Transcriber: Jihyeon J. Kim Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Hi, my name is Phil.
I want to start with a poem.
My mother taught me this trick.
If you repeat something over and over again,
it loses its meaning.
For example, homework, homework, homework,
homework, homework, homework, homework.
See? Nothing.
Our life, she said, is the same way.
You watch the sunset too often,
it just becomes 6 p.m.
You make the same mistake over and over, you'll stop calling it a mistake.
If you just wake up, wake up, wake up,
one day you'll forget why.
I should have known nothing is forever.
My parents left each other when I was seven years old.
Before their last argument, they sent me off to the neighbor's house
like some astronaut jettison from the shuttle.
When I came back, there was no gravity in our home.
I imagined it as an accident.
When I left, they whispered to each other,
"I love you."
So many times over that they forgot what it meant.
Family, family, family, family, family.
My mother taught me this trick.
If you repeat something over and over again,
it loses its meaning.
This became my favorite game.
It made the sting of words evaporate.
Separation, separation, separation.
See? Nothing.
Apart, apart, apart, apart.
See? Nothing.
I'm an injured handy man.
I work with words all day. Shut up.
I know the irony.
When I was young, I was taught
the trick to dominating language
was breaking it down,
convincing it that it was worthless.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.
See? Nothing.
Soon after my parents' divorce, I developed a stutter.
Fate is a cruel, inefficient tutor.
There is no escape in stutter.
You can feel the meaning of every word
drag itself up to your throat.
Separation.
Stutter is a cage made of mirrors.
Every, "What did you say?" Every, "Just take your time."
Every, "Come on, kid. Spit it out!"
is a glaring reflection of an existence that you cannot escape.
Every awful moment trips over its own announcement
again, again and again,
until it just hangs there in the center of the room.
As if what you were to say had no gravity at all.
Mom, Dad, I'm not wasteful with my words any more.
Even now, after hundreds of hours practicing away my stutter,
I can still feel the claw of meaning in the bottom of my throat.
Listen to me.
I've heard that even in space
you can hear the scratch of an I, I, I, I,
I love you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
Once again, I'm Phil.
I'm a full-time spoken word poet.
And if you don't know what that means, that's totally okay.
A lot of times I say that and people say things like, "What is that?"
"Is that even a job?" (Laughter)
"How do you support yourself?"
And my people, I generally mean my family and friends... (Laughter)
And the short answer of what I do, in a nutshell, is I tell stories.
And I've been incredibly lucky, at a relatively young age,
to be able to support myself doing it.
I co-run an organization with the best friend and a fellow poet.
another TED-alumn, Sarah Kaye. No relation.
We get to travel around internationally
performing and teaching spoken word poetry workshops,
helping people tell the stories that they want to tell.
Now I said that I tell stories,
but it's bit of a misnomer.
because all of us tell stories.
I have a bit of an advantage especially in a place like this.
While I'm standing up, you're sitting down.
I'm in the place that we've all agreed is a stage.
Most of the times before I speak,
somebody says a lot of really nice things about me that I write.
(Laughter)
But we're all constantly exchanging our own narratives.
Right? We do it all the time.
We do it on the phone. We do it online.
We do it in coffee shops. We do it with people we love.
We do it with people we just met for the first time.
I'm really fascinated by this.
And a lot of the work I do with Project Voice
centers around this question of "How do you tell a good story?"
And there's a lot of very tangible elements:
Topic, structure, diction.
As I was working with more and more people,
and hearing hundreds and hundreds of stories,
I became obsessed with this different question,
this deeper question,
which is why we tell stories.
For thousands of years, almost every human culture
has been telling stories.
What moved me to get up in front of a room
full of people I never met
and talk about a period of my life
that for many years I've just wanted to wish it had never happened.
It's not just a historical thing, or an artist thing.
We all do it.
Why do we have a tradition of reading bedtime stories to our children?
Why do we get online and spill these narratives about ourselves
to people we don't know very well
or may never well meet.
And this is the real question that I really ask myself.
To be totally honest, I couldn't come up with an answer,
and I had a big freak-out moment.
Here I was. I had this career.
And I couldn't answer the simple question of "Why do I tell stories?"
Was it all just self-indulgence?
You know when I'm feeling very cynical,
and people ask me, "What's it like to be a spoken word poet?"
I'd be like, It's like the opposite of a therapist.
A therapist, you pay the money,
you sit down, you tell him your problems.
A spoken word poet, you pay me money, you sit down,
I tell you my problems. (Laughter)
Which I didn't believe.
And I thought, "Do I?"
No, I don't believe that.
Then what was it?
And I struggled.
I went back and forth.
And I searched and I thought.
I thought back to my own first experiences.
And some of my first experiences with stories were impression.
I loved it.
I came home after watching Pirates of the Caribbean,
And I started talking like this!
Mom, when is breakfast? (Laughter)
Which was weird. (Laughter)
But the reason I loved impression was because it was an immediate story.
Just by changing the tone, the pitch,
the timbre, all of a sudden, I took on this entire contexts
of belief, of feeling.
It was fun, right?
I go with my sister to fast food places
and be like, can I have a number four?
To go. (Laughter)
I thought about why I did that.
It was a pretty simple answer.
It was to make my little sister laugh.
I thought about we have a lot of times
we tell stories of these very simple intentions.
to entertain, to warn, to scare, to explain.
And that is getting me somewhere
but not down to the real crux of why we're all telling stories.
And I still haven't figured out yet,
but after reading a lot of books,
and talking to thousands of people,
my best guess is we tell stories
to feel alive.
Bear with me, right?
We like to believe that our lives are incredibly predictable.
Take me for example.
Yesterday, I woke up in my apartment in New York, took a bus to the airport,
got on a plane, and I'm here.
In retrospect, this seems incredibly linear
and incredibly predictable.
But right here is all the options of
what could have been.
I could have taken a bus, a different bus,
and met the love of my life.
Taken a different plane with a propeller failure,
and the whole plane could have gone down.
I could have woken up sick, never been here,
never met any of you, any of these relationships
that I had from this day would have never happened.
We like to think that we can plot our lives out.
But there's this big, deep, unknowing out there.
This is a deep chance.
And I think maybe subconsciously that makes us feel vulnerable,
it's scary, and in the face of that great vulnerability,
that's where that impulse to tell the stories comes from,
to share, to connect,
to figure out what it is to feel alive, to stand here
and say, I stood here with these people today.
And I want to celebrate, as Lieutenant Choi said so aptly,
I am somebody.
Story lets us carve our initials into the wet cement of this moment.
And it does it so well,
because it not only celebrates vulnerability
but it embodies vulnerability.
The act of telling a story is of a vulnerable act in and of itself.
This TED talk could suck. (Laughter)
I'm not sure it doesn't yet.
And that suckiness would ring out on the Internet for years.
And that's terrifying.
But here I am, and here are all these other people
who've been so incredibly vulnerable
and shared so much of themselves,
all here trying to figure out what it means to be alive.
In the face of this great unknowing of our future,
I think we tell stories to make a context of our past.
Think about it this way.
You're walking through a city you've never been in before.
You're taking in the sites,
walking down the avenues, looking in the shop windows,
getting the scent of these particular streets.
And later you look at a map,
and you say, "Okay, I was here and walked along here,
I saw this, and I liked this. This was not okay."
I like to think of life as one big new city.
And the people that live it well know exactly what these streets smell like.
Stories let us build our own maps.
They give us contexts, right?
They become our streets, our landmarks.
I know when my grandmother passed away,
there is a bell tower of grief in my map.
The first time I found poetry was a spring in the center of my map
and life has erupted all around it.
So what does all this mean?
We tell stories to make sense of this great unknown.
What does that mean in terms of telling good stories?
