Sam Hamill quotes
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“Just as I wonder whether it's going to die, the orchid blossoms and I can't explain why it moves my heart, why such pleasure comes from one small bud on a long spindly stem, one blood red gold flower opening at mid-summer, tiny, perfect in its hour.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Sam Hamill (2002). “Dumb Luck: Poems”, p.88, BOA Editions, Ltd.
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“Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal.”
-- Sam Hamill -
“Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds.”
-- Sam Hamill -
“If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Sam Hamill (1995). “Destination zero: poems, 1970-1995”, White Pine Pr
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“Ho Kyuns poetry is in the tradition of his master, the incomparable Tu Fu, while remaining fully his own. Writing nine centuries later, Hos poetry strikes many parallels--the experiences of war and exile and constant struggle-- and his voice is similarly humane. This is rich and enlightening reading.”
-- Sam Hamill -
“Korea's first Zen Master-poet wrote simple yet elegant poetry of the world he inhabited, both physically and spiritually, and of daily insights-a pause along the way for a deep clear breath, a moon-viewing moment, a seasonal note or a farewell poem to a departing monk. His poems speak softly and clearly, like hearing a temple bell that was struck a thousand years ago.”
-- Sam Hamill -
“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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?”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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“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.”
-- Sam HamillSource : Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.
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