Weekly Post

This last weekend I went to the Saul Williams performance in the Winston Room and I can’t even begin to tell you how great it was. Saul Williams, for those of you that don’t know, is an African American author, actor, musician, and poet and he performed a lot of his poetry for us and it was really interesting. It was especially interesting because he grew up wanting to be a hip-hop artist/emcee, but after attending a poetry reading in college he realized he could use his love for hip-hop and his writing ability to create a really unique kind of poetry that could reach people on a new level. He wanted to inspire people the way hip-hop has throughout history. His book The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop is a great example of the kind of poet he is. He’s brutally honest and he has the ability to relate with readers across many different backgrounds even though he uses a very inner-city kind of language. I really enjoyed his poetry reading and his book was a great read. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in expanding their idea of what poetry is because his work is very different than what we’ve been reading in class so far. If any of you have a chance to see him perform his work I also highly recommend you go because he’s so great to watch. It really opened my eyes to how different someone can read a poem they haven’t composed versus how the author intended it to be read. Saul Williams definitely is a great writer, but he’s also a very great performer and seeing him live was really awesome. So… You guys should definitely check him out!