Conversations with Poets & Rappers: Featuring chris time steele

“We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

Welcome to my new column where I have conversations with word-weaving poets, spoken word artists, and rappers — may their words inspire you to take up the pen and the Molotov! Below is a meandering and joyous conversation with my dear friend chris time steele — writer, poet, artist, rapper extraordinaire! 

The Future is Ancient Embrace Magnificence* 

carla: I want to begin with your new album that’s dropping on September 1st, titled: Mary Oliver Type Sh*t: what was the spark, or inspiration to create this album? And what was it like to collaborate and think-feel with Mary’s work?

chris: This album was unplanned and unsuspected. I took a trip to so-called Buena Vista, Colorado and went to just relax, be present, and not necessarily work on music. The first day I went on a hike and got real lost, while lost in the forest I kind of gave up on getting back and looked at the beautiful surrounding and the gift of being lost and said this is some Mary Oliver Type Sh*t. I went back to the place where I was staying, I wrote 3 songs and made about 3 songs a night and did the whole album in 3 days. 

Collaborating with the ghost of Mary Oliver's work was a beautiful tension. I worked to take Oliver's approach by making each song a short mantra or meditation on mindfulness and the interweavings of creativity and nature. That was the tension for me, to keep the songs short and to zoom in on a small microscopic topic. If you look at my last album Paulo's Path, Beyond the Willow I had 70+ bar verses. It's hard to release a song with less words sometimes, the tension of surrender. I admire haiku writers and also Chinese poets like Han Shan, his book Encounters with Cold Mountain is amazing.

I love how Mary was like a journalistic poet or documentarian of nature and the planet too, she would often go and get lost with a journal and send communiques back to the cities and collaborated with nature in a beautiful way. There was only one bookstore in the town too and in the back area I found a copy of her book Devotions and picked that up on the last day, it felt like a kismet gift. 

carla: If you are going to collaborate with the brilliant ghost of Mary Oliver and her poetry, this is how you do it. Not planning, being in a forest, lost. Beautiful. I also love that she challenged you to surrender to the tension and truly collaborate with her. (I won’t pretend that I fully understand, but I love it! Haha). And her book being in that store, too — yes, kismet! But also as she said “attention is the beginning of devotion” and I think tuning in, paying attention to patterns and your instinct is all part of the magic, and you my friend, walk this walk!

chris: carla, you would often share quotes and parts of Mary's poems with me for years and planted seeds of this album I never planned making [laughs], can you tell me what resonates with you about Mary's work and how it has influenced your writings and art? 

carla: wow, I am honoured to think that maybe I watered this seed a bit with my constant sharing of what I am doing/thinking/feeling! Hah! So, me and my partner have a sunday morning ritual called “Sundays with Mary” a kind of spiritual undertaking where we read Mary Oliver to each other as we sip coffee. (we also read other poets, but not as fun of a title!). I think what I have absorbed most from her work or been inspired by, was her embodied entanglement with nature. She seemed to be turning away from modernity’s ideas of nature with each poem, not by giving a lecture or standing on a soap box, but through her daily practices – how as a human she listened, gave attention, marvelled, and strolled with all life. It feels so visceral as you read about her being with and a part of nature, it opens up so much beauty and possibility, inviting us to say Yes! to life.

I have learned this from you, too chris. I know you approach your craft with a kind of care and rigour that is remarkable, to say the least. And, even when you are armed with a lot of information you are able to beautifully translate all that knowledge and knowings into words and bars that connect rather than alienate. Like, the first song on the album titled, Tremble in the Darkness. Well, first of all, the composition of music with your words is very yin yang and I felt so invited into presence right from the start. And then you take us by surprise by tackling some big ideas, especially around sanity and trauma, and then manage to capture the depth and horrors of living under empire in a few lines! How do you do this!? Maybe talk a bit about your process to convey such complex and nuanced ideas without slipping into lecturing?

chris: Thank you, Sundays With Mary is amazing and such a mindful way to read Mary’s work. I'm not sure of my writing process, I just try to write and trust the direction and flow of where it is going. The first lines are about trusting your body on knowing how to metabolize trauma. I weaved that into trusting on being lost and into seeing the rock that I thought was some forest spirit at first glance. I remember Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda's stories saying if you thought you saw something you did. It made me think about the magic and inspiration we so often are invited to kill by homogenizing our reality and mind's into what is status quo "sanity" and stigmas into it. I learned a lot about sanism from your book Trust Kids and also from the work of kitty lu bear. Art is about wandering around the borders of magical thinking and weaving in different ways of experiencing the world. I was trying to trouble magical thinking too with capitalism and colonialism like a great deal of coaxing and fantasy is needed to make people go to war to salute a piece of fabric with different colors and to think one brand of toothpaste is more impressive than another. 

carla: I think troubling magic while still walking with it is so necessary right now. So I am glad you are just going for it while also acknowledging the way capitalism and colonialism work to destroy and gentrify everything in its wake…. (I did go further into a rant here, but y’all will have to wait for that!).

Anyhow, I am going to refrain from bringing up every beautiful song on the album, but it’s hard because every piece is indeed a meditation and an invitation to go deeper into understanding ourselves and our worlds more…  but, I will try because I want folks to get what I got: the beautiful surprise of it all! And, well, here’s one more! These lines from the third track, titled: “Get Saved by the Beauty of the World” spoke to the little kid in me and has been with me since I heard them, reminding me of that courageous kiddo who is, of course, still with me. Or as Mary once said “I am, myself, three selves at least…” and then spoke about her child self. So I guess it spoke to all of me.

Here are the words you wrote:

she wrote herself out of that house and saved that little girl

she said i got saved by the beauty of the world

And then there’s another voice at the end of the song speaking about being saved by poetry and the beauty of the world, and, wow it was Mary! What a delight! I absolutely loved that the only samples are of Mary. chris, you often save me with your poetry, and it really is because of your profound attention to the world… Can you talk about the process of writing this song? What does it mean to you to get saved in this way?

chris: I was just working on weaving together Mary Oliver's ideas from her interview on On Being and with the power of writing. Concepts like if you stay disciplined with your craft and write even when you don't feel inspired, that is an opportunity for magic and inspiration. Trying to zoom into the power of poetry and songwriting too like imagining a bar as a prayer the heart can memorize. I love how she was inspired by the Blue Horses painting by Franz Marc and how Gadzooks Bazooka put them in the cover too like a mirror reflecting a mirror of inspiration, the echoes of art. I was really inspired by how Mary worked through her trauma in her writing saying how she saved her inner child by writing her way into her abusive home and writing her out of there and summing it up with she was saved by the beauty of the world. I worked on finding my inner child on the Paulo’s Path mixtapes, I don’t think I actually did it, I think I got detoured into escapism but those mixtapes helped build the architecture and some maps to the past that I can keep navigating on. Can you talk about how you timeweave in your writings and what benefits you've found? 

carla: That cover is beautiful! You can really feel that you were in a kind of call and response with Mary in a deep way, which of course meant with nature too. Listening to this album has helped me to know her more, and for that I am very grateful!

Thanks for this stunning question: well, since I can remember, I had this sense about “reality” that it went beyond the material world. The brilliant artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint once wrote that seeing beyond form is what life is, and I guess I am looking for that. It isn’t all ghosts and dreaming, because I think it has a lot to do with memory (our own but from all the cosmos too). Folks write a lot about timelines and many worlds but I think sometimes it is dismissed by thinking it’s all multiverse stuff (which it can be that too). But there are immediately three timelines that are very much experienced by everyone: our past, our present, and our future, and we timeskip between those three daily. But of course ancestral memories flash up, transmitting messages to inspire and guide us further. I feel that so much goes unnoticed and so it all lingers waiting to be seen and felt, y’know? I suppose embracing a practice of listening has been the best benefit of all. I remember you once said something like: all the thoughts and ideas are in the ether, like a cosmic library that any of us can access. And that gave language to what I was sensing, and I appreciated that so much. I think when we timeweave we have the potential to unlock our imaginations beyond our own lived experience and connect with other beings across all times. And then, if we are really listening, perhaps we can create new worlds together or escape the propagandized world we are corporeally in.

And, now, I would love it if you answered the same question!

chris: I think timeweaving comes spontaneously when you experiment with art and you can access portals, art is an ancient technology. As someone who writes about history I’m always thinking about James Baldwin’s quote about the past being dragged into the present, I try to show some of these loose tracings in my writing like when the Irish came over on coffin ships and how courageous people are trying to survive with their family crossing the Mediterranean or people crossing through the harsh Sonoran desert. Colonialism is an echo of death that keeps screaming. On the song Thingification with namebuddha produced by AwareNess I tried to show how Kant and Locke were the EBSCO and peer-reviewed journals of their day and seen as experts and how that power helped crystallize global white supremacy. In 2023, Israeli minister of defense Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals”. In 1864, Colorado Calvary Colonel John Chivington, who commanded the Sand Creek Massacre said of the Cheyenne “Nits make lice.” Frantz Fanon points this out in his book The Wretched of the Earth, “the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms.” 

carla: Mic drop! Powerful timeweaving right there — Thank you! For this album you worked with a few different producers, how come? Plus it was so good to see and hear your number one brilliant friend and producer, AwareNess on there! 

chris: I met blank thought a year or so ago and he is a kind person and the intro track he produced had so much mood I had to use it. Mud B did some production on the album namebuddha and I recently released Wars Within Wars, he is in Colorado and I love the soulful instrumentation and moodscapes he builds. Shout out to AwareNess, I texted him when I was out of town and told him I’m making an album, he made all of those instrumentals in a day or 2 and sent them to me, it was all spontaneous. 

carla: Yes, you and AwareNess have a collaborative magic that radiates through all time (and y’alls project calm. too)! I love that. 

carla: Can you bring us back to the forest that sparked this album and how it inspired the songs?

chris: The main forest is the climb up to Mt. Princeton. I spent a lot of time on this mountain because I decided to climb it when it was still covered in snow and I didn’t have the right shoes or gear and then it started raining. A crow kept following me and probably was curious or laughing at me or wondering if I was going to soon turn into food. I was about an hour from the summit and my toe was bleeding and I had blisters and soaked socks. This was the inspiration for the song “it’s ok to turn back.” A true lesson in surrender “there's strength in surrender, acceptance that's integrity.” carla, you incorporate a lot of nature in your writings and thought. Can you share a story where nature informed your writing and an insight that came up? 

carla. That crow was taking care of you, accept it! Hah! Oh what a wonderful question, thank you! Well, I have written a lot with the wind, the rain, thistles, dandelions, trees (mostly oak trees), acorns, crows, roses, moss, the moon, and more! I think a short piece I did, that went with an animation created with Maya Motoi, is one that connected me to my ancestors the most. I won’t go too far into it, but I was on a journey to reconnect with my Irish ancestry, and was in Belfast laying under an oak tree, and was thinking how unrooted I felt there, but also at the same time the most connected to land I had ever felt. It was strange in lots of ways, on the one hand I felt calm, but on the other, I was also feeling a profound sense of unbelonging to place. When I arrived home it was late summer and I came across the first acorn of the season (for me – I often pick acorns up, and I always plant the first one as per Orwell’s suggestion), and all of a sudden this piece poured out of me. A kiddo in my life calls acorns spirits, and clearly that acorn spirit had a message for me! I later sent the poem to my friend Nick (who is nuts about trees) asking if he had an idea of what to call it, and he suggested “Root Cutting” (which is the process of using a piece of root for propagating a plant), and well that resonated and became the name of the animation.

Speaking of magical spirit-beings, I just came across this line from Sun Ra, and it reminded me of your otherworldliness, and beyond time offerings from the ether. He said: “I’m actually painting pictures of infinity with my music. It has something else in it, something from another world. Hold my hand. I opened up the Space Age.“ But it also reminded me about the first lyrics you sent to me, which was from a song you were working on that was in collaboration with the ghost of Sun Ra! I have since then listened to your entire discography, which is extraordinary (everyone go here to listen!) but in doing that I noticed that working with another writer in this way isn’t new for you… in fact, you collaborate with a lot of ghosts and living writers, thinkers, trees, waterways, the moon, the entire cosmos really (including other artists creating today). So I would like to know what drives these kinds of collaborations in general? And yep i'm going there, who of these ghostly writers and thinkers has been your favourite collaborator so far? Or if you can’t pick a favourite, who do you feel inspired your craft the most?

chris: I think DMX (RIP) really inspired my craft of storytelling and taking on different characters — he did these series of songs called Damien about him rapping back and forth with a demonic entity. In middle school this blew my mind, the worldbuilding and channelling that hip-hop can do. I loved Talib Kweli’s remake of Four Women by Nina Simone as well and Nas and Organized Konfusion writing as a gun or a stray bullet. As far as collaboration, when you and I first started talking you spoke about writing with ancestors, I found that a powerful workshop and thought more about it and started inviting in more things to collaborate with, like the trees outside my window, the tea leaves in my cup, or the coffee beans turned into a drink. It made me think about the cosmos because we’re made of starstuff and really I’m just borrowing particles for a few years and composing them into songs and writings then I’ll blow away. I really enjoyed writing with the ghost of Luis Bunuel and surrealism on The Fantastic Reality and Aimé Césaire on Radiolarian Ballet. Césaire’s poetry is amazing, it contains liberatory history, plant imagery, fireflies, and vulnerability. 

carla: OK, folks reading, go check out all those pieces mentioned above! Weaving your voice in with Aimé Césaire’s was pure genius. What’s the most wonderful response you’ve received about your music? 

chris: My favorite response I’ve received is that my music inspired someone else to create and also gave them permission to make or release art that they didn’t think was worthy to be released. Capitalism and empire seek to keep us constrained and feeling helpless so we seek to consume some solution instead of finding each other and finding our voices to release art, which is a way of transcribing the soul into these realities. 

carla  Oh! Love that, transcribing the soul… Beautiful. I can confirm that your work gives a kind of permission to play, and to take a chance to go for it, what a gift! Let’s take a moment to delight in mentors and collaborators. Who would you like to acknowledge for inspiring your craft as a writer and poet and rapper?

chris: I’d like to acknowledge AwareNess, we’ve been making music together for over 20 years, it’s rare to sustain a friendship and a brotherhood for that long and grow as artists, that’s our greatest song. I’d like to acknowledge you carla, you were the first writer who gave me a chance and let me write a vulnerable chapter for your powerful book Trust Kids, you’ve helped so many other artists and writers in the same way, thank you and thank you for nurturing curiosity. I’d also like to thank scott crow who has been a mentor and someone who has helped me grow as a writer and an artist, as well as Joy James and Gerald Horne who were open to letting me collaborate with them and have taught me so much. 

carla: Gratitude is beautiful. And right back at you my friend, thank you for opening up worlds and new horizons of creativity for me and others! Before we jet, I also encourage folks to check out your other fantastic writings, books, and collaboration with incredible historians and theorists, like Dr Gerald Horne and Dr. Joy James, like you mentioned above — maybe talk a bit about that work. And, for folks new to your work, where should they begin? And, lastly, what are you working on now that has you most excited?

chris: Please check out In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities by Joy James, and Gerald Horne and I released a book a few years ago called Acknowledging Radical Histories. If you’re new to our music, start anywhere, maybe with “Conversations With a Willow Tree.” Right now AwareNess and I are recording our next calm. album called “Pushing on Portals”, it’s a fun project with false realities and multiverses where we are also an indie band, a country band, and a goth band! Thanks again for this great conversation and I love what CAW is doing!

carla: Both of those books are incredible, and your contribution and work in them are brilliant. I cannot wait to listen to the new calm. album, “Pushing on Portals!” Thank you chris for sharing some of your magic here and for the ongoing inspiration!

* by Time, from his new album, Mary Oliver Type Sh*t!

photos are by chris time steele