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"This
is where I come to hide," says Sam Hamill as he pulls the car into
the grove of fir and cedar surrounding the house and studio he built
himself. But he is not hiding. He has scheduled his Progressive
interview hard upon his return from New York City, where, during
a blizzard, he and poets Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Martin Espada,
and others read to a large and enthusiastic audience at Lincoln
Center.
It
is a late February day near Port Townsend, Washington, and Hamill
has had little chance to retreat from public attention since mid-January,
when he received a note from Laura Bush requesting his presence
at a White House symposium on Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson,
and Walt Whitman.
Hamill responded with an e-mail to friends. It read, in part: "When
I picked up my mail and saw the letter marked 'The White House,'
I felt no joy. Rather, I was overcome by a kind of nausea... Only
the day before I had read a lengthy report on the President's proposed
'Shock and Awe' attack on Iraq, calling for saturation bombing that
would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless
innocent civilians. The only legitimate response to such a morally
bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against
the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the
war in Vietnam." Hamill called upon all poets "to speak up for the
conscience of our country" by submitting poems for "an anthology
of protest.
"Within
thirty-six hours, the submissions of poems to Hamill's project had
overwhelmed his e-mail account. The First Lady heard of the poets'
plans and canceled the symposium.
On
February 12, the day the White House symposium was supposed to happen,
poets participated in more than 135 readings and events around the
country denouncing Bush's war moves against Iraq. By that date,
Hamill's new web site (www.poetsagainstthewar.org) had published
more than 6,000 poems.
At first glance, Hamill might seem a surprising person to cause
an uproar. The esteemed editor, translator, essayist, and poet is,
by his own admission, reclusive. But his life of contemplation and
dedication to poetry prepared him more than adequately for his confrontation
with the U.S. government.
Among many other things, he is the translator of Lu Chi's Wen Fu:
The Art of Writing, a book that stresses the importance of calling
things by their right name, a Confucian idea that applies as much
to political rulers as it does to emotional states or descriptions
of the natural world.
Hamill
is a founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, which is known for
its independence, as well as for its accurate and graceful translations.
The Copper Canyon list includes such poets as Olga Broumas, Hayden
Carruth, Cyrus Cassells, Odysseas Elytis, Carolyn Kizer, Thomas
McGrath, Cesare Pavese, Kenneth Rexroth, and Eleanor Wilner.
An
avowed pacifist, Hamill opens his book A Poet's Work with a quote
from the Albert Camus essay "Neither Victims nor Executioners,"
which he says changed his life. "All I ask is that, in the midst
of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make
a choice," Camus writes. "After that, we can distinguish those who
accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices
of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force
and being."
Question:
Why did your call for a new Poets Against the War movement elicit
such support?
Sam
Hamill: It was almost as if they were waiting breathlessly for
someone to step forward and say, "Enough is enough." We became a
chorus. Last week, the poems were coming in at one per minute. We
have twenty-five editors downloading and formatting poems. We're
well over 11,000 poems already, and we'll publish an anthology of
probably about 225 pages of theoretically the best.
Q:
Who inspired you to do this?
Hamill:
The spirit of Denise Levertov, and listening to Galway Kinnell and
Philip Levine and Etheridge Knight and June Jordan during the 1960s.
That made me decide when I received the invitation to the White
House that I simply couldn't just say no thank you and pretend that
it was OK.
Poets
should speak out against what we see as the assault against our
Constitution and the warmongering that's going on. I'm perfectly
willing to lay down my life for my Constitution, but I am not willing
to take a life for it or any other reason because I think killing
people is counterproductive.
I'm
basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with
my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln Center,
although it was one of those lifetime moments, as they say.
Q:
Can you describe what the Poets Against the War movement was like
during Vietnam?
Hamill:
Well, I can remember, I think it was 1967, sitting in the First
Unitarian Church in Isla Vista, Santa Barbara, and seeing Phil Levine
come out on the little stage. He sat on the edge and said, "You
know, sometimes it's hard not to hate my country for the way I feel,
at times, but I won't let that happen." And then he read, "They
Feed They Lion," this incredibly powerful, incantatory poem that
was inspired in part by the burning of Detroit in 1967 and the riots
that followed. And then Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful
big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in
public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized
it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful
extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about.
It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's
what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war.
We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might
be possible with a little self-transformation.
Each
of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a
way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one another and
toward our environment. Because if we don't, we are going to be
committing suicide at a very large level. We're certainly not perfect,
and we're not probably even better than anybody else, except that
perhaps we are given to certain kinds of contemplation that provide
a valuable balance to the knee-jerk reactionary behavior of most
of our newspapers and political leaders. Poets are great doubters.
What
poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what
makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining
governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder
to organize than a group of poets.
The
only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country,
is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something
done about it.
Bush
is using language that's a mirror image of the language of Osama
bin Laden when he says, "We have God on our side. This is the struggle
of good against evil." Isn't that exactly what bin Laden said? Bush
the born-again Christian, bin Laden the born-again Muslim, and they're
both convinced that they have God on their side, and they're both
willing to kill countless numbers of innocent people to assert their
rightness. Very dangerous, very dangerous.
Q:
You've described yourself as anti-religious.
Hamill:
Yes, yes. I am anti-religious.
Q:
And why is that?
Hamill:
Most of the ugly wars in history have been wars of religion. And
there's nothing more dangerous than someone with religious certitude
who creates consequences in the world that to me are simply inexcusable.
Q:
You seem to be contrasting religious certitude with what you said
about poets as doubters. Is that right?
Hamill:
Yes. Well, we poets don't tend to be certain a lot. Much of our
art is made out of our own uncertainty. And there is a not-knowingness,
I think, that leads us back to suffering humanity with a more compassionate
vision than most of our politicians have.
Q:
In your essays, you write that poetry saved your life. I was wondering
if you could explain what you mean.
Hamill:
I was a violent, self-destructive teenager, who was adopted right
at the end of World War II. I was lied to and abused by my parents.
I hated life in Utah. I resented the Mormon Church, its sense of
superiority and its certitude. I escaped through the Beat writers
and discovered poetry and have devoted my entire life to the practice
of poetry in varying ways. Poetry gave me a reason for being. And
I'm not exaggerating when I say that. My ethics, my sense of morality,
my work ethic, my sense of compassion for suffering humanity, all
of that comes directly out of the practice of poetry, as does my
Buddhist practice. Poetry is a very important element in the history
of Buddhism in general and in Zen in particular. It was really Zen
that motivated me to change the way I perceive the world.
It's
not, I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who
practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me. Sometimes
people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic
poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems."
And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"
Poetry
teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain
kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important
element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry
frames the experience that lies beyond naming.
Q:
Did you have a political awakening, or have you always felt the
way you do?
Hamill:
I would say that my great political awakening was really born on
Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners"
essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself.
I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me. All I'd ever heard
my entire life in my family was, "Nobody wanted you, and we took
you in." When you get that into your head at a tender age, you really
feel like you are an unlovable human being, and then you behave
like one. That's exactly what I had done. It took me many years
to deal with my own violence and find my own niche.
Kenneth
Rexroth took me under his wing for a brief period. I was fifteen
years old, and I was smoking a lot of heroin and trying to be cool,
man, and I really loved poetry. And Kenneth convinced me that destroying
myself was not really the best possible solution, and that I needed
to look at the world's literature, and not just my own life, in
order to be hip, if you will. So he had a huge influence on what
became of me thereafter.
I
got interested in Zen when I was a teenage beatnik on the streets
of San Francisco. And it was my interest in Zen, in part, that got
me into the Marine Corps, because that was a ticket to Asia. So
I spent a couple of years on Okinawa and began reading and thinking
about how I wanted to go about conducting my life.
Q:
I looked back at your translation of Lu Chi's Wen Fu: The Art of
Writing. You make the observation that he lived in some ways a dangerous
life by writing and naming things. What is the position of today's
American poets in relation to that life?
Hamill:
Well, I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets.
A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route
too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do. It's
difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you
sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because
if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in
the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good
poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be
better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.
That
said, I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since
the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school
on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to
W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence
in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first
law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you
have.
Q:
Can you talk a little bit about translation as a discipline?
Hamill:
One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the
self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have
to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his
voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply
into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent
poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't
accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written
language can, and often does, contain. For instance, on the mat
outside my door, you can read that as two characters: a roof and
a woman under it. If you combine those two characters, that's the
character for harmony or for peace. If you put that same roof out
there, and put two women under it, you get the character for disharmony.
That's a visual linguistic pun. Well, it's hard for us to do anything
equivalent like that in our language, so what I have to do is find
other ways of putting the turn on this line or the edge on that
image. You can't just do a word-for-word because they don't exist.
We don't have a word for two women under one roof. So you have to
find other ways of making it literary and of being true to the sensibility,
if you will, of the original, as much as possible.
The
oldest clichŽ in the world is about "what's lost in translation,"
but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's gained
by translation, and the answer is everything. Our language is a
compendium of translation.
Q:
What is the proper role of poetry in our society?
Hamill: That's one of those questions that would just love
to have a pat answer. You know, poetry's job is to make us feel
good. Poetry exists to allow us to express our innermost feelings.
There isn't one role for poetry in society. There are many roles
for poetry. I wrote a poem to seduce my wife. I wrote a poem when
I asked her to marry me. Poetry got me laid. Poetry got me married.
I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was
building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to
watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem,
was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the
poem has something to say today, as it did then. And I speak here
only of my own poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different
because most of us write from direct human experience in the world.
It
would be nice if all the Republicans could put poetry in a little
box and put the box under the bed and sit on it, but they can't.
And neither can the left insist that poetry must do this or must
do that. I've heard a lot of people quoting Auden famously that
"poetry makes nothing happen," but none of the people who were quoting
it seemed to have understood the irony of what he was saying. If
you think for one second that Auden believed that poetry makes nothing
happen in a real, literal way, then you're a damn fool.
Q.
What do you say to members of the rightwing media who are saying
that the poets organizing against the war are behaving badly or
that they're looking foolish?
Hamill:
I haven't seen any poet in this country behave nearly as rudely
as Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly. I'm not asking these people to
approve of everyone's manners. I don't feel obliged to defend the
manners of every poet who submits a poem to my web site. That's
not my job. My job is to provide them with an opportunity to speak
from the heart. If there's not much in the heart and if the mouth
is running wild, that's not my problem. Of course, there are some
people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up
in public and take his clothes off. I don't do that, but I liked
Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy [laughter].
When
these idiot rightwingers start complaining about poetry being political,
I'm fond of reciting Sappho to them, who excluded men from her world.
Why does she exclude them? Mostly because of their warmongering.
Q: Is there a particular bit of Sappho you quote?
Hamill:
There's a fragment that goes, "Some say the most beautiful thing
in the world is a great cavalry riding down over the hill. / Others
say it's a vast infantry on the march. / But I say the most beautiful
thing is the beloved." How political can you get?ÊÊ
------
There is a great sea called Tranquility. I saw it once
on a map. There were white ships with white sails
blown by Adriatic breezes, there were cargoes of dream
and belief--I saw it all on the map.
But I could never take you there. I can't find it again.Ê
But here is the sea I know, hard and cold,
bitter in its judgment, flattened by a sky of solid ash.
The day's news arrives with its nerves exposed
and we are hardened, our blood cools, and a ghost from the past
delivers our narcissistic sermon
in
the same old monotone our parents heard at Auschwitz
or Treblinka. When summer comes, the sea
will turn to gold and we will see our reflected faces
in the water. Only then can we remember
the many-hearted rose opening, one after another,
its
own most secret chambers to the end.
We walk on the ashes of the dead beneath a sky of ash.
The Japanese combine the word for word
with the word for temple to get the word for poetry:
temple word; holy word; no word can save.Ê
But
we all have wounds only a few right words can poultice.
We long all winter for summer's blue;
all summer we long for quiet. The voices we converse with
year by year grow fewer. In the Temple of the Dead,
speak softly. And if you must speak, praise.
An
excerpt from "Conscientious Objection," reprinted from Destination
Zero: Poems 1970-1995 (White Pine, 1995), by Sam Hamill.
Anne-Marie
Cusac is Investigative Reporter for The Progressive.
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