VIDEO: Natalie Merchant: Singing old poems to life

[Ryan Goble]

Interesting story re: Natalie Merchant's 2010 album Leave Your Sleep:

Lyrics from near-forgotten 19th-century poetry pair with her unmistakable voice for a performance that brought the TED audience to its feet.

I suppose I owe you an explanation. I've been working on a project for the last six years adapting children's poetry to music. And that's a poem by Charles Edward Carryl, who was a stockbroker in New York City for 45 years, but in the evenings, he wrote nonsense for his children. And this book was one of the most famous books in America for about 35 years. "The Sleepy Giant," which is the song that I just sang, is one of his poems. Now, we're going to do other poems for you, and here's a preview of some of the poets. This is Rachel Field, Robert Graves -- a very young Robert Graves -- Christina Rossetti. Ghosts, right? Have nothing to say to us, obsolete, gone -- not so. What I really enjoyed about this project is reviving these people's words. Taking them off the dead, flat pages. Bringing them to life, bringing them to light. So, what we're going to do next is a poem that was written by Nathalia Crane. Nathalia Crane was a little girl from Brooklyn. When she was 10 years old in 1927, she published her first book of poems called "The Janitor's Boy." Here she is. And here's her poem.