Get Inside the Mind of the World’s Greatest Slam Poet, Actor, Author and Musician
Saul Williams is restless. As a slam poet, he can be kind, ferocious, funny, existential, dramatic and sensitive, all within the same minute. But even as he spoke with me from his home in Paris, I could hear a similar energy in his voice. Energy for everything he was talking about, be it celebrities, religion, hip-hop, politics… He had the sound of a man continuously searching and discovering, sharing and revisiting.
He is also prolific. When restlessness meets artistic ambition, boundaries become irrelevant. He’s won the title of Grand Slam Champion at the revered Nuyorican Poets Café and competed in the National Poetry Slam, after which he was recruited to write for the movie “Slam.” He also assumed the lead role in the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Camera D’Or at the Sundance Festival in 1998. He has four critically-acclaimed hip-hop albums to his name and recently released an innovative book of poetry entitled “Chorus.” It’s best if I allow him to explain the book… and everything else:
Your upcoming tour is called “Chorus: A Spoken Word.” Can you explain what that means and what these shows will look like?
I have a book coming out on September 4 called “Chorus,” which I’m calling a literary mixtape. In more traditional terms, it’d be labeled an anthology. What I did is, through social media, I put out a call for poets to send me their work, and within a month I received 8,000 poems from which I chose a hundred poems and tried to piece all of them together as if they were one voice. So, for all of the shows I’ve booked around the country, I’ve invited the poets that are in the book to come out if they live near the location. So the first thing fans can expect is there will be local artists collaborating with me probably in every city that I visit. It was a way for me to try to put an arm out to all the poets around who are looking to get published. Initially there was nothing I was looking for. Granted, there were poets that didn’t make the cut – not because they didn’t write good poetry but sometimes because, as I started getting through the first number of poems that touched me, I started realizing the theme. I became excited at the opportunity of taking the pulse of this generation and seeing what subjects naturally arose, but it’s hard to say what I was looking for.
What theme came out of this?
The recurring theme, I would say, circled around the questions of identity – whether it was sexual identity, racial identity, national identity, religious identity… I felt like I was hearing from a lot of people who were kind of fed up that they were born inside of some box and had to take it upon themselves to either break out of or define it for themselves.
Can you talk about how growing up in New York shaped you, and how you got into both acting and the café poetry scene?
I grew up in a city called Newburgh, New York, which, if you look up online you’ll see is a pretty crazy city. It’s had the highest crime rate in New York state for like the past forty years, and it’s a city of only 40,000 people. So I grew up surrounded by a lot of drugs and violence, however, in a really strong family where those things were never a question for us. My father was a pastor of a Baptist church and my mother was a schoolteacher. I grew up with parents who were really gung-ho about education and the opportunities that were afforded us and about taking advantage of those. We made sure we went to the theater and participated in extra-curricular activities. So, even though I was surrounded by craziness and a lot of my friends were caught up in it, I kind of had a “Good Will Hunting” experience where my friends protected me from a lot of the craziness going on, saying “nah man, you’re gonna do greater things, don’t do this…” So I had lots of friends who were dealers and gangsters who were always looking out for me. I decided really early that rapping and theater were what I wanted to do, and I was supported by my family and my friends. So even though it was a violent community, somehow I thrived in it.
What is your writing process like? More specifically, your approach to writing hip-hop as opposed to writing poetry.
Well, I would say the first step in my writing process is reading. I really believe that good writing is often times reflective of good reading. From a young age, I’ve really been into a large variety of different sorts of literature, whether it was black nationalist poetry, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Qur’an, crime novels, romance novels, classic fiction, magical-realism in fiction, philosophy, nonfiction of many sorts… So, one, I think, I acquired an eye for what I thought was good writing over time. At first you just read stories then eventually you read someone like Albert Camus or Richard Wright and go “Wow, the way this was written is crazy!” And I started to appreciate good writing. So that’s what I feel is the first step in my writing process. As far as distinguishing between when I write poetry and when I write music, the main difference is that when I’m writing for music I write the music first, so then I’m writing to music. When I’m writing poetry, I’m floating freely and not trying to fit something into a confined space, you know? When it comes to rapping, of course, I’m trying to fit within the confines of what’s available to me. So that’s the first big difference. Secondly, when I’m writing to music, I may put less weight on what I’m saying often times because I think music carries a weight of its own. Whereas when I’m writing freely, the music is in the writing itself. In both cases I’m searching for a musicality and language, but I think when I’m writing poetry alone perhaps there’s a greater sense of musicality in the language because there’s nothing else for it to rest on.
