"It’s an attempt to figure something out, to ask a question and hopefully come up with an answer," Williams says of the creative process involved in writing poetry. "It is beyond my own comprehension," he says. Williams does manage to move freely through mediums of expression, always asking the sorts of questions that bring us closer to knowing ourselves and each other more truly and this often involves the commingling of devastating realism with a buoyant spirit of hope. What begins blind ends up illuminated. It is a question, a challenge and a resolution. This is poetry.

Though we may live in tumultuous times, "I don’t think that times like these divide us," Williams says. We have been talking, briefly, but specifically, about New Orleans and the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. "I think they unite us," he continues. Williams, rather than living in the shadow of, seems to be a direct descendant of the generation before us, the generation that gave us revolutionary change, music that created movements, poetry that fueled action and leaders who not only stood up for, but died for their beliefs. "We did not drop the ball, yet," Williams says. There is both confidence and warning in that statement. Naturally, our task is different than the generation before us. "We have to redefine and reconfigure the past, apply critical ideology and accept responsibility," these words roll off his tongue with so much smoothness and apparent ease, not simply because he is a talented wordsmith, I realize, but because he actually works, creates and more importantly, lives by these words. "The desire to see that change, which is inevitable," Williams says "this is what motivates me."

Before hanging up, a thought occurs to me. Of all the mediums through which Williams has expressed himself, I wonder, which is his favorite? The simplicity of his answer is as courageous and meaningful as his response to my first question.
“Words,” he says. Words. Of course.

[el fin]