Said the Shotgun to the Head
by Saul Williams
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Book Summary Information
Author: Saul WilliamsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-09-16
ISBN: 0743470796
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: MTV
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780743470797
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Book Reviews of Said the Shotgun to the Head
Book Review: when he is good, he is very, very good.
Summary: 3 Stars
Saul Williams, , said the shotgun to the head (Pocket/MTV, 2003)
I have had people comment that they sometimes can't tell the difference between what I consider good poetry and what I don't. To me, it's as simple as can be 99.9% of the time: good poetry deals with the "person, place, or thing" section of the category of nouns. Bad poetry, almost invariable, deals with the "idea" section. T. S. Eliot started out Book 5 of his long poem Paterson with the injunction "No ideas but in things." It is a retelling of the golden rule of poetry: "show, don't tell." What most bad poets don't realize is that it is almost impossible to directly show an idea. It is easy to show an idea through things, as long as you're willing to accept the ambiguity inherent in that idea. Many poets are not willing to do so, for fear that either (a) the reader won't get it, or (b) the reader won't interpret it correctly. Either way, folks, bad poets are talking down to you.
I tell you all this at the beginning of this review because I have not recently encountered a book of poetry where both sides of the equation are so well-defined as they are in , said the shotgun to the head, the third book by slam champion Saul Williams. I figured going into this that I was going to be getting a book of bad "poetry", as usually defined by the slam community, where how you perform the poem and how naked your message is are more important by far than whether you've crafted a good poem or not. A quick flip through before I began reading strengthened this impression, with lots of indentation, font changes, different sizes, black pages... this is exactly the kind of stuff I expect from someone who uses this sort of trickery to disguise the fact that he simply can't write. Then I read the first three sections, and I was blown away. "from now on/cities/will be built/on one side/of the street//so that soothsayers/will have wilderness to wander/and lovers/space enough/to contemplate a kiss" (29-30). Concrete images that convey feelings. That's exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. The language is a bit looser than I usually like, but Williams has the concept of how to write damn good poetry down pat, and he does a fantastic job of realizing it in these first three sections.
The inevitable political sections crop up, despite this being a love poem, and for a while there he manages to keep it up (viz. this gem from p. 56: "where is that voice from nowhere/to remind us/that the holy ground we walk on/purified by native blood/has rooted trees/whose fallen leaves/now color code/a sacred list of demands?"), but as the vast majority of political poets are wont to do, he gets to a point where he no longer seems to trust the reader to get the point unless he spells it out for us in three-foot-high red neon and brands it into our foreheads (given all the fontastic trickery in this book, I'm sure I'd mean that literally if he could have figured out a way to do so), as in: "we are exiting your colosseum/and encircling your box office/demanding our families back/our rituals back/our cultures back/our languages back/and our gods" (68). I'll certainly give praise where prise is due that Williams at least realizes that if you must do this thing, at least you should try to go from concrete to vague, and in that respect it's better than 99% of the political poetry that I've read, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
That said, while the political runs throughout this piece, it's usually enmeshed in the concrete images and language that mark the first section I quoted, and overall the book's good points outweigh its bad pretty strongly. It's that rare example of slam poetry that manages, at times, to bridge the gap between performance poetry and art, and it's worth checking out. ***
Summary of Said the Shotgun to the Head
The greatest Americans
Have not been born yet
They are waiting quietly
For their past to die
please give blood
Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...
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