Poetry in motion: TEDTalks Playlist

Very cool - CK Williams is one of my favorite contemporary poets.

Poetry in motion: TEDTalks Playlist

Today’s playlist is about poetry. Where does a poem come from and how does it reveal itself? These speakers perform poems that come from the battlefields, childhood, and even from inside a computer, to create a lyrical soundtrack in some traditional and not-so-traditional ways.

C.K. Williams shows how growing up is not so easy, and opens up about the experiences and oddities of youth.

Emmanuel Jal channels the war-torn terror of his childhood to produce words and music that inspire.

Rives tells a type-faced story about a boy who loves a girl with a ponytail.

We’d love to hear more of your favorite TEDTalks about Poetry. Add your suggestions to the comments below, join the conversation on Facebook, or email contact@ted.com with the subject PLAYLIST: POETRY. (Jog your memory with the TEDTalks spreadsheet.)

Curator of this playlist: Rachel Tobias

Just for fun, here are three poems by CK Williams from The New Yorker (1986):

First Desires

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew
anything at all about the music,
what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of the
orchestra each represented:
there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thinnings, the
winding cries of change
that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of you
and then apart from you.
And even when you’d learned the grainy timbre of the single violin,
the aching arpeggios of the horn,
when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left, an
ache, a sense of longing
that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the
dominant’s resolve into the tonic,
as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you knew
it was more likely) you.

Love: Beginnings

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so
much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring
entity and unity they make—
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her
laughter at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness
of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring
back in flame into the sexual—
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that
filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting
again, stamping in its stall.

Love: Habit

He has his lips pressed solidly against her cheek, his eyes are wide
open, though, and she, too,
gazes into the distance, or at least is nowhere in the fragile
composition they otherwise create.
He breaks off now, sulkily slouches back; his hand, still lifted to her
face, idly cups her chin,
his fingers casually drumming rhythms on her lips, a gesture she finds
not at all remarkable—
she still gazes away, looking for whatever she’s been looking for, her
inattention like a wall.
Now he kisses her again, and they both, like athletes, hold that way
again, perversely persevering…
Oh, Paolo! Oh, Francesca! Is this all it comes to, the perturbations
and the clamor, the broken breath,
the careenings on the wheel—just this: the sorrowing flame of
consciousness so miserably dimmed?

Tags: Poetry in motion, TED Talks, Playlist, CK Williams, Rives, Emmaanuel Jal, New Yorker, poetry, poems