August, 2014

FEATURED POET: Sam Hamill is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Destination Zero: Poems 1970–1995 (1995), Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2005), and Measured by Stone (2007). Influenced by Ezra Pound,William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, and Hayden Carruth, Hamill “presents a model of honest, consistent, undisguised political engagement: he articulates not only a vision of peace with justice, not only his relish for work to achieve that vision, but his sense of the role that poetry can play,” as Publishers Weekly noted in its review of Measured by Stone. Hamill has also published several collections of essays and numerous translations, including Crossing the Yellow River: 300 Poems from the Chinese (2000). Hamill’s own poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Hamill has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Fund, and has won the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award.  (Bio adapted from the Poetry Foundation)

Make sure to check out his latest collection Habitation by Lost Horse Press release party at Elliott Bay Bookstore September 2

What the Water Knows

What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.

A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.

Still, the heart is a river

pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay

and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,

it carries the cry of the loon and the salts

of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river

salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide

upstream until he disappears

into the nothing from which he came.

Only the thought remains. Lacking the eagle’s cunning

or the wisdom of the sparrow, where shall I turn,

drowning in sorrow? Who will know what the trees know,

the spidery patience of young maple or what the willow confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.

Listen to what the water says.

Wind, be a friend.

There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

Sam Hamill

Border Song

For Esteban Moore

Sometimes I like to read

the poets of the borderlands,

slowly from their native tongue,

my scant Spanish failing at each turn,

the gists and piths of poetry.

There are images, there are tones,

that crosses the rivers

of time and space and cultural bounds

to touch the heart of one

who struggles in the journey.

Poetry is made of flesh and bone.

What is a nation, what is our song,

and what is a man, a woman, but

a tear and a smile, un abrazo fuerte

por favor, tender and temporal,

wine in the cup, a song in the ear,

when the struggle itself is everything.

It is what we know and what

we have to work with―bare hands,
dreams that restore

big hungry hearts and minds

made whole by what we share:

mi pan, mi agua, mi canto amor.

Sam Hamill

WRITE YOUR POEM! 

The prophets have their secrets

And their certain magic.

I am not a prophet.

I know only the ordinary.

That is my Tao.

Sam mentions in various interviews that poetry by its nature cannot claim to be apolitical. If you are a seeker of the Tao, then where does that put your poetry? The recent events in Ferguson, MO really beg a deep painful silence alongside the protests. Consider Deng Ming-Dao's comments. "In the case of a personal attack, the follower of the Tao would ask if so could they have prevented it? Of course, they would defend themselves, but even then, their self-defense would come from long solitary training and not from frantic outer directed violence." (365 Tao: Daily Meditation San Francisco, CA: Harper)

So read the Tao above. Read Harlem below. Center yourself in the tension. Write a poem that reflects a mirror. If it still beats the heart of others, then write a new poem. When you write the mirror poem put one copy on a leaf before they fall. Float it down the river. Write your poem. It is the lack of a mirror that grieves the souls of our children and elders.

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes