Why We Tell Stories | Phil Kaye | TEDxMiddlebury

Phil Kaye is a touring poet, published author, and co-director of Project V.O.I.C.E. He has appeared on NPR, performed at Lincoln Center, and most recently coached and performed on the 2011 Providence National Poetry Team, ranked third in the nation. His first book, A Light Bulb Symphony, was published in 2011, and his work can be found regularly in CHAOS Magazine.

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)