Embracing Individuality: An Interview with Slam Poet Neil Hilborn

For better or worse, poetry can make you feel the deepest of emotions in just a few sentences. But making a living from it these days can be difficult. US slam poet champion and author Neil Hilborn does just that. Touring Australia for the first time this December, he will bring some of his most notable works to life in a witty and passionate performance like no other.

In this interview, Neil speaks about making a living through art, how poetry has helped heal the scars of mental illness and what people can expect from his first Australian tour.

You’re coming to Australia next month for the very first time. What are you most looking forward to when you visit?

Ok so for a while John Darnielle, singer of The Mountain Goats, had a Twitter profile picture that was him hugging a wombat. Wombats have been some of my favourite animals since I was a small child, (and also I want to grow up to be John Darnielle) so I am going to find a wombat and hug it.

 

Your show in Melbourne sold out within a matter of days, and now a second show has been announced. Was that something you expected?

Touring internationally is still pretty new to me, so I’m always surprised that people will actually pay money to come see me be sad loudly. My first international tour was this past August in the UK, and even though almost every show was sold out I was still surprised to come on stage and see a venue full of people waiting to hear me say things. Maybe some day I’ll get over my imposter syndrome, but it doesn’t seem like that will happen soon.

What can people expect from your live performances?

I think of my set as something halfway between what you’d see from a musician and a comedian. It’s got an emotional arc, and I don’t hold back on the emotionally intense poems, but in between I do a lot of storytelling and comedy bits to tie the poems together. So technically the show is just me talking for an extended period of time, but through all of my babbling I hope that I really let the audience into my world.

 

What do you want people to take away from seeing one of your live performances?

I say this at the end of the set, but if there’s one thing I want people to remember from the show, it’s when I say, “Forgive yourself. Love yourself.” The world is gigantic and terrifying enough without you hurting yourself over things that may or may not be in your control.

 

Will you get much down-time when you’re here?

Yes! I have about a week after I’m done with shows before I have to head home, so that’s probably when the wombat-hugging will occur.

 

You’re very vocal about how poetry has helped you cope with your own mental illnesses. Where do you think you would be without it?

I mean, who knows? I say all the time that if I didn’t have punk rock, poetry, or my bicycle I’d be dead. But maybe in an alternate universe I learned how to play cello and that became my mental health outlet.

I was a fencer in high school, so maybe there’s a world in which I’m a fencing coach and I channel all my obsessiveness into the sport. What I can say is that in this universe, whenever I have a thought or feeling that’s too big for me to handle, the first thing I do is open my notebook.

Where else do you draw your inspiration from?

I consume a huge amount of stand-up comedy. Because a portion of my show isn’t actually poems, I take a lot of cues from comedians on how to read rooms, work the energy of a crowd, and how to perfect my timing. I think that comedians and poets are both trying to set up expectations and then subvert them, so why wouldn’t I study both?

 

OCD is possibly the poem for which you are most well-known. How cathartic is it for you to know that your poetry – and ability to speak out about mental health – has helped so many people survive their own issues?

I think it’s incredible that my work has helped so many people handle their mental states, but also if I think about it too much I get really overwhelmed. That’s a lot of responsibility for me to handle, so I’ve sort of compartmentalised.

Neil Hilborn is the guy in the videos, and he loves being on stage. He loves the attention and he’s so, so excited that he’s helped people work through some stuff.

Everyday, normal me is just Neil, and I’m pretty shy and introverted. If I could go four or five days at a time without speaking to anyone I would be so happy. So, Neil Hilborn is all the extroverted parts of my personality, and he never gets overwhelmed when he hears people say that I saved their life.

 

I watched your 2014 “Agents of Change” TEDx talk recently, and you mentioned you retired OCD at one point before bringing it back into your set. Are there any poems you don’t particularly like to perform anymore, or others that you think deserve more attention?

With a couple of exceptions – OCD being the most notable – I don’t really perform anything I wrote before 2012. A lot of my writing from back then feels so clumsy now, and I don’t know how to connect with it on stage in a way that feels authentic.

 

That being said, I wrote this poem in 2011 called Phreaking that’s about early hackers, long-distance relationships, and the way technology depersonalizes us. I love that poem and I have so much fun performing it, but audiences hate it. I know that it’s too weird and melodramatic to really work on stage, but a boy can dream.

 

How do you wind down from a performance?

I walk into the hotel room and immediately get completely naked. Like, by the time the door latches I’m already down to socks and underwear. Then I watch cooking shows while I watch internet videos of animals being friends.

If I’m touring with people, which I increasingly am these days, then I just have a beer in the shower. Not quite as satisfying, but shower beers are the best beers, so it’s pretty close.

Your poetry has taken you all over the world, for both festivals and more intimate shows such as those you are doing in Australia. What’s special about each performance format, and do you have a preference?

With huge crowds there’s something intense about that many people all having feelings in the same place, but with smaller audiences I have the opportunity to make eye contact with every person in the room and feel like I’m making a specific connection.

So, my ideal crowd is between about 400 and 600 people – we can all have huge feelings together, but I still feel like I can look everyone in the eyes and make sure they know that I see them.

What do you enjoy most about touring and connecting with fans?

There’s this moment toward the end of my set that I think about when I’m tired and feel like quitting. I almost always close with my poem The Future,  and in it there’s a line that goes “The future is just like gravity: everyone is slowly drifting toward everyone else; we will all be part of each other one day.” By the end of that sentence I’m pointing at and making eye contact with someone in the centre of the crowd, and that’s always a huge, intense moment that reminds me how much I love doing this for a living.

Slam poetry is considered to be a fun way to access this artform, but you took it very seriously when you started. Did you ever imagine you could make a living out of poetry?

Certainly not from touring and selling books. My plan was always to be a professor or editor of poetry, so I thought I could make a living with the art form somehow, but if you had told me in 2008 that I’d be touring in Australia I’d have asked who you were and why you were taunting me so.

You initially self-published your first chapbook, Clatter in 2012 before it was picked up by Button Poetry. How do you feel about the self-publishing process versus more mainstream methods?

 

The whole process gave me such an appreciation for the amount of work it takes to publish a book. My little guy wasn’t even thirty pages and it still took months of work to edit, format, and print. I hope I never have to do it again, but I’m glad I know exactly how much work the folks at Button are putting into my books.

 

Your debut spoken word album Northbound was released in 2014. How did recording that compare to performing live? Do you have plans for a second recording?

Recording the album was honestly quite difficult. Something about being in a quiet booth by myself totally messed me up. Poems that I could crush on any stage in front of any audience I suddenly couldn’t remember. I’d find myself dropping lines that I had said literally thousands of times or focusing way too much on the inflection of one particular word.

I’m a perfectionist, so when I had an opportunity to get every single poem exactly right I got way too intense about it. I’m hoping to record my next book as an audiobook, and I’m going to make it someone’s job to tell me “It sounds fine, let’s move on.”

 

In addition to performing live, you will release your second full-length volume of work, Future, next year. When writing, how do you tell the difference between a poem that is destined to be a spoken word piece and one that remains on the page?

There are always a couple clues, the length of the poem, the intensity and directness of emotion, and so on, but I don’t normally know until I finish the first draft and read it out loud. If something clicks on that first read-through and I start naturally putting my performative inflections on it, then I give the poem a shot on stage.

Do you believe that having your work in written, visual and audio formats has helped you reach more people and spark conversation regarding mental health?

Absolutely. I think that the advent of poetry video has brought modern spoken word to a much broader audience, and that has given poets the opportunity to get people to engage with the topics they find most important.

I frequently hear from fans that they use my videos to explain to people around them what their experience with their mental illness is like. I think, or at least I hope, that the new accessibility of spoken word and thereby my poems has given people a way to get into conversations about mental health.

 

You’ve been credited with bringing poetry into the mainstream with your contemporary take on the genre. How do you feel about that?

I’m not sure how much credit to give myself for that. My take on poetry is similar to a lot of people in the genre, and I think that spoken word itself was ready to take off as an art form, so if it hadn’t been me with the hugely viral video it probably would have been someone else.

Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve got some moves, but I had to learn those moves somewhere, and I continue to take inspiration from the really incredible work people are putting out.

 

How important is education in decreasing the stigma surrounding mental illness?

Education is incredibly important, but I’m more personally interested in humanisation. It’s so easy to see a mentally ill person as just their symptoms when normally if I were to describe myself my mental health would be maybe the ninth or tenth thing I’d mention.

 

When people see mental illnesses as just one aspect of a person and not their entire character, then suddenly those illnesses are much less scary and mysterious.

 

What are some of the highlights and lowlights of your career thus far?

When I was in London this summer I got to perform at a venue called Union Chapel. It’s an absolutely gorgeous church with high ceilings, stained glass, candles, the whole deal. When I walked into the venue for the first time I turned to my manager and quietly said “Are you serious? They’re gonna let me do poems here?” So that was a highlight.

Another highlight was when we were in Leeds and Mogwai happened to be playing a different room in the same venue as me, so I got to go watch them do the loudest sound check I’ve ever seen for a completely empty room. I’ve been a fan of Mogwai since I was about sixteen, so that moment made me feel like I might actually be doing something real with my career.

As far as lowlights go, I don’t want to be too negative, but I will say that when I was coming up and really learning how to tour I did a fair number of shows that were at noon in college cafeterias or main public spaces.

I don’t care how good I am or how much of myself I put into a set. If I’m talking to a bunch of people who are just trying to eat a sandwich and hang out with their friends, the show is not gonna go well. I’d make it a goal to try to get one person to stop what they were doing and pay attention to the rest of the set, and that worked maybe 40 percent of the time.

 

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I was still paid well for those shows and I actually did learn a lot from them, but when I think about points at which I doubted this as a career choice, that’s definitely up there.

 

Given the success of your work so far, do you get nervous when writing new material or is the process still a comfort to you overall?

Yes, definitely. I’m now very conscious of the need to write “hits,” so with some of my poems I’m thinking very intensely about how to write lines that are solid and accessible while still maintaining a degree of artistic integrity. I’m also so much more conscious of my audience than I used to be.

 

Back when I was bad, and no one was listening, it didn’t matter what I said because even if I wrote something dumb no one was going to know. Now I’ve always got one eye on the way that my work is perceived and the kind of trouble it could get me into.

 

What’s your biggest regret?

I really wish I had learned to be honest earlier in my life. I spent so long being terrified that people were going to stop liking me, so I just told them what I thought they wanted to hear regardless of how true it was.

I hurt a lot of people because I was lying so I didn’t hurt them. It’s a thing I still struggle with, but I’m trying to teach myself to be honest from the very beginning.

 

What are your techniques to deal with writer’s block?

I just read poems. I pick up whatever poetry book I’m into right now, and I read until I find something that inspires me, usually a structure or image, sometimes a cool phrase or idea.

I write that at the top of the page, and then let myself run with it. I’m just an amalgamation of my influences, so I try to be explicit about that with myself.

 

What advice would you give to aspiring writers and slam poets?

Get ready to fail a lot. I’ve competed in hundreds of poetry slams, and I’ve won ten of them, if I’m being generous. If you submit poems for publication, you’re going to be rejected exponentially more than you’ll get published. The trick is to not have an ego about it either way. Whether I won or lost, I always told myself that that was just what the audience was into that night, now here are ways in which I could improve. As soon as I attached myself to whether I was successful or not, I lost all desire to continue working.

 

What’s the epitome of success for you?

Getting to live a life that you’re excited to continue living. I’m really depressed and anxious most of the time, almost every day I find myself saying “Man, I do not want to be alive anymore,” but I think about what I get to do for a living and it keeps me going.

 

If you could invite three people from history (living or dead) to dinner, who would they be and why?

Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Winston Churchill, because with all the pithy quotes that get attributed to those guys, can you imagine how fun the conversation would be? Also, I bet they would all hate each other, and I’ve always wanted to see legendary figures get into a food fight.

Neil Hilborn’s debut Australian tour starts in Brisbane on December 7th 2017. For more information, and to book, visit Destroy All Lines.