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8 beautiful and heartbreaking poems from Shane Koyczan

Shane-KoyczanShane Koyczan has a style with words.

Shane Koyczan: To This Day ... for the bullied and beautiful Shane Koyczan: To This Day ... for the bullied and cute "I've been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness simply from standing upwards for myself," he says, starting time today's talk. "That's what we were told—stand up for yourself. Just that'due south hard to practice if you don't know who you are."

Koyczan appeared on the TED2013 phase merely a week later on his spoken-word poem, "To This Day," went viral every bit a oversupply-animated video. Live onstage, mixing verse and prose, Koyczan explains to the audition what prompted to him to write the poem, an ode to anyone who felt bullied or left out every bit a child, and have it animated by people around the globe. Koyczan says information technology wasn't just overt bullying he was reacting to — only the subtle discouragement kids receive forth the path to adulthood, as they're required to define themselves in narrower and narrower ways.

"At the same time as we were existence told who we were, we were beingness asked, 'What do you want to be when y'all grow up?'" Koyczan'south answers were: a writer, and so a professional person wrestler. Both ideas were shot down.

"What made my dreams so like shooting fish in a barrel to dismiss?" he asks. "Granted my dreams are shy, considering they're Canadian. My dreams are self-witting and overly apologetic—they're standing alone at the loftier school dance and they've never been kissed. Come across, my dreams got chosen names too — empty-headed, foolish, incommunicable."

To hear more of Koyczan's motivation, and to hear a beautiful live rendition of "To This Day," sentinel this talk. For more of Koyczan'south poems, read on.

http://www.youtube.com/sentinel?v=zsq68qRexFc

A proud Canuck, Koyczan wrote the verse form "We Are More" for the Canadian Tourism Commission. He even performed information technology at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, for a tv audition of more ane billion people. "We're more than hockey and fishing lines/ off the rocky declension of the Maritimes/ some say what defines united states of america/ is something as unproblematic as please and thank you," spits Koyczan in this poem. "Merely we are more than than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized." Meet a version of the verse form with visuals.

Koyczan got some help in sharing these "Instructions for a Bad Day" from a group of students at Yard.P. Vanier secondary school in British Columbia. They wrote the storyboard for the video, handled the cameras, did the interim and nerveless the props. The piece was created for Pink Shirt Day — a national day devoted to the give-and-take of bullying.

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Here, Koyczan performs "The Crickets Have Arthritis" at Words Aloud in 2007. A heartbreaking love letter to his 9-year-old hospital roommate, Louis, the poem begins, "It doesn't thing why I was there, where the air is sterile and the sheets sting. It doesn't matter that I was hooked upwardly to this thing that buzzed and beeped every time my heart leaped similar a man whose organized religion tells him God's hands are large enough to grab an airplane, or a world."

Yes, Koyczan does on occasion write love poems. Hither is "More Oftentimes Than Sometimes," in a new video produced by Amazing Manufactory Productions and posted just 2 weeks ago as part of the Giants of the Forest series. "I recollect of her more often than sometimes/ If she e'er hears this/ I desire her to know that/ Our first kiss tasted like pepper," he says. "Nosotros loved like ii games of solitaire/ Waiting to be played by one another."

In Jan, during an event to mark the closing of the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver later 63 years, Koyczan performs the poem "Remember How We Forgot." His words are beautifully backed, as they were on the TED phase, by violinist Hannah Epperson. "Once upon a time nosotros were young/ our dreams hung like apples waiting to be picked and peeled," flows Koyczan.

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The words that brainstorm the poem "Atlantis," performed here at Words Aloud in 2007, may merely become you lot: "Your entire body shakes when you express joy/ as if your sense was built on a fault line/ and the coast of your eye falls into the ocean of yourself/ and you're left looking for Atlantis."

Hither, Koyczan's poem "Educate the Middle," created for the Dalai Lama Heart. In a video almost writing the poem, Koyczan stops reciting and talks boldly about how our culture values the incorrect things. "Somewhere forth the way we got very invested in things that don't care about usa," says Koyczan. "Money doesn't dear yous. Your car isn't going to sit downwardly and hold your hand if your kid is sick."

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