Did you say prophets, or profits?" a student interjected into a conversation with Saul Williams before his performance in Page Auditorium Monday night.
"Good question," the poet responded.
Even dinnertime discussion with Saul Williams lends itself to poetry.
Williams, perhaps today's most well-known and influential performance poet, is himself a prophet. But he's not out for profits of the monetary kind; he seeks an increase in conscience and consciousness with his words, his deeds, and his mere presence (or presents?).
If Williams is the prophet, then the 15 students at his workshop Monday afternoon were his disciples, and the nearly 500 people at his performance/sermon Monday night as a featured speaker for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day were his congregation.
An aspiring actor since age six who was born alongside hip-hop and grew up with it, Williams was a graduate student in drama at NYU when he wrote and performed his first poem in 1995. As he stepped off the stage in Brooklyn that night, he was immediately ambushed by promoters offering him opening gigs for The Roots, Dead Prez with KRS-One and The Last Poets.
One year later, in 1996, Williams earned the title of Grand Slam Champion at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Championship in New York City. In 1998, he co-wrote and starred in the feature film Slam, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d'Or at Cannes. Williams has released one solo hip hop/poetry album, Amethyst Rock Star, while appearing on many others, and has published two books of poetry, The Seventh Octave and She. Yet another is on the way this fall.
His breadth of experience and insight allowed him to lyrically field questions Monday night as broad as "Could you talk for a bit about the prison industrial complex?" and "What can you say about love?" All the tangential musings and discussions - from his love of punk rock to his activism against war on Iraq - left Williams time to read only three or four poems. But among these was an excerpt from the manuscript of his forthcoming book Said the Shotgun to the Head, which Williams shared in front of an audience for the first time in Page. Written as one long poem with words jumping off the page the way they leap from Williams' tongue, Said the Shotgun to the Head centers around the modern-day journey of a female messiah. At a university formerly known as Trinity College and footsteps away from the emblematic Chapel, Williams delivered his version of a matriarchal trinity - that of father, mother and child. The book will be published this fall by Atria/MTV books, a move Williams felt compelled to clarify as a way to bring his counter-stream, socially conscious work into the minds of the mainstream.
Addressing the hypnotic powers of anything mass-produced - from news media to hip hop - Williams emphasized his conviction that "to be on the cutting edge of art is to be on the cutting edge of thinking."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.