With a shaggy beard, gauged ears, and tattoos running up and down his arms, William James looks more like a hardcore punk rock singer than a poet when he takes the stage. That isn’t a coincidence.
It took him many years to come to terms with being labeled a poet, writing his “pre-teen angst” out in middle school before taking writing more seriously in college.
“That wasn’t necessarily trying to write poems. That was, ‘I want to be in a punk rock band and all I can do is yell, so I’m going to write song lyrics and hope that somebody will start a band with me,’” James admitted.
Many failed bands later, he began to realize that penning poetry wasn’t as far away from his original goal as he has originally thought.
“The lyricist of a band will end up writing far more than what his musician bandmates can keep up with, so he’ll have this whole backlog of words written, and at some point you decide, ‘What the hell? I might as well let them stand on their own merit, put them in a chapbook, and say that now I’m a poet, too,’” he explained.
“So I had that moment of realization where it occurred to me that I was probably never going to be successful in starting a band, so I might as well go the next route.”
Residing just outside of Pittsburg, James discovered the city’s slam poetry scene in 2007, which he felt had an iconoclastic mindset towards structure that “really, really appealed to the leftover remnants” of his “angsty, teenage punk rock years.” He has since become a member of the Steel City Slam and the host of the Young Steel Youth Slam.
“I found that, and finally after years and years and years of trying to figure out how to be a poet, I realized that it wasn’t as difficult as I was making it out to be…There’s this whole other world that doesn’t have to follow rules of rhyme scheme and form. I mean, I couldn’t even spell ‘iambic pentameter,’” he joked.
“I kind of went, ‘Oh wow, I can just get up on stage and holler at people and then I will be a poet that way.’”
He found his own voice through stubborn persistence, writing thousands of pages constantly, expanding his influences to classic poets, and immersing himself in the vibrant and diverse writing and poetry scene in his area, eventually taking his act on the road and performing nationally at over 300 readings, slams, and even punk shows with accompaniment from bands.
One particular night at Blue State Coffee in Providence, RI stands out to him, when the co-feature was group of young writers from a summer writing program for inner-city youth called Books for Hope.
“They did their reading and were so absolutely dynamic and awesome that it sort of lit up the room to the point that you could practically feel the actual electricity generated. (My friend) looks over at me right before I got ready to do my set and he goes, ‘Well, you better not suck, huh?’ Up to that point, I had just been sort of emulating what everyone else was doing, standing behind the microphone and being somewhat timid, I guess, and somewhat reserved and not really trusting the power of the art form that I’m a part of,” James recalled.
“I just got so amped up on that night in June of 2010, having watched these kids who were half my age just blow my mind that, without even really thinking of it, I just said, ‘I have to match this energy.’ …I didn’t even think about going behind a microphone and talking and introducing myself and saying, ‘I’m going to read some poems and here’s what they’re about.’ I just started yelling my first one, and it was an unconscious reaction to the electricity and the energy that was already in the room. At the end of the set, I was wiped out, exhausted, and I felt like I had just spent 20 minutes in a mosh pit at a hardcore show, and that’s when I realized, ‘Holy crap, this is definitely perfect.’”
Now 29, he finds that his inspiration is still in man’s struggle to survive at all costs.
“The main driving force behind me as a writer has always been a cross between a coping mechanism and a stubborn survival tool. A lot of the poems that I have that I’m the most proud of and a lot of the poems that I have that have the strongest response when I perform them are the ones that weren’t necessarily written in onset with the purpose of being a poem. It was just a case of, ‘I’m going through some shit and I need to write this because if I don’t, my head is going to explode. So I just wrote something in a journal and had that moment of frantic catharsis,” James described.
“Any time I’m performing in front of an audience, be it of one or one thousand, everything that I write and everything that I perform can essentially, in some way, be traced back to the basic premise of this whole being alive and being human thing is kind of an awful struggle and it’s difficult, and the only way we’re ever gong to get through it is to kind of hold each other up, so let’s do this thing.”
The parallels between music and poetry also continue to this day for James. Much like he turned to his favorite bands to get through these hard times, he has found that his own work has had the same impact on others.
“They say to me, ‘You had that poem that you closed your set with that was talking about when you tried to commit suicide and you didn’t, and I’ve never told anybody this, but I was there just not too long ago,’” he said.
“Basically, they’re telling me, ‘Your poems and your art have helped me to not lose hope and to not kill myself, which is much more intimidating to me to get that kind of comment from somebody than it ever is to get up on a stage and perform the poems. It’s kind of a terrifying validation of, ‘Yeah, this thing that you set out to do is actually happening. It’s a little sobering to realize that I’m now on the same side of equation that the singer of my favorite band when I was in high school was for me.”
While usually intensely personal, his work has taken on new dimensions since he started performing over three years ago, using characters to tell others’ stories as well, such as one piece written from the perspective of soul singer Marvin Gaye’s father, explaining and justifying the reasons why he shot and killed his son in 1984.
With three self-published chapbooks and a new mini-chapbook under his belt, James is currently working with an editor on a full manuscript and will make his third appearance in Scranton at New Visions Studio and Gallery, 201 Vine St., at its third free Writers Showcase on Saturday, March 31, which he promises will have all of the “energy” and “violence” of the punk rock shows that inspired his origins as a writer.
“I’m just going to get up, I’m going to stand in the middle of the floor, and I’m going to yell at you and it’s going to sound like poetry.”