Given at TEDGlobal Edinburgh in 2013, it’s a TED talk (live onstage with good lighting and so on) about why I like poetry, and about some of the more serious things that poetry can do for us, whether or not we spend much of our lives reading it. Many thanks to all the people at TED who helped make it possible, and made it (I hope) OK to watch. (I’m used to hearing myself on audio at this point, but video? Still weirds me out.) Discussed: science fiction, death, global English, and poems by A. E. Housman, Rae Armantrout, Wallace Stevens, Terrance Hayes, Denise Riley, and John Keats.
You can now watch my TED talk.
