What We’re Reading: Our Numbered Days

Our Numbered Days by Neil Hilborn (Button Poetry 2015)

Button Poetry is an organization in Minneapolis that specializes in all things spoken word: they have a YouTube channel of spoken word artists, they publish books such as this one, produce audio recordings, and much more. It’s an honorable and enormous feat to catalog this ephemeral art form with contemporary tools. Neil Hilborn is a local Minnesotan spoken word poet whose video of his poem “OCD” went viral via Button Poetry (you can watch it here) in 2013. This is his first printed collection of poems, which includes “OCD” and more.

Hilborn speaks to his reader in a straight-forward and no-frills fashion. It’s a conversational tone, which makes sense for spoken word. But there is masterful emphasis and powerful a-ha moments that take it beyond conversation and into poetry. The surprises come in his turns of language, the underlined truths that he sends home with his reader, such as in this excerpt from the poem “Joey”:

[…] We were 17 and the one time Joey
tried to talk to me about being depressed
when someone else was around, I told him to

shut the hell up and asked if he  needed to change
his tampon. You know that moment when the cartoon
realizes he’s taken three steps off the cliff

and he takes a long look at the audience
like we are carrying the last moving box
out of a half-empty house? Joey looked like that

without the puff of smoke.

The language is simple and direct, but the metaphor is surprising and drives the moment. Of course, watching him perform his poetry, such as in the clip of “OCD” earlier in this post, gives added depth to the words on the page, takes me on even more surprising turns with the way he delivers it. That is perhaps the most beautiful thing about Button Poetry: they are capturing this art form in as many ways as possible, bringing to more audiences on more platforms.

Hilborn begins many poems with a series of related quotes from other writers — some fellow spoken word poets, others not. It sets a loose framework around the following poem from Hilborn himself and shows us his writing roots and inspirations. However, I eventually found myself wishing there were fewer lines from other writers, and more of Hilborn letting himself do the speaking. I also don’t imagine these as effective if spoken, which makes me wonder if this was a novelty he allowed himself in the written form that isn’t there in his performance poetry.

There are some phrases that crop up bordering on overuse, but I think I only notice them since they are printed, and wouldn’t pay any mind if I were listening to this being read out loud. Phrases such as “Let me tell you” are figures of speech meant to emphasize, and we see them sprinkled throughout. The whole book feels cyclical with multiple poems hefting the same title (including the title poem, “Our Numbered Days”), poems prefaced by some of the same writerly quotes , and subjects that keep rising to the surface. You can feel the poet coming back to his tics, his heartache, his questions.

I find both my younger self and current self satiated with this collection. There is so much here that my younger self would relate to so well: first loves, heartbreak, constant questions of self. Yet there are also poems on politics, social commentary, and current events that make this collection seem very relevant to my current self.

What other spoken word poets do you follow? How does reading the poetry of a spoken word artist change the experience for you?