#4, "Act III, Scene 2 (Shakespeare)", Saul Williams (2004)

150 Favorite Songs: #4, "Act III, Scene 2 (Shakespeare)", Saul Williams (2004)

I used to write poetry. I took it very seriously. I published chapbooks and performed at venues all over the country and recorded them and made records. Some of the poems were, I still think, pretty good. And then one day, I stopped.

There’s a meme that goes around sometime that usually has a picture of the kids from The Sandlot on it. It says something to the effect of, “one day, you went out to play with your friends, not realizing that it would be the last time.” It’s wistful and weepy, sentimental in a way that I don’t really have much susceptibility to (as opposed to all of the kinds of sentimentality that,146 entries into this series, it is very clear gets me every time). I was thinking about that when thinking about the years I spent writing poetry, because that isn’t what happened to me at all. I remember the day I stopped writing poetry quite well. I was at SpiderHouse, which was a coffee shop in Austin where I used to spend a lot of time writing in notebooks. I had just moved back to the city after a very disorienting year of living in London, and I was trying to find my footing. So I went back to SpiderHouse, ordered a cup of tea, pulled out my notebook, and wrote. When I was finished, I realized that was the last one, that I had no more poems in me.

I don’t know if that poem was good or bad. (It was probably okay but nothing I would be particularly proud of now.) I don’t know if I still have that notebook, or where it would be if I did. I think I mostly just had to write it so that I had written a last one.

A few weeks later, I went to a different coffee shop downtown where I used to perform a lot in my first stint of living in Austin, during their weekly poetry night. I built a lot of confidence in that room. People responded really well to what I was doing, and for a little while, I felt like I was part of a community of peers. I went there because I wanted to say goodbye to writing and reading poems, to talking to a room full of people from behind a microphone, to that part of my life that really defined my idea of who I was for seven or eight very formative years. So I went back to that coffee shop to read my poems one last time. A friend of mine from The Old Days was there, and I told him that I was done with it, and he laid into me.

“I can’t believe you’re going to stop writing,” he said. I told him that I’d never said that. I told him I was going to pursue journalism. He insisted that one could do both—that Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism was poetry—and I wasn’t interested in that. I was done. (Also, poetry is poetry, and it doesn’t do any good to declare another kind of writing to be “poetry” just because it’s good. All it does is marginalize actual poets, and they don’t really need any more help with that.)

When I started my glittering career as a newsman, I wrote almost exclusively inconsequential entertainment pieces for websites, and I struggled with the point. I had a few reasons for wanting to pursue that line of work—journalism may not always be lucrative, but it pays a hell of a lot better than performance poetry; cultivating an audience by physically getting in a car and reading your words directly to them is not extremely efficient compared to publishing them with outlets that have their own audience—but those weren’t really the reason I wanted to write journalism. Really, I decided that I needed to do it around the time I first heard “Act III, Scene 2” by Saul Williams.

Saul Williams is a poet. (I mean really, not just a songwriter who's good with literary elements, and so I guess there's some irony that something he wrote helped me decide to stop writing poetry.) But it's not just his words here that felt like an imperative, it's the chorus, from Zach De La Rocha, whose voice has always, to me, sounded like the most righteous thing in rock and roll. I must have listened to this song a hundred times the first week it came out, feeling incredibly moved by his sixteen-word refrain. 

Spit for the hated, the reviled, the unrefined
the no-ones, the nobodies, the last in line.

The truth is, poetry felt really self-indulgent. At least the way I was doing it. I wrote political poems sometimes, talked about stuff that I thought was important, but even then—it felt self-serving. Who was it for? Who did it help? If I was good at this, and if I had something to say, then I needed to find a way to say it that helped people a little bit. 

And journalism seemed like the way to do that, to tell some truths that might matter to some people. I want to spit for the hated, the reviled, the unrefined, the no-ones, the nobodies, the last in line. (“Spit,” in this context, means “rap,” mom.) If I’m any good at this, that’s the thing I can do that’s most worth doing. And while other people are able to do that in a variety of fields—there are poets and preachers and politicians who do those things—the place that felt most right for me, with the skills I possess, was journalism.

I don’t get to do it all the time. I’ve learned over the years that even when you do, the impact of it is rarely as dramatic as you’d like to imagine. Often, the only people you can be certain anything you’ve done made a difference to are the ones it was about. But I’ve also learned that that’s enough.

There’s a piece of this that’s very directly tied to Zach De La Rocha, too. His phrasing makes something clear that it would be easy to misinterpret. It’s easy to hear it as “use your voice to say what you think people whose voices aren’t elevated would say,” and, like, there’s a paternalism in that sentiment that reinforces the same dynamic you say you’re trying to address.

But because it’s Zach De La Rocha’s voice, and he can convey so much just in his delivery, it doesn’t sound like that to me. It doesn’t mean to speak for the marginalized people he refers to, as in to speak instead of them when they are capable of speaking for themselves; it means to speak for them, as in to use the voice you have in their service. When you consider who you are doing what you do for, to have those people in mind, rather than yourself, or the powerful people whose worlds you might want access to, or whoever in your line of work you’d like to impress to climb the career ladder. It’s not to dictate the viewpoint of the marginalized, but to recognize that if you have the opportunity to speak, you need to use it in their service.

You can do that through writing poems, or through writing about music. I have a colleague who does it, beautifully and elegantly, mostly through writing about the lives, work, and food of the taqueros whose restaurants feed people across Texas. You can do it in a lot of ways. Zach De La Rocha and Saul Williams probably know that better than most. But if you’re in a position to be heard, then be heard saying something that serves the people whose voices are often drowned out.

I get the opportunity to do that sometimes. If I’m lucky, I’ll continue to. Either way, the chances I’ve had so far were worth trading poetry for. If it took a poet to teach me that, well, that just seems appropriate.