Saul Williams

“This is probably the least amount of poetry I’ve ever recited,” admitted an affable Saul Williams about two hours into his performance, taking place last Wednesday night in CSU Chico’s BMU. However, it was not so much a performance, as Saul would say, but an open dialogue in which the audience had a rare opportunity to discuss, in depth, the art with the artist. And, while there were perhaps no more than a few poems recited in a two and a half hour time period, it is not to say that the audience was misled in their endeavors to catch an exciting night of spoken word. On the contrary, Williams, in a spontaneous and titillating fashion, delivered with those he did recite, and eagerly indulged an enthusiastic audience with insights as to where his poetry comes from.
To a packed house, the highly educated and successful actor, screenwriter and musician detailed how he came to experiment with poetry in the first place. “I started writing,” he says, “not because of some crazy love for poetry . . . but because of hip-hop.” It is the beats and rhythms, the vibrations of language that, as he says, “we all operate off of” that first inspired him. However, while an underlying music definitely colors his style, Williams insisted that his hip-hop style poetry is very different from a lot of hip-hop music. While the music of an MC is often wrapped in displays of aggression, the poetry is wrapped in displays of vulnerability — an aspect that shines through Williams’s work.
Standing, for the most part, at the edge of the stage, Williams shared his love for language — slinging out rhymes of diverse subject matter and fashioning together images with unexpected turns of phrase and meter like a street corner Shakespeare. With a range of emotions and clever approaches, Williams did what few poets of late have managed to do — revitalize the English language. Perhaps his fresh approach comes from his own ability to see himself as a shaman of sorts, writing “incantations and spells” — not necessarily to comment on something that already exists, but to instead “determine something” new about his present and his future. As the night, opened with the poetry of the unceasingly talented Jamel Shakir, came to a close (much to the dismay of the audience), Williams left with a useful piece of advice. “The trick to being alive,” he says, “is not being mechanical.” True to his word, the night was anything but a mundane, rehearsed response to a mostly college-aged crowd.
As part of the spoken word poetry movement — a movement that Williams defines not as solely African American, but one as diverse and broad as the “origins of man” — Williams proves to be an inspirational and original talent who offers us much to look forward to. He has already published a book of poems entitled She, and expects to complete an epic narrative poem in the near future. Opportunities to examine Williams’s creative endeavors do not end there, however, as one can further sample his writing and acting in the award winning film Slam, as well as explore his music with his album, Amethyst Rock Star.
—Vanessa Hudson

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