I would say it teaches us to embrace the vulnerability,
embrace the risk, dare I say.
Right? To break out of predictability.
The best way to tell a good story is to live a good story.
Talk to the person next to you on the bus. Maybe they are the love of your life.
Another piece is to not be afraid
to be vulnerable enough to tell your stories.
The biggest question I get anywhere I go,
and this is five-year-olds and seventy-five-year-olds,
is "How can I start?"
I love this art form whether it's poetry, storytelling,
nonfiction writing. But how do I start?
And there's this underlying question to that of
"What book do I need to read?",
"What certain life experience do I need to have?"
"What's the right school I need to graduate from to start? "
And my best and most simple advice is to completely throw that out.
That's not what it's about.
People haven't been telling stories for thousands of years
to all get published in Harpers.
Let go of this idea of perfection,
because that's not what it's about. It is to connect.
I think it is to make sense of what it is to be human.
And with that I want to end with this last poem.
If it's not eminently clear,
I'm desperately trying to figure all of this out myself.
And in doing so, in becoming a young man in the world
I'm thinking a lot about not only my own stories
but the stories of the people around me where I fit into that.
And this story, a poem, is for my grandfathers,
and it's called Teeth.
Ojisama is what I call my Japanese grandfather.
In 1945, his Tokyo home was burnt to the ground.
Grandpy is what I call my American grandfather.
In 1945, he was serving on the U.S.S. Shangri-La,
sending off American bomber pilots to burn down Japanese houses.
Our jaws have not yet healed.
1906, Poland.
Granpy's father is hiding in an oven.
He doesn't know the irony of that yet.
He's heard men singing on the street below.
Hyenas, my family calls them.
After celebration drinks and song, the outside town's people
come into the Jewish Ghetto for a celebration beating,
molar fireworks and eyelid explosions.
Even when Grandpy's father grows up
the sound of a sudden song breaks his body into a sweat.
Fear of joy is the darkest of captivities.
1975, Tokyo.
My father, the long haired student with a penchant for sexual innuendo
meets Reiko Hori,
a well-dressed banker who forgets the choruses to her favorite songs.
12 years later, they gave birth to a lanky lightbulb.
1999, California.
My mother speaks to me in Japanese.
Most days I don't have the strength to ask her to translate the big words.
You burned that house down, mother.
Don't you remember?
1771, Prague.
In the heart of the city is a Jewish cemetery,
the only plot of land
where Grandpy's ancestors were allowed to be buried.
When they ran out of room,
they had no choice but to stack dead bodies one on top of another.
Now there are hills made from graves piled twelve deep
individual tombstones jutting out crooked
like valiant teeth emerging from a jaw left to rot.
1985, my parents' wedding.
The two families sit together
smiling wider than they need to.
Montague must be so happy.
We can Capulet this all go.
1999, I sit with Grandpy's cousin,
90 years old and dressed in full uniform.
I beg with him to untie the knots in his brow.
He says, "Hate is a strong word.
But it is the only strength I have left.
How am I to forgive the man that severed the trunk of my family tree
and used its timber
to warm the faces of their own children."
2010, Grandpy and I sit together,
watching his favorite, baseball.
In the infertile glow of the television I see his face wet.
Grandpy sits in his wheelchair, teeth gasping out of his gums
like valiant tombstones emerging from the cemetery left to rot.
The teeth sit staring and I can read them.
Louis Birdman, killed at Auschwitz.
Sarah Leese, killed at Dachau.
William Cane, killed off a coast of Okinawa.
I will never forget what has happened to our family, Grandpy.
And he looks at me with a surprised innocence
of a child struck for the first time.
Philip, forgetting is the only gift I wish to give you.
I have given away my only son trying to bury my hate
in a cemetery that is already overflowing.
There are nights I am kept awake
by the birthday songs of children I chose not to let live
They all look like you.
A plague on both your houses, they've made worms meat of me.
Thank you.
(Applause)