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Interview with NEIL HILBORN

“I have this thing where in exactly the right moment, it’s like I’m behind myself, watching myself do the poem and it feels like I’m not saying words anymore, I’m just flowing waves of energy out into the audience and just receiving waves of energy back.”

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Neil Hilborn has become a household name in mainstream slam poetry. His poems like “The Future”, “Joey” and “OCD” receiving millions of views on all forms of social media, with the latter having 80 million views on Facebook alone. His debut poetry book, Our Numbered Days, is an Amazon bestseller and has been sold 500,00 times in print, with a second book coming out in April of next year.

Now, coming to Australia next week for his debut tour, I had the absolute pleasure of talking to Neil about his beginnings in Slam Poetry, his life with mental health and his love for Shakespeare and Australian animals.

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So first of all, what inspired you to get involved with Slam Poetry?

It was kinda on accident, actually. A guy called Dylan Garity, who has actually become one of my good friends, showed up to a meeting of one of my literary magazines in college with a spoken word piece in one of the workshops. I had never heard of slam poetry before, I was like, “What’s spoken word? How do you do poems?” and he set up and did this poem. It was genuinely terrible, honestly, like a really bad poem [laughs] but we were all bad back then. But he really meant it and it was so genuine and so honest with this terrible poem that I asked him, “How do you do poetry like this?”. So he took me to some poetry slams in Minneapolis, in St. Paul where we live, and it seemed like a fun way to do poetry. And now, 10 years later, it’s my full-time job.

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Any there any slam poets in particular that inspire your works now?

Definitely! Let me see… One of my biggest influences is Patricia Smith, she’s credited as one of the first slam poets but she’s just an incredible poet in general. Her book about Hurricane Katrina called Blood Dazzler is also my favourite poetry book, so she’s way up there. Another poet is St. Paul that I love is Hieu Minh Nguyen, he’s one of the most successful poets on the planet, he’s been running this whole thing for about 5 years. I was really influenced by Buddy Wakefield back in the day. That’s a good top three right there, I’d say those are my top three.

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Does writing slam poetry come easily to you or do your poems take a while to come together?

They definitely take a while. It’s definitely is when I think a poem might actually be more of a performative piece. I spend a lot more time with it, I do a lot more drafts of it because normally, when I write, it’s more page-oriented and they tend to be more shorter. And with spoken word pieces, they’re a little bit longer and instead of two-minutes, they’ll be three to four. So yeah, I tend to spend a lot more time with it and I think much more meticulously about it where a normal poem will take me a week or two to finish. It depends on the poem obviously, but I’ll probably work on a spoken word piece for two to six months until it’s done.

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Awesome, so a lot of your poems have a constant theme of living life with mental illness, what inspired you to openly write about your struggles with Bipolar Disorder and OCD?

Just the method of through them, you know. It’s a kind of thing where, especially the community that I was in in Minnesota, a lot of poems were very much based on personal narrative and confessional poetry idea of just revealing whatever you’re going through and being very intensely honest about it. So that was just the community I was in. A lot of us were dealing with mental health issues and so it was something we talked about anyway.

I was diagnosed with OCD when I was 11, and it was always something that I had been trying to write about but I had never really written much successfully. With slam poetry, I finally had that community around me that I could bring those ideas to and get feedback and have this collaborative thing. And then afterwards, I had realised, “This is really cathartic”. Like it’s a very therapeutic thing to write about whatever’s going on in my head or whatever my mental health is at the time. It just seemed like the natural thing to do and now, it’s worked for me so I keep doing it. 

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Along with mental illness, you’ve also openly spoken about sexual assault like your performance with Ollie Schminkey on “One Color”, tell me a little bit more about how that performance came together.

You know, it’s funny, everytime you work on collaborative poems, we kind of sit around and brainstorm what stories we feel we can tell together. My philosophy with group pieces especially has always been “There needs to be a reason for everybody that’s in the poem to do it”, and Ollie and I, both of our styles of poetry are very frank about our life experiences and it turns out our experiences with sexual assault were pretty similar. And to just do that conversation, I said “hey, do you wanna write the poem about this?” and it came out like that.

What’s really great with that poem especially is that that was the place where I felt I was most able to talk about my experience wiht sexual assault whereas most of the poems I’ve written myself just haven’t felt as good and I think having Ollie with me there to talk about made it a lot easier for me.

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You like to diffuse these heavy discussions with characters like the “North American Hipster” and “Punk Rock John”. Are these people you reference in your poems people you know or amalgamations of yourself as these kinds of people?

I think they’re always a collection of people. For instance, in my poem “Joey”, I took three of my friends growing up and put them together because onstage, I have 3 minutes and I didn’t have time to talk about everybody’s story, so most of the characters are definitely people I know put together.

And then with the poem “Mating Habits of the North American Hipster”, all that are jokes mainly but also true at the same time. I mean, I’m a horrible hipster too, don’t get me wrong, but at the same the poem was written, I was living with two organic grocery, co-op working, bike riding kind of hipsters. So that poem started off with just me making fun of my living situation and then I thought, “oh, but what if I did a David Attenborough thing with this? Like, what if I turned this into some Animal Kingdom kind of thing? Ok great, this is now the poem” [laughs]. Yeah, so that one was pretty much inspired by two people.

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Of course, I have to talk about easily your most-recognised work, “OCD”. “OCD” currently has over 13 million views on YouTube, how do you feel that so many people have connected so much to this particular poem of yours?

Man, I think… it’s still kind of surprising to me. It’s funny, like now, I’ve sort of accepted it like “Yeah, OCD is this poem, the most loved poem ever” but at the time when it was blowing up, all my friends and I thought “Really? OCD? That’s the one that did it?” [laughs].

Truth be told, I kind of just expected it would just be somebody else’s poem or a different poem of mine if slam poetry ever blew up ever. So it’s definitely been an experience to go around and have a bunch of people come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re that OCD guy”. I usually just say back, “Bro, yeah but there’s so many other things about me too” [laughs]. I feel like that makes me sound ungrateful, but I’m super appreciative of that poem and without it, I wouldn’t be touring Australia, I wouldn’t be talking to you about it, I wouldn’t have any of the things I have in my life right now so I always try to have that perspective about it, although it does get frustrating for me sometimes. It’s still why I’m here and why I get to do what I love so I always try to be appreciative.

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Along with the success of “OCD”, you’ve also released your debut poetry book last year. Tell me how the idea for releasing ‘Our Numbered Days’ came along.

‘Our Numbered Days’ was just all the poems I had been writing over a 2 year period and I hadn’t even considered putting out a book together, especially after ‘OCD’ blew up. I was just constantly touring and focused on doing live shows full time and getting that part of my life going. Sam Cook, who is the director of Button Poetry, who is also my friend which is weird to talk about him like that because he’s just one of my dudes. He called me one day and said “Hey Neil, your poem’s gotten all this attention and people know about you, I feel like we should release a book. It’s dumb we haven’t done it yet” and I just said, “sure, dude”. So literally, I just took all of my favourite poems that had written over the past couple years and it was really fun.

I think, a lot of the time when people write books, there’s this pressure to create it as one unit so I decided to put in all the best stuff that I had written. I also got to arrange it and release it, it was like putting together a mixtape honestly. It was so much fun and now, it’s out there. And now, we’ve tried to take a similar approach with my next book that’s coming out where I’ve just tried to write every day and make writing a part of my daily routine and take my favourite things I’ve written out of that. That method produced one book I really like, so why not do the same for this new one.

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‘Our Numbered Days’ is now an Amazon bestseller. How do you feel about all the success you garnered since the initial release of ‘OCD’?

Yeah, it’s been a bit overwhelming, honestly. It’s weird, I know it doesn’t seem like it from videos of me onstage, but I’m a pretty shy, introverted person so I’ve had to compartmentalise a lot where there’s the guy who’s selling books, the guy on stage, the guy talking to you right now. That guy is the extroverted part of my personality, he’s enjoys attention and likes talking about himself. I put all that stuff on the part of my personality that can handle it and if I think it too much, the agoraphobic everyday Neil freaks the hell out and I can’t handle that.

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So, you’re finally coming to perform your works in Australia next week, are you excited to perform to your Australian fans for the first time?

I’m so stoked. I’m have been excited ever since Ian, my agent, asked me if I wanted to do this. I’ve wanted to go to Australia for my whole life! I’ve always really loved animals. Growing up, I thought I wanted to grow up and be Jane Goodall and y’all have some of the craziest animals on the planet so I’ve read a lot about Australia my whole life. I’m just so, so stoked that I get to come and hang out. Everybody I know that’s performed in Australia says the crowd are so enthusiastic and present so yeah, I’m really excited to come over.

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Do you have a favourite poem that you like to perform most? or are all of them quite special to you?

I mean, they’re all special… Nah, I’m kidding, there’s some poems that suck [laughs]. I probably shouldn’t reveal this but I close all my sets with ‘The Future’, which is about how I have bipolar disorder and the way in which I’ve decided to love myself and not kill myself. It has a big anthemic ending and there’s this thing that happens where I’m really feeling the poem. This will probably sound hippy but I have this thing where in exactly the right moment, it’s like I’m behind myself, watching myself do the poem and it feels like I’m not saying words anymore, I’m just flowing waves of energy out into the audience and just receiving waves of energy back. So I love that poem and I love performing it. I’m just so pleased with myself that forever ago, I decided to close my sets with that poem because no matter how tired or worn out I am, I get to the end of my set and I just think, “I love this poem”. Just the chills in my spine, man.

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Is there any surprises that fans can expect from your live performances?

Yeah, I think people are surprised to learn that I’m actually pretty funny. And that’s not to pat myself on the back at all like, “Oh yes, I’m very funny”. I just think when I started touring solo after ‘OCD’ went viral, I sort of realised very quickly that people weren’t wanting to be sad and have feelings for an hour straight and so I studied as much stand up comedy as I could. I have always been a comedy fan but I got really into it. It was actually a podcast I would listen to called “The Comedian’s Comedian” and it helped me so much, I learned an incredible amount of technical stuff on how to be funny from that podcast. Anyway, I get the comment a lot when people come up to me. I’ll be at the mercy table and people will say, “You’re actually really funny” and I say, “Thanks, I worked really hard on that” [laughs].

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Aside from the shows, aside from getting to see our crazy-looking animals, what are you most excited to do in Australia?

So, I heard… I actually heard this today, I’ve heard that in Melbourne, there’s a pop up globe theatre. I’m a nerd and I love Shakespeare so much and I’m just beyond excited. I mean, I’ve heard that Melbourne’s a crazy ass city anyway, but I’m really excited to see some Shakespeare in Australia. That sounds wild!

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So, what’s next for you after these shows? You mentioned previously a new book coming out, is there any plans of releasing it just yet?

Yes! Oh my god, they keep telling me this release date and I keep forgetting it. I think it’s April 3rd, I’m going to go with April 3rd. It’s definitely the first three of April, I would say it’s April 3rd. If I’m lying, then you can yell at me. But yeah, it comes out April 3rd, it’s called ‘The Future’ and I’ve been working on it for a long time. Again, like ‘Our Numbered Days’, it’s a combination of hundreds of poems I’ve written over the last couple of years and I think it’s pretty good, man. I’m usually really humble about stuff but I’ve worked really hard on this and I think it’s worth the time and money. So that comes out in April, and then pretty much the rest of the year, I’m doing a worldwide tour starting in American cities, I don’t have dates for this yet because why would I but American tour in the summer is probably my best bet. Then England and festivals in the UK and Europe, and then I’m looking at India. And then, coming back to Australia for the fall or winter of next year so new book then on the road forever.

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AMNPLIFY – DB

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