Said the Shotgun to the Head by Saul Williams
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Book Reviews of Said the Shotgun to the Head
Book Review: He Rocks, the book will change you
Summary: 5 Stars
It was just what I ordered, came just as it said it would, and was so well written, he is my new Hero.Book Review: amazing
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of my favorite books I own. Saul Williams is a brillant writer.Book Review: Misleading, but still head and shoulders over his clones
Summary: 3 Stars
Saul Williams casts one of his numerous talent nets into the public pool once more with the single-poem tome ", Said the Shotgun to the Head". A lone poem clocking in at roughly 180 pages in this day and age can likely be called a lot of things without even scratching the surface of the content or quality of the poem itself: Audacious. Trend-setting. Personal. It is all of these things at one level or another and more, though not all of them as gray in meaning as the three popular critic buzzwords above.There are two things we have to clear up right off the bat: This is one of those poetry books that wouldn't have been published without some measure of the author's existing celebrity coming into play. It's not Ashanti or Jewel or T-Boz trite - not even close; Williams is, at least a fine poet when he wants to be. It is still, however, a bit of a reach in terms of being out-the-door publishable on its own merits as a poem. Based on the layout of Williams's last title, "She", I'm almost entirely sold on the notion that this is the book Williams wishes he could have gotten away with the first time MTV Books came knocking.
Also, reading it isn't as arduous a task as 180 pages makes it sound, though the feeling in an interested reader is understandable: the Dover edition (a company whose editions are typically printed in as few pages as possible as a standard) of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" clocks in at 70 and 77 pages, depending on your edition, while the Gramercy edition cracks library whole rows of library shelves at a whopping 120 pages. And because most of us remember how mind-numbing a trek poring over Coleridge's classic tale was in school, some measure of apprehension is understandable in an approach of Williams's book...until, at least, one bothers to skim the pages. Many of the pages contain single words or fonts so huge as to warrant a large print advisory on the cover. You could burn through the book in an hour, and that's if you take the time to absorb some of the poem's intentions, of which it has in spades.
Touted as an "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", the poem has an undercurrent of another, less story-oriented message. An underlying mission statement and a tone of the artist as cutting off from previous incarnations pervades the work, to the point of babble for sure for much of the book as it veers from story to political statement. For someone who has in the past stated in no uncertain terms that he does not strive to include overt messages in his poetry, Williams certainly crosses the line in this work.
Around page 52 the work completely jumps the tracks unapologetically into political pedagogy and begins to put on the chipped armor of much contemporary politic-minded poetry: word play for the sake of the sounds of themselves, clichés, points that do not feed into the original narrative. Of course, stating that the book is an account of someone so ravished by a kiss that they become a lunatic of tongue and thought opens the door for just about any bit of gumbo pot-tossing you can conceive of without appearing to fail at telling the love story being publicized.
It must be noted, however, that much of the unoriginal and derivative spoken wordplay that passes for contemporary poetry in this day age comes from laziness, arhythmic imitations of hip-hop and the cloning of the voice and soul of Williams himself, so here we see the originator of the voice and stylings attempting to set the record straight. With lines like:
she had eyes
like two turntables
mix(h)er
in between
my dreams and reality
blend in ancient themes
and:
the bass is of isis
(basis)
and:
your curren(cy)t-sea
reflects an army
of dead men
(p.111)
...Williams gives us some of his trademark etymological dissection for etymological dissection's sake, blatantly dipping into the pool of complacent yawners of faux-deepness. If you have to explain how your wordplay works (see "(basis)" above, though with "curren(cy)t-sea" and the text that follows it Williams shows that he is more sly than most who abuse the tool), then you either think your audience won't get it without hearing it, thought it was pretty good when you wrote it, or you want to show how words can be used to instill double-meaning to little or no point. I'm hoping it's the last one. Showing how flat and pointless wordplay like this can be on the page is a good message to send. I just don't know if that's what Williams meant to do. I can hope. I also hoped I'd get away from what must be the mandatory John Coltrane reference in Black poetry in this day and age, but was thwarted on page 141.
Not that the work doesn't have its professional ringers. This passage:
pools of blood
are not recreational
even lifeguards drown
when the undertow breaks bread with the under belly
demons disguised as sharks
have not put enough thought
into their costumes
(p.70)
...and all of page 172 soars with metaphor, and draws a line between Saul and his imitators. Wordplay isn't good enough; there must ever be an idea behind the line, a program for the machine.
All in all, this is an audacious (ha!) book, but would have made a better two poems than one, or at least could have used a legitimate editing, not for length, but for point. Of all the poets to make any semblance of a whimper on the poetry scene in the last ten years, I trust few more than Williams with a poem of this length to do something not only good, but wondrous. He doesn't quite do that for me with this book, but it certainly sets a great precedent. Fans of his work will lap it up, but will they lap it up because they believe that it is good or because he's the poet to watch for now?
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. ***
Book Review: uneven and a bit too pedantic
Summary: 2 Stars
I have read all three of Saul's books and I have listened to his musical CD, and I love most of his work, but I was a bit disappointed with this book. The imagery is not as rich as in his previous two books and most of the book reads more like disjointed philosophical musings rather than poetry. In addition, he relies too much on large font sizes, bold print, and italics, to either emphasize his points or to get us to read his poems the way he would read them out loud. It does not work. If he wanted us to know how he would read them, then he should have included a compact disc with his book, like he did for his second book, SHE. Don't get me wrong, I believe that he is one of the ten most talented poets alive, but it just doesn't come out as well in this book. I also know that Saul doesn't want to be pigeon-holed as strictly a poet; he is also a musician, a spoken word artist,and an actor. But he does call this book "a poem" so I have no choice but to hold it up to poetic standards. To be honest, none of his poetry books have been all-the-way good from start to finish, but I found this one to be the most disjointed, sensory-starved, and pedantic. The first 49 pages are especially uneven and uninteresting, but it gets much better after that and it finishes quite strong. I just know that he can do better, and I look forward to reading the book by him that grips me from the start and won't let me go.