Rhyme and reason at Dublin's Lingo Festival

By the time Saul Williams got to poetry, he already had a solid grounding in hip-hop culture, writes Richard Fitzpatrick.

BEFORE 43-year-old Saul Williams — one of the grandmasters of the spoken word scene — got into performing in slam poetry nights, he was a rapper, just like nearly every other kid his age who grew up in early-80s New York State.

“Rap was my everything,” he says. “What’s funny is that at that time the big argument was whether it was actually music or not: ‘It’s not even music; they’re just talking!’ I remember defending hip-hop as poetry to parents and older people. ‘What is this stuff?’ ‘It’s the poetry of the streets.’ Poetry was my first line of defence for hip-hop.