Empty Belly Magazine Interview with Monte Smith
Jan 15, 2012 at 10:23 PM 1. What is street poetry?
Street poetry is the unheard voice of the common man and woman. It has no ties to the world of academia. People today cannot benefit from Shakespearean style poetry. We need poetry that reaches the youth and at the same time unifies the elders and everyone in between.
Street poetry needs to be threatening even though speaking out comes with a price, as Langston Hughes--who I consider one of the first American street poets---found out with the 1927 release of his blues inspired second volume, Fine Clothes To The Jew.
Black middle class critics hated it, writing things like “Langston Hughes’ book of poems--trash” and “Langston Hughes, sewer dweller.”
In a 1926 review of WC Handy’s Blues Anthology the reviewer wrote, “Whereas the spirituals are always concerned with escape from this world, faith, hope and a certain ‘joy in the Lord’, the blues are very much of this earth, dirty with pain and lazy with the weariness of life.”
Today’s street poetry is yesterday’s blues, and modern street poets are writers like Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron (RIP), the Watts Prophets, the Last Poets, Lenny Bruce, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Bob Marley, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Chuck D and KRS-ONE to name a few.
2. You mentioned in an interview that you believe street poetry is rap's nucleus. Can you build further on that so that some clarity can be left on that?
Poetry is the heart of rap music. It’s not tied to money, your job, or your responsibilities. It’s your soul, vocalized. That is the essence of rap.
Before there was Kool Herc, Africa Bambaataa and Coke La Rock… there was Gil Scott (RIP), The Watts Prophets and The Last Poets. And before them, there was Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson. All of these “outlaw” artists had a hand in the creation of what we know as Rap music. I personally believe Gil Scott was the first emcee, and I will also add he was the first emcee on wax.
3. Tell us about North Carolina, how your advancement and mobilization began. Also pass some of the revolutionary history that has taken place in NC.
A. I cut my teeth writing anti-racist/sexist literature for groups such as S.H.A.R.P (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and A.R.A. (Anti-Racist Action). I then went from writing to fighting. The groups that I was involved with decided that our best action would be to storm Ku Klux Klan rallies taking place in the South. We were successful in stopping the Klan from marching on several occasions in several cities.
At one time we had over a thousand kids from all over the eastern seaboard ready and willing to disrupt Klan rallies, violently if we had to, at the drop of a dime. The key to our movement and any movement is youth because kids actually believe they can change the world.
Today I hold youth and prisoner centered poetry workshops in order to teach people to release emotions in positive ways. If it wasn’t for poetry I know I’d be in prison because I, like many men, grew up being taught to repress my emotions.
B. North Carolina has a rich revolutionary history. Freedom fighters from North Carolina include David Walker, author of the Appeal, the first revolutionary manifesto in the United States for black liberation, and Robert F. Williams, author of Negroes with Guns, the book that single-handedly sparked the militant black movements of the Civil rights era, including the Black Panthers.
4. What was the [true] Plan Columbia about?
Plan Columbia was, on the surface, a plan to eradicate the Columbian cocaine trade for the betterment of Columbian and American society, as America is the world’s largest market for Columbian cocaine.
However it was actually a covert scheme to punish Columbia’s F.A.R.C. rebels for not giving in to US pressure to wash their cocaine money through the New York Stock Exchange.
Columbia’s F.A.R.C. guerillas manufacture cocaine to fund their insurgency.
One of the ways the CIA profits from the international drug trade is by coercing drug suppliers like F.A.R.C. to launder their drug money through stock exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange.
Most suppliers fold under CIA pressure, and, by paying their dues and laundering money through these exchanges, remain un-touched by international law enforcement, but F.A.R.C. refused to play ball so the US military decided to destroy F.A.R.C. by taking away their main income source, and sprayed a fungus called “Agent Green” on F.A.R.C.’s coca crops.
This was deadly for the Columbian people. The fungus went from the coca fields to the water systems poisoning thousands, and causing an incredible number of birth defects and infant deaths.
Two researchers who provide ample proof and documentation on plan Columbia include Michael Ruppert, the ex-Los Angeles police officer turned whistleblower who not only broke this story, but also blew the lid off the Gary Webb/Dark Alliance article explaining how the CIA was responsible for the crack epidemic that devastated South Central Los Angeles in the mid and late 80’s, and investment advisor Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H.W. Bush turned White House whistleblower.
5. Name a few who move you and a few who don’t move you... and why on a few of them
Few Who Move Me:
Mumia Abu-Jamal. Locked down for over a decade and still a symbol of resistance against the beast, from within the beast! And the system knows they can’t execute him, because the streets would run red with pigs’ blood if they did.
Gil Scott-Heron… the ultimate wordsmith. No one has ever conveyed the depths of human despair; drug addiction, desolation and social isolation like Gil, and no one’s words have ever touched me like his. I loved this man, and wept when he passed.
Few Who Don’t:
Soulja Boy, Gucci Mane, corporate radio, the Amerikkan political shytstem and all stooges of Capitalism. They are the ruiners of hope and takers of dreams. They are the reason men and women grow old before their time, unable to do simple things like practice yoga, or go for walks, meditate, spend more time raising children then just yelling at them, etc. because we are too busy in the rat race, making the corporate wheels turn, turn, turn.
All soldiers have to be extra vigilant, and recognize the game that’s being played by corporate masters to keep the masses unaware and what’s more, not caring that they’re unaware. We have to be the ones who hold the red flags, organize flanks and give marching orders when the revolution comes.
6. What is the end game for capitalism? When it collapses what comes next?
Anarchism is a movement that deserves examination as an alternative system. Successful examples of Anarchist movements include the Provo movement of the 60s. The Provos were quite revolutionary and innovative, and many societal ideas from the movement are indelibly etched into the fabric of Dutch society today.
The Provos really pushed people in Sweden to think green way before the Green movement.
The Provos are who made bicycles synonymous with Amsterdam with their “White Bicycle Plan,” which proposed the closing of central Amsterdam to all motorized traffic in order to improve public transportation and save Amsterdam residents millions in gas every year.
The plan called for the government to buy 20,000 white bikes per year which were to be free for everybody to use. City authorities rejected the plan, but the Provos decided to go ahead anyway. They bought 50 bikes, painted them white and left them on streets for public use.
The Provos refused to live under rules they felt violated their humanity and said, “You know what? Fuck these fuckers. We have better ideas and we can create a better way of living.”
7. Illuminati, Freemasons, what do you say to someone interjecting these matters as the source of some of our current global problems
Some people believe that 13 families control the planet. That number might be correct. Or it might be 12. It might be 9…but certain families have tightly controlled the global economy and enormous amounts of money and property--much of it stolen--for centuries.
Most global problems are the result of this 2% of the global population controlling all of the gold and using it to strong-arm third world countries into giving up their natural resources.
For the common man and woman, the money in their pocket is mere interest off the gold this “elite” stole.
8. Is Amerikkka the new Rome?
We create war and havoc everywhere we go, just like Rome. Henry Kissinger is our Nero. But tell the average American this and he or she will look at you like you’re robbing them at gunpoint. Why? Because Americans have been taught not to think for themselves.
All the majority knows is a distorted reality backed by lies, misinformation and a whitewashed history. We have been spoon-fed lies for so long the masses can no longer decipher fiction from reality.
As Bill Hicks would say, “Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this. Shut up. Here’s American Gladiators. Here’s fifty-six channels of it. Here you go, America: you are free to do as we tell you.”
Don’t let this happen to you. Don’t let the media tell you how to think. Don’t let Hollywood set our social tones. And most importantly, don’t let the American educational system get in the way of your real education--learning how to create social and economic systems that don’t require people to die or starve in order for them to work. Pretty fucking simple when you say it out loud.
9. I feel from your book that there is a feeling of [continuous hate build up] in society, how can we reverse that or is it to late
Most of the hate you see is a result of people living in a system that doesn’t benefit us. The cost of living is rising but wages are not increasing and unemployment is at an all time high.
Gas prices are also at an all time high, so now people can’t afford to drive to jobs that don’t pay their bills.
People can’t afford medical care and can barely feed their families and sometimes, working two, even three jobs isn’t enough to keep food on the table.
Nobody can buy shit in America anymore, but in America, happiness is bought.
Now, since nobody can buy shit, everybody is realizing they don’t look like the people in the movies, they’re not eating in the same restaurants they see celebrities eating in on TV and everybody hates themselves.
This is how capitalism works and it’s a shitty system so pardon me if I look like I wanna slap you when I see you in the morning at the train station.
10. Solidarity mobilization, how instrumental is that to the progress of mankind?
Love, compassion and tolerance are the key ingredients to any and every solidarity movement. That is what we need but mobilization is often difficult because we live in a system that thrives on choking the power out of us instead of helping us prosper.
Still, I’m supposed to pledge allegiance to the flag and smile at you when you see me at Mao-Mart? Fuck you! You’re lucky I’m not bucking at you.
11. Why have we lost respect for earth? Who is responsible for the campaign to keep it like that?
Nature was originally divine to humans, but greed, property rights and dick fights fucked it up. Instead of living without boundaries, we fenced everything in, divided everything up, locked everyone out and threw away the key.
The educational system is partly to blame. Why is the biggest lesson some boys learn in school is how to skip it?
Students aren’t being engaged, aren’t excited about learning and aren’t learning the most important things like why its so important to take care of our planet and how to grow our own food and grow into socially competent and engaged adults who are not guided by greed but by a higher purpose.
Our ignorance is also to blame. Most people with minor ailments would never have to see a doctor if they simply read about the healing powers of herbs. But instead of using herbal concoctions made from plants we can all grow we shuffle off to a doctor’s office where we’re treated like faceless numbers while receiving sub-par care and scripts for “medicines” sold by companies who provide big money scholarships and other initiatives for the medical school that doctor graduated from.
“Medicines” that in fact, often do not cure you and can potentially wreak havoc on your entire body.
Owners of pharmaceutical companies are some of the biggest culprits and should be yoked up by their starched collars and dragged out in the streets, where families of people killed by their “medicines” can beat them to death with spiked baseball bats.
12. What things would you say are indispensable to the mobilization of our consciousness and should be watched out for, to prevent government or corporation, sabotaging or advancement of taking over our agenda?
Remodeling of the educational system is a definite requirement to the mobilization of consciousness.
Unfortunately, we sabotage ourselves by raising ignorant youth. They are ignorant because we stuff their minds with shit.
Why must children watch so much bullshit on TV? Why must they be force-fed so many lies in school, like Columbus discovered America?
It’s also important to study past movements and how they were infiltrated so we can recognize the signs and patterns that occur when infiltration is being attempted.
13. What is it you want those who read the book to walk away with in their heads?
I want people to know that Don’t Shoot the Hostages is more than just another "conscious" or “radical” poetry book. It’s an outspoken contribution towards the clarification and understanding of: race, white guilt, religion, police brutality, the real Drug War, America the Plantation, 9/11, the Prison Industrial Complex and local/international poverty issues from the perspective of the revolutionary, the drug dealer/addict and the common man and woman.
Don’t Shoot the Hostages offers the reader the opportunity to live out the following scenario: Imagine walking into a heavily populated section of any major city and having the ability to read the minds of everyone you passed. You would quickly realize the masses are starving, doing dope to cope, and as a result, severely failing in personal and social relationships. Don’t Shoot the Hostages reminds the reader that the main problem poor, working class people face, is themselves.
I wanted Don’t Shoot the Hostages to be an unflinching look into the minds of society's forgotten. The poetry, social commentary and contributions in this book are radical, angry, and at times, terrifying.
14. Where can we see more, read more, buy the book and stay posted with your mobilization?
My new book, Don’t Shoot The Hostages: Poetry and Social Commentary for the New world Survivalist is only $12 for the paperback version and can be purchased from my website www.streetpoetmonte.com. You can download the e-Book version for $5.00 and keep up with my movements, thoughts and ideas there also.
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