What happens when hip hop culture, young people, and poetry meet: Ken Arkind at TEDxDenverTeachers

so Eli just got braces he's 17 and he wants to grow up to become a writer so by definition that makes his mouth well he wants to grow up to become a rapper so by definition that makes his mouth his instrument so imagine slapping training wheels onto the bicycle of a Tour de France champion in an attempt to straighten him out the world has bent him crooked forcing him to stumble where he used to run and I am Eli's poetry performance teacher so that makes my job today really funny whenever he speaks it's like Dylan going electric there's suddenly all of this static that didn't used to be there he when he reads his poetry it kind of sounds like an angry river screaming at a newly-built Dan and while checking out his reflection in the window of the classroom we were working in he says to me in a voice more Parseltongue than English yo in the right light these braces sort of look like a platinum grill yeah and I say well that's very gangster young jeezy that's very gangster never read your poem and he does over and over slowly gaining footing in this awkward little war where every syllable feels like a traitor a soldier breaking rank on the front line every word is a forgetful sinner tumbling out of a confessional half clean his tongue is relearning how to navigate the newly hostile topography of his mouth it's a wolf pacing in its cage at the zoo and after forcing him to read the same poem 20 times in a row he would Maul me if he could and I love him for it he's my kind of poet right his hand-me-down clothes fit his skinny finger figure like an older brother that he doesn't have dragging him to a dinner at home that won't be there he always seems to be coming from someplace where he probably shouldn't have been which is actually anywhere if you give him enough time and there aren't any cameras he treats his middle finger like it's his prized possession and if he thinks he knows more than you do about the subject you are trying to teach him he suddenly death he's the reason I keep writing because if I can't say something that will make him listen and it probably wasn't worth trying to say in the first place right see he's honest like that an uneducated man would call him slightly criminal but really the word is honest because he simply cannot afford to be anything else and I say to him honesty does not always mean just telling the truth honesty means saying what you have to say regardless of what the outcome might be and he says after thinking about that for a little while dude that doesn't make any sense and I say well you don't make any sense and he says yes I do and you know what else you know who else had braces Forrest Gump he had leg braces and he turned out to be the fastest dude in all of Alabama so what does that say about me son what does that say about me and I say well run Forrest run and we both laugh out loud for the first time today and his open mouth looks like an armory like two perfectly aligned glinting rows of swords and I think to myself well that's the trick isn't it the brightest things in this world are so often also the sharpest that we fear for our own fingers too much to hold on to our own shine sometimes convincing ourselves that our mouths are just black holes full of dangerous things that we need to dull the edges of in order to fit in so we can speak in this language of stop signs slow down you're too young you don't understand your arms are still so skinny these weak things aspen branches blowing in the wind is if they're trying to hold on to the storm that wants to break them in the first place we convince ourselves that our bodies are not strong enough to hold on to the velocity of our hearts so we just let them go and I see this this young man this factory of sound and song this boy who is so much faster than this world's expectations of him and he does not yet know how uncrashable he actually is that his head is a steering wheel that his heart is a gas pedal and that his mouth is a son his mouth is a son where all of their expectations and road signs will go to burn his mouth is an instrument in this poem is his song and he is standing before me and he is reading his song to me he is playing it to me over and over until he almost gets it right he is playing it over and over until it's honest and so that metal in his mouth no longer resembles a weapon but a tuning fork and I swear that this is true because the melody that is coming out of him it's pitch perfect it's perfect thank you so I'm gonna I'm gonna try to I'm gonna try to slow myself down but I'll be honest with you my heart gets really excited and I just sort of go sometimes so we're just we're just gonna bear with it right okay so my junior year of high school my mother is at the parent-teacher conference tonight with my creative writing teacher Jared Parsons and he tells her that I'm at the top of his class and she says well that's really good because he's failing everything else and he wants to be a writer when he grows up and Jared just sort of shakes his head and he says no he doesn't want to be a writer he is a writer that's the most important thing someone has ever told me for two reasons one it's the first time I teacher told me I was good at something that wasn't illegal and two because it was definitive right there was no pesky potential no could be there only was he is so he could which means to me I am a writer so I can write I am so I can now this becomes my compass my identity becomes how I navigate the world around me it's the most important thing being a writer anything else is secondary and if it gets in the way I just get rid of it right so like my job wants me to work more hours where I would rather be writing I quit my job my girlfriend wants me to spend more time with her and less time writing I quit my girlfriend and I write some poems about it College wants me to study more I drop out of college so dropping out of college because it's hindering your ability to write is kind of like dropping out of an airplane because it's hindering your ability to fly and I did not fly I fell but I fell gracefully and somehow managed to eventually learn how to make a living as a writer and mostly it's from traveling around reading my poems to people but I'm also lucky enough to be the executive director for an arts literacy program that works with young people and tries to empower them through the mediums of poetry performance and particularly slam poetry now this work that we do is very often called teaching artists work right that's a funny term teaching artists and from an artist standpoint it's a tiny bit defeatist right because of that stupid thing that we don't want to we buy into but we do which is those who can't do or those who can do and those who can't teach okay I'm gonna lead this one all right ready we're gonna do this one two three do it with me right okay the truth of the matter is in order to be a good artist you also have to be a teacher what is art if not something that we've learned from right that's the truth of the matter and honestly being a teacher and a performance poet have very similar job description sometimes designing a great lesson plan is a lot like writing a good poem it's just something that you create a journey that you lead someone in that hopefully they take something away from and we both have to know how to control an audience right and I'll tell you teachers y'all deal with much tougher audiences than most of the poets that I know and I've walked into a classroom and I felt like I was about to be booed off of the stage and I've walked into a classroom and I felt like every single seat contained its own little hallelujah right that it the entire room was expanding and one gigantic standing ovation okay and and that's where the best poetry in the world is written it's written in those dark corners of classrooms and so I grew up in the early 90s that's why I was going to school is the 90s especially the early 90s is a time I like to magically refer to as the Golden Age of Ritalin because it seemed like you couldn't be a kid and say a cuss word and not have a pill flying to your mouth faster than you could shut it my generation felt like the guinea pigs of this new social norm that would be feeding kids pills in order to starve off their anger and I'm not saying it doesn't work but I'm saying that to me and a lot of people I've worked with it feels like your disease somehow that this anger is something that needs to be cured that it's not actually just a natural reaction to the world around you right anger is your body's alarm it's something that tells you when something is wrong and to defend yourself and we do not shun porcupines for bristling their quills when they're attacked so why would we do the same thing to a child right and so the basis of teaching artists work really is to teach them to focus this anger we tell them to take those quills fill them with ink and then tell their story with it and that is the basis for all great art it's what Lorca would refer to as the Duende taking passion and pain placing it into something and then giving it to the world right even screaming blindly into the darkness because no one will hear you that's the first note in a song swinging your fists randomly and nothing that's the first part of a dance and it and reminding kids that they can do this reminding them by practicing teaching them and giving them tools to practice what is arguably the world's oldest art form poetry is actually kind of and valuable and it's an amazing tool that's the thing about is that we're not teaching them they already know how to do it DNA it's it's poetry is in our DNA it says regular for us as fire and farming it's just something you do this moment right here a TED talk is the basis for poetry it's us standing around the village fire sharing stories with our peers communicating it's it's what we do were meant to do this right to stand in a stage or in a room until people I am and I am from and I can now this reminds me of one of the greatest writing prompts for teaching poetry to kids that I've ever found in my life it's extremely simple and I learned it from my good friends mahogany Brown and jive poetic from New York City it's like a piece of paper draw a line down the center on one side you say I am from and on the other side you say I am and then the student fills out those columns right now the magic trick about this is that they've already written the poem just by filling out the sheet you've tricked them into doing something that they already know how to do and what's best about that is then they can take those and arrange it in any way they see fit or any way you ask them to see fit so we're in Sydney Australia in Redfern at the young black and deadly conference and we're teaching this workshop and using that prompt and I meet this dude named Mark Anthony Mark Anthony is 11 and he's as awesome as he sounds right because his name is Mark Anthony and Marc Anthony's absolute passion is professional wrestling he loves it now he's just not some weak fan or some weekend warrior we're talking ultimate warrior Hulk Hogan WrestleMania in 1990 this dude knows his stuff and he loves it and he's convinced that he can't write a poem right even though he's filled out the sheets and the I am section is literally just facts about wrestling and the I am from section is talking about the violence in his neighborhood which apparently is a lot especially in the community that he came from so we just start talking about wrestling I'm like yo dude so who's your favorite wrestler and he's like Jake the snake Roberts and I'm like why he's like because he had the best move and I'm like what's the best movies like the DDT and I'm like what's the DDT he's like it's when you grab a dude like this with the head you fall back and bam take him out I'm like that sounds like it hurts he's like it does like I've ever seen that in real life he's like yeah what kind of a couple weeks ago my neighbor was getting pulled out of his house by the cops and the cop had in the headlock and he fell back and bam I said what did you just say he said well the cops ddt'd my neighbor I'm like write that down man and he did and it clicked any what a poem and it was not long and it was most certainly not pretty but it was honest and used all of these wrestling metaphors to describe the violence in his community and the magic part of it though is that only he could have written that poem that was his story and that's what made it in a way something beautiful and I've been lucky enough in my weirdness to be able to see this in Sydney in East High School in Denver Colorado to a National Poetry Slam where one kid is standing in front of 3,000 of his peers saying I am from and I am and therefore I can the thing about this is that to this day I still have not earned my college degree trust me it's a my bucket list ID you know I'm talking to a roomful of teachers but ironically I've written close to 40 recommendation letters for colleges universities and scholarship programs because every kid who has ever been a member of a Denver youth slam team has gone on to college including Eli except for one dude his name is Brando and he's a National Poetry Slam champion and full-time touring artist which honestly is not bad work if you can get it so I could continue to sit here and wax poetic about the importance of providing open space for young people to express themselves or I could actually just do it so I'd like to welcome to the stage Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam champion and college freshman Amal Casilla before acquainted with diction my prayers were so sloppy practically slipping off the paper but finally when I learned to tame the little things it was like handcuffs were broken off of my wrists see it's a terrifying thing to learn that your fingers are drenched in humanities hope it's a terrifying thing to learn that you have the power to control soldiers of truth and write songs of freedom my words all come from the cultivation of struggle the all-city and userra the bumps and the ease straighten me up like a minaret my fingers wrapped around pens like prayer beads my call to prayer is the sound of humanity's distress because when the sky drops bombs and there's blood in the rivers and the news tells lies and freedom fighters are getting their tongues cut out ink is the only thing that resembles truth in a place on fire and this world is on fire besides it's always the poets that get arrested first hand written riots they shatter corporate glass windows we are the upholstery of the earth we are the foot to foot shoulder to shoulder of a Friday prayer our tongues don't know dust we are sustainers maintained errs providers we are educators we weave bulletproof vests made out of historical accuracy to protect our children from things like ignorance from things like silence we are not silent we cannot be silent I am NOT silent I was created I am now a threat to the Western misconceptions they handed me the very tool by people who mispronounced my name and now my sloppy prayers are constitution's because when you're in a place on fire and the only thing that resembles truth is ink the only thing you can do is pick up a pen and that's what I did thank you it's it's entirely essential for me to think can our kind person see guys later yeah we'll see you guys later I love him so give it up for Ken our kind

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 68,243

Keywords: ted talk, English, TEDxDenverTeachers, ted x, ted talks, multiculturalism, 21st Century Education, tedx, tedx talk, ted, writing, United States, poetry slam, tedx talks, diversity, poet, poetry education, poetry, Hip Hop (Exhibition Subject)

Id: PI-KA3t0IEs

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2013