor
to powerfully and painfully describe the transition from youth to adulthood as "the arrival of knowledge
that eyes are birds with clipped wings." For your poem, you can make
your comparison to your image. Your image is or is like blank. And to fill this blank,
you may draw on anything from nature's animals,
plants and environments to humankind's creations,
communities and environs. Though you may wish to focus on material
that relates to the person you lost, whether occupations, hobbies,
passions or dreams. The act of actually creating
your simile or metaphor, though, is really this simple. Compare. Connect. For example, the microphone
is a blank page; the room lifts like a balloon; the mind is a dam that stills
the raging river of the world; or the mind is a raging river that bursts every dam
the world builds to stop it. A good simile or metaphor will possess
some combination of surprise and aptness, of trueness and newness. However, the key to beginning is not worrying about the quality
of the end result. Just write and let
your imagination move freely. Let's take a moment
to explore this together. Return to the image
you wrote for the person you lost and expand it
with a simile or a metaphor. I will again ask
a few questions to prompt you and I want you to write down
or reflect on your answers without judging what arises. Which animal is your image similar to? Which season is it most like? If your image were a sport or a game,
which would it be? When undertaking this exercise alone, choose a simile or metaphor
from the list you brainstormed and expand the comparison
by answering the questions "why" or "how": Why is this image like this season?
How is this image like this game? For example, I could compare
Blair's silent phone to winter. This connection to the cold lack of growth
expresses my internal feeling. The next step is to tease out
the similarity with greater specificity. I could explore how his silent phone is
like a blizzard glacier or frozen lake, or I could compare
his silent phone to poker, our favorite game to play together, and expand this further by writing,
"Your silent phone is a game of poker in which the cards are glued to the table
and I cannot pick them up." Or I could combine winter and poker, return to my original image
and revise it simply like so, "Your silent phone
is a poker game played in a blizzard." Once again -
if you haven't already - I encourage you to expand your image
with a simile or metaphor. Your image is or is like blank. Our final power of poetry is its capacity to rouse pleasure
and stir emotions with its music. The most obvious way poets do this,
of course, is through rhyme. Here's a prime example
from Jay Electronica's Exhibit C. "You either build or destroy,
where you come from? The Magnolia projects
in the 3rd Ward slum. Hum, it's quite amazing
that you rhyme how you do and that you shine
like you grew up in a shrine in Peru." The power here arises not only
from that marvelous bounty of rhymes but also from their placement. For example, beginning a line "hum" with what had been the end rhyme
"from" and "slum" or the wonderful internal rhyme "you grew"
tucked between "you do" and "Peru." Even in poetry that doesn't rhyme, poets still often work
to make their words sing. Two means of accomplishing this
are alliteration and assonance. Alliteration is characterized
by the repetition of consonant sounds, as in "termite tract trees"
or "birds in berry bunches." Assonance, by contrast, is characterized
by the repetition of vowel sounds, as in "the breeze is fleet and brief"
or "a day of rain." Take for example William Wordsworth's Reflections upon Nature
a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. In nature, he hears "oftentimes
the still sad music of humanity nor harsh nor grading,
though of ample power to chasten and subdue." Note the musical centering he builds
with the repetition of "s" sounds, "Oftentimes the still sad music." And note, too, how he employs assonance
to create a sonic connection between lines via "sad" and "ample,"
and "grading" and "chasten." We can return to our own two lines then and revise them to heighten the music
through alliteration, assonance and rhyme. Alternately, you may work
to diminish the music if it better suits your desired effect. Here once again is my developing poem. "Your silent phone
is a poker game played in a blizzard." And here are my lines
revised to heighten the music. "Your telephone's silence is poker played
with invisible cards in a blizzard." Note how I added
the striking alliterative "s" by changing "silent phone"
to "telephone silence" and heighten the alliteration
of "poker played" by cutting the word "game." I also added assonance
through "invisible" and "blizzard," and with this addition, more effectively
communicated my helplessness. Not only are the cards concealed
by the snowy storm but they're also impossible to see. This, then, is my two-line poem for Blair. I'll give it a title, Last Call, and I invite you to do the same
with your poem when you finish it. In sharing my process
and inviting you to write, I hope I've demonstrated,
as the first half of my title promised, that you already possess
everything you need to write a poem. The experiences to explore and the tools of imagery,
metaphor and music to do so. I also hope you see the truth
of the second half of my title. How poetry can save a life. What I mean is that even though I can never
save my friend's life in the way I feel I should have, I can at least write a poem
that preserves his life and saves me from slipping
into the abyss of my failure. And importantly, I can keep writing
and aiming to save. I can build these two lines
into a longer poem, and in this poem I can transform
the frozen phone into a fiery megaphone, a blazing thing that calls out,
in the memory of my good friend, to all those who need it; creating a real icebreaker,
a true think-pair-share. And in this icebreaker, I can ask you to close your eyes
and think about it. The ice inside you. Think about that massive block of ice, that unskateable surface
or unscalable glacier made of what is missing
or of anxiety and dread or of the voice that destorts
and demeans. And pair up with the maker
inside yourself, the one who listens, crafts,
questions and explores. And share with your inner maker
the work of encountering the ice, the work of chipping it away,
or the work of scaling the glacier or navigating the expanse
of the frozen lake. And when you inevitably fall
into those frigid waters, know that as your out-of-balance body
churns under the surface, your lungs aflame with held breath; that it will be the hands of this maker that break through the ice
and take hold of you and pull you back through. (Applause)
