Omar Lawrence Doesn’t Care About Your Credentials

A Bronx Poet on Hip-Hop, Academia, and Being a Man of Words

Omar Lawrence

Omar Lawrence is a hard man to classify. For as long as I’ve known him, I’ve seen him as something of a maverick, marching to an internal beat heard, it seems, only by himself. The author of the album Omar: Man of Words, an audio companion to the poetry collection of the same name, Omar refuses to be a part of the conventional literary establishment. An artist who seems to have little reverence for boundaries of genre and form, his poetry fuses the deep traditions of American poetry, spoken word, and music.

In our most recent conversation, Omar made clear that he is deeply influenced by the strategies of hip-hop, and yet thoroughly dismissive of its current commercial trajectory. He performs his works aloud, sometimes accompanied by music, but disdains slam poetry as crass and manipulative. These contradictions may seem unbridgeable, but he holds them in a compelling, if tenuous, balance. In a word, he is avant-garde—unabashedly, uncompromisingly, and unbearably authentic.

I’ve known Omar (who now goes by his middle name) since we went to high school together at Fordham Prep, a Jesuit school on the campus of Fordham University. Even back in those first-term Obama days, you could find him working on his poems before, during, and after class, long before I personally had come to any kind of literary consciousness. It’ll be no surprise to listeners of this album that he has been chipping away at his craft for more than a decade now—it shows in his felicity and ease with assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, and overall prosody. He’s self-published three collections of his poetry so far, but a new aspect to his work is revealed through the vocal intonations and complex rhythms laid onto a bed of musical form. This is his first official album.

This conversation has been lightly edited.

Gabriel Noel (GN): I find your poetry kind of unclassifiable. I was telling my editor how you write poems to be spoken aloud, yet they conform to almost none of the conventions of either spoken word or slam poetry. At the same time, while your rhythms seem influenced by hip-hop, you definitely aren’t rapping either. You don’t use any end rhymes, but do employ assonance and consonance (in the tradition of poets like John Keats). How did you develop your style, and your written and spoken voice?

Omar: When Miles Davis first returned home from his initial foray into the world of New York jazz, he went home to St. Louis and had a conversation with his father about music. His father pointed out the window and said, “You see that mockingbird? It just copies whatever it hears. It sings the same song that it picks up from somebody else. Don’t be like that mockingbird. Be yourself. Be an original.”

I started off by buying anthologies of poetry, and not just looking at it with an eye of reverence, but dissecting it to see what are the components that make it great. What is so awe-inspiring about this Langston Hughes poem or this Nikki Giovanni poem, this Robert Frost poem? What’s so special about them? I have a competitive spirit, so I don’t idolize anyone that came before me, whether it’s in the literary tradition, the spoken word tradition, or the musical tradition. I think that what I do is a combination of those three, all blended together. I dissect them, just as an athlete would watch old tapes of a player to study their moves and encounter certain situations. I would enter into a silent competition with them, just between me and the author who probably isn’t even alive, and I would try to beat their time. So I look at rappers, and then try to do and be the opposite. If I didn’t,  it would defeat the purpose on an artistic and creative level. Where is the challenge in that? It also wasn’t viable on a business and commercial level either. I see myself as an independent, avant-garde artist going up against the goliaths of the industry. I have to be innovative and go through the side door or back door, rather than cram myself through the front door that everyone is trying to gain entry to. Also, when it comes to the spoken word, even though there is music accompanying the poems, I compose the rhythms in my head instead of writing to a beat, which makes it a bit off-kilter or unorthodox at times. But there’s still a structure; it’s not totally free verse. Take the top songs off the Billboard 200; they all sound the same. You can predict what the end of the line will be. With my work, I don’t want you to be able to predict the next word I’m going to say.

How do you feel about being so outside of the academic poetry world? Do you have any feelings, ill or positive, towards that world, which you seem to be completely circumventing?

Well, name five [academic poets].

Well, personally I can do it because I’ve researched them, but… [laughs] 

Yeah, but can anyone else that you know [outside of the literary world] do the same? 

Probably not.

I think that intellectuals are overrated. In my opinion, an intellectual is someone who is advanced or has above- average knowledge in a particular area of expertise. If you have a Ph.D— I have friends who have Ph.Ds— it’s not a generalist position. Advanced degrees are not built on generalism. Your thesis has to be on a narrowly defined, specific subject. But specific knowledge doesn’t correlate to higher wisdom across all fields. Just because you’re a Doctor of Philosophy or Doctor of English Literature doesn’t mean that you’re a good father, intelligent with your finances, a good businessman, or have all the other skills that are necessary to build a good life, or even a great life. The mark of ideas, or the relevance of ideas, in my view, is how deeply they penetrate our culture. How do they influence people? Who is listening to you, and what effect do you have on those listeners? If the only other people who are aware of, consuming, and talking about your work are people who are just like yourself, you limit yourself to an extremely small community. Jay-Z and Beyonce are nobody’s definition of an intellectual, but they have an audience, and people respect them and care about what they do. They’ll probably make it to the White House before a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard, Columbia, or Yale. So who’s really the smart one?

Let’s talk about the actual album. One thing that seems to be a common thread here is approaching your writing from multiple perspectives. Sometimes you seem to be writing in an epistolary mode, sometimes you take up the mantle of a news anchor, or a teller of folk-tales. You inhabit many different voices throughout the album. Is that something you were doing… 

Consciously?

Yes. And for what reason?

To keep it interesting, and to keep it diverse. If I just give you a matter-of-fact retelling of what is and what was, then there’s no creativity or intrigue to that. I can state my opinion, or I could be an observer, or tell a story where you don’t know where I stand. In that way, it gives a certain mystique and level of interest to the music. I can peel back the layers. I’m exploring a diverse range of subject matter with different voices that may or may not reflect my own personal opinion on something. I don’t use my art as a form of propaganda. I want there to be some mystery, some suspense, some sense of the unknown when people are listening to me.  That translates to rewarding the listener as well. You know that for your money or your time, you’re gonna get a unique experience out of me. And the day that I’m not capable of producing that anymore, then I’ll retire. I’ll do something else.

It seems that your willingness to speak in voices other than your own, and put those voices in dialectical positions against each other, allows a listener to see and hear in ways they probably wouldn’t have before. I think that in our current climate, people are afraid to do that in art. A lot of artists are afraid or unwilling to speak outside of their experience.

Personal experience is so limited. It’s navel-gazing. Just because I’m black and from the Bronx, I have to tell you the same, tired urban stories? I don’t have a crack mom. I don’t have an absentee father. I was never in a gang. Now, you can’t live a lifetime in the Bronx without seeing those things, or brushing shoulders with people from those walks of life, but there’s so much more to talk about. One of my professors from school is a real-life, living and working classical composer. I feel as though I have more in common with him than I do with a rapper. I do this out of love. I could totally forget about it and just commit myself to dollars and cents, but I couldn’t do that to myself because of the love that’s in me for language and for music. I don’t know why it’s there and who put it there exactly, but it’s just a feeling that I get when I’m creating, or just in awe of the brilliance of someone else.

One track name on this album that stood out to me was “Synthesizer”. I don’t know if you remember, but you actually performed it for our class in high school.

I actually forgot about that! That was a proto version of this one.

What was the process of writing that like?

Well, you know that there are books and documentaries out comparing our generation’s social media use to behavioral addiction, but they take two hundred to three hundred pages to get their point across, or an hour and a half to two hours to illustrate the points they want to make. I wanted to make the same point, but from a first person, narrative perspective. I think one of the great things about poetry is that you can say in five hundred words what it would take another five hundred pages to say. That’s also the challenge; to say it, but to say it with brevity and power. In that piece, I’m just holding up a mirror to myself and others who engage in that compulsion. I got the title from an Outkast song on their third album, Aquemini. I always loved that song, and they were talking about similar themes back in 1998. Like a DJ, I sampled the name and themes and turned it into something else.

Along those lines, let’s talk about the track “If.” It seemed to me like a clear reference to the Rudyard Kipling poem. You seemed to really remix it in your own style.  

And I think I smoked him. If he came back to life and heard me saying his shit, I think I got him. [Laughs]

I think his poem is inspirational and uplifting, and I really resonated with its spirit. I just wanted to retell it in my own voice and in my own words, using my personal experiences. Those are real moments that I had, and still have to this day, in my life. The people that I mention—  Phil Knight, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, rap culture, bebop culture— that’s the real arc of what inspired me and made me feel as though it was possible to be and do a little bit more than average.

Tolstoy wrote a short book called What is Art late in his life, and spoke about what he thought were some of the major criteria a great work of art had to fulfill. One of the main criteria he believed made a great work of art was its degree of ‘infectiousness:’ the ability for the consumer of a work of art to take in the same feelings, emotions, and perceptions that the artist had in creating it. It seems that your work has a high degree of this ‘infectiousness.’ A lot of spoken word or slam poetry tries to run over the listener with its point, but you seem to run in the opposite direction.

Ideas don’t move people. Emotions move people first. The idea comes second. If I don’t make you feel anything, then you don’t move a muscle. Whatever idea you have in your mind doesn’t mean anything unless an emotion lights a fire under you to take a step or perform an action. You need the emotion. I’m not giving a TED talk, or a lecture. It’s good that you mentioned Tolstoy; as far as pure survival [goes], artists and intellectuals belong in the same class of ‘being unnecessary’. The people who are truly necessary are the people who build the bridges, roads, vehicles and infrastructure. In my opinion, the reason why artists and intellectuals exist, is because even if we have everything we need for survival, we still want our lives to be enriched somehow. We still have a curiosity and a longing for more. That’s the opportunity for intellectuals and artists to be useful to other people. They add joy and color to our lives. What would your life be without music? When you fall in love, get married, graduate college, get a promotion, finish writing a paper— you play music. We have this existential angst, this feeling of uselessness and purposelessness, and a great artist or intellectual disrupts that in a way that’s meaningful and helpful to others.

You read Shakespeare not because his plays are necessary for your survival, but to just be enriched by the display of human creativity. A chimpanzee doesn’t have the same ability.

Let’s talk about “The Story of Kalief.” Obviously, the title is a reference to the young man who was held on Riker’s Island on faulty charges and wasn’t granted his due process rights. He eventually committed suicide. Why did you decide to write a piece on his life?

A friend of mine, who is not from New York, was unaware that this event, or this tragedy, I should say, even happened. I was telling him the story, and he said, “why don’t you tell your own version of how this story affected you? Tell your story of Kalief, so to speak.” It was because of his challenge that I decided that it would be a good idea that I took it on. I watched a documentary about his life, researched some facts about him and what had happened. I wanted to tell the story as one of human empathy. There are certain things that art has the power to do, and one of them is to put you in someone else’s shoes, so that you can feel what they feel. I want somebody to feel attacked, under stress. What would happen to your mental health? What would be your thought process, if you were in those shoes? [This injustice] happens to enough people that it’s a story worth telling. I just tried to put myself in his shoes and imagine that I was him, and tell a story about how I might feel and react being in that situation.

You mentioned earlier how you’ll take bits and pieces from your life, things you’ve seen, things you’ve read, references to other works, etc. I think in that way, you’re working in the hip-hop tradition of sampling. In a way, it’s almost an innovation on sampling; instead of just sampling sounds, you’re sampling events, other works of art, and issues of the day that reshape into a new work of art. That seems pretty avant-garde.

And to anyone who reads this who’s a creative, you see how that approach only widens your pallet of what you can say, can express, and of how you can say it. If you listen to popular music today, you’re like “this is a limited range; this is all we can talk about?” I’m not making a value judgement, at least in this instance, on what people are talking about. But it’s the creativity that you bring across, from a purely artistic standpoint— like, be original. Show me something different. Tell me something I haven’t heard before. If you tune your antennae to find inspiration in anything and everything, then you won’t run out of ideas until you run out of life. That’s how I look at it. 

Karl “Omar” Lawrence is a poet from the Bronx, New York. He developed a passion for words at an early age, falling in love with the art of poetry when he was 11 years old. He published his first book at the age of 18, which went on to sell over 1000 copies. He aims to use music as a platform to impact people through authentic stories and insightful truths. “Omar: Man of Words” is his first album, released through his brand Rich Radical.

Gabriel Noel is the ‘Notes’ editor for 433. Born in the Bronx, NY, he earned his Bachelor’s in Political Science from Boston University. His work can be found in Strange Horizons.