You mentioned writing is informed by reading – who are some authors you admire?
Those names are always rotating, you know, but today I’d say Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Arthur Rimbaud, Craig Thompson, Bertolt Brecht, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Carter, Runi, Charles Wright, uhh… there you go! (laughs). I read every day, it’s a part of my daily practice. I don’t see how people can practice sanity without it. It keeps me focused on what I’m perceiving and life and everything around me. I’m always in the middle of a book or two.
Do you remember the first poem you wrote?
The first time I wrote a poem, I was at Morehouse College in Atlanta. My friends and I decided to start a magazine, and for some unknown reason I decided that I was going to create a section that had a poem and then an essay. So the first poem that I wrote for that magazine – it was called “Red Clay” – was about the holocaust because at that time I was into etymology and I discovered that holocaust meant “the whole burned.” And I don’t really remember the poem at all. I think it was a poem where I was putting everyone that had experienced any sort of genocide, or what have you, within the idea of the holocaust. So Native Americans, African Americans, Armenians, Rwandans, witches that were burned… I was essentially blurring the lines between what we call the holocaust and the greater picture of all the tragedies of human history.
What inspired you to make a poem from those ideas as opposed to writing out your thoughts in an essay?
Because it wasn’t a school assignment, and I understood really well what the first paragraph was supposed to look like for an essay for school, but because it was something I was doing with my friends it became a form of shorthand for me. I was like “fuck it, you’ll get the idea if I just say this…” You know? And so I found that when I wrote and it wasn’t a school assignment, that I preferred to write in some sort of shorthand. And if I shared that shorthand, it looked like what people call poetry.
I think it comes through when actors choose roles that have some significance to them personally. Like there’s a part of it you can tell that’s hard to explain.
Yeah, and it’s not to say that I have no interest in anything from superheroes to murderers. When I first got into acting as a kid, I thought I wanted to be the black Jack Nicholson because I’d watched “The Shining” a million times and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and those films were favorites of mine. I just wanted to do horror films, that’s what I would practice at the house. I would scare the hell out of my sisters just standing and staring blankly in the middle of the night. Even a lot of the horror films I see coming out of America, they don’t scare me. But I look at some of the stuff coming out of Korea and say “oh, wow, that’s a horror film!” A lot of times Hollywood is too clean for me. It’s become too pasteurized, homogenized, it’s just too clean, it isn’t thought-provoking. So, yeah, I started looking for stuff outside of it and what have you. But I don’t remember your question…
I don’t remember either, but that’s all interesting. You really do have to look outside the states to find an effective horror movie, then Hollywood hunts them down and ruins them.
Yeah, you’ll see them in another language and be like “holy shit, this is so much better!”
This question takes us down a slightly different tangent, but how do you feel about where popular hip-hip is now? Given you’ve witnessed its birth and evolution within your lifetime.
Well, you know, I think hip-hop right now is exactly where America is. You could ask me what I think of popular culture and America and the direction that it’s heading… It’s the same question. Which is to say that I used to feel that hip-hop went against the grain. That hip-hop represented the voices of the disenfranchised and of the people that you weren’t about to see on TV or in a movie – they represented the people who weren’t represented. And now people choose to represent wealth beyond aesthetic. Wealth and violence. There’s a lot of stuff I like. I like Lil B, I like Soulja Boy, I like Lil Wayne, you know, but in general, there’s not a lot of stuff that I listen to on the level that I listened to the greats – whether in hip-hop or any genre of music. Like, I’d be far from saying that Jay-Z is becoming anything like the Bob Marley or Fela Kuti or Nina Simone of hip-hop… But I like some Jay-Z, too. But, you know, it’s the same way you can like great lobster and also like a great hot dog (laughs).
Looking past your upcoming tour, what’s in the future for you?
One, like I said, I have a film coming out in January. Also, I’m writing a play. Other than that… lots. That’s what I’ll tell you (laughs).
Saul Williams will be performing at the Blind Pig on Sept. 11. 18 and over; $15 cover.