Before there was Split This Rock, Sam Hamill brought us Poets Against the War. On Thursday March, 22nd, Sarah Browning, MartínEspada, and Marilyn Nelson came together at the 2012 festival for a tribute to the man himself -- poet, activist, fearless leader, influential editor. A model for the poet as public citizen.
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| Sam Hamill honoring June Jordan at the 2012 festival kick-off |
MartínEspada:
Poetry saved Sