Sipping "Volcanic Sunlight"

Perhaps poetry is irrelevant today. Saul Williams, a poet, is not. When you perform at Def Jam events, when you make an album with Trent Reznor, when you project words, thoughts and feelings like a force of nature, relevance remains. It lifts you up.

I remember hearing Williams recite poetry at the end of one of the great hip hop albums, Blackalicious "Blazing Arrow." I remember being moved by it, but not knowing who he was. This past summer, TWM71 brought him back to my attention and I picked up his book "The Dead Emcee Scrolls."

If Williams just wrote poetry and read it at bookstores, he wouldn't stand out. That's the problem with poetry. It's too easy for people to dismiss. There's no cache. Why would I want to see/hear/read/write that?



Matthew Zapruder, also a poet, wrote a great piece in the L.A. Times called "Why I Rhyme." It looks at what drew him to poetry, but also at the evolution of poetry through rhyme to today's free verse. There are some gems there.

"Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind... the leap from one thought to another... that leap, that movement is what makes poetry." -MZ

Williams makes leaps from one form to another, moving beyond poetry proper. He is an actor, he is a musician. He has a singing voice that may be kin to Lenny Kravitz's. I think Williams' reaching out, expanding the boundaries of poetry to more culturally relevant forms of expression can invigorate poetry.

Williams' art is performance. That's what connects it. It isn't content to live quietly on a page. It wants ears. On Feb. 23, at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., it will have mine.

My grandfather slept in his truck

It's an allusive world. Or maybe only if you have an allusive mind. And mine cross-references like a one-armed bandit, pulling cherries or bars at random depending on who or what pulled the lever.

And if that doesn't turn a straight road, linear worldview into a greased go-cart slick track, my attention span is a shuttlecock smacked around by writers, friends, music, media. If someone whose take I jibe with points me at something cool, I'm off and after it.

This is a good thing, as long as I give myself a chance to catch up. Example: between The Rumpus, Twitter and TWM, over the course of a week my reading list has expanded to include Saul Williams's Dead Emcee Scrolls, Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries, and John Fowles's The Tree, let alone just learning about and wanting to read everything Benjamin Percy has written. It's f-ing hard to keep pace...

Twitter is a dangerous thing for me in its ability to reflect like a prism at the hands of writers and poets and thinkers and cool people. Sometimes I'm too plugged in--restless leg syndrome for the brain.

Sometimes I've got to meditate or run--detatch from it all to cultivate silence and stillness.

My grandfather used to sleep in his truck. Nothing unusual. He drove a truck pre-Bay Bridge when you took a ferry across the Chesapeake Bay. If you didn't time it right, you sat. And waited. And slept if you were tired.

That's a lesson learned, there. A message he left me, without knowing--just by living and working. He wouldn't have meant it as an example.

But that's where the allusive mind kicks in, as I sit in my truck, with the radio off, listening to cars cruise by, waiting.