Said the Shotgun to the Head by Saul Williams Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Said the Shotgun to the Head
Book Review: beyond poetry slam
Summary: 5 Stars
Poetry slams are dung. So are you, coincidentally. Pick the peanuts out of poetry slam and pick through Saul's work. He's the only thing that'll survive poetry flam...
go to hell.
Book Review: Saul Williams is a name to remember
Summary: 5 Stars
I had no idea who Saul Williams was until I saw him with the Plea for Peace tour reccently. Watching him preform excerpts from "said the shotgun to head" I was immeadiately entranced by the conviction of his words and the eloquence of them. When his segment of the show was up, I went and bought this book from the merchandise table and I was not disappointed. I am an avid fan of modern poetry, and this book takes on a very hip hop feel to it. The imagery is wonderful, the message is powerful, and his gift with words, crafting them and setting them to poetry, is amazing. Yes, it is one long poem, but the layout of the book makes it very easy to follow. I don't regret my impulse buy at the concert that night, as Saul Williams is a talented poet and preformer.Book Review: Read and Read Again!
Summary: 5 Stars
Saul Williams is one of my favorite poets. He gathers material from everyday life and transcends into something I would say ethereal. It's really difficult to put this particular one continuous poem piece into words of compliment, but I'm still reading this book. I've read over it at least 20 times and pick up something new everytime. Great for long road trips or quiet evenings.Book Review: Genius
Summary: 5 Stars
Saul Williams is amazingly tallented. This book of poetic stream of wordplay gave me chills many times over. I recommend it to anyone who wants their conceptions of how words can be put together completely altered. Brilliant crafting.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, clich?s, 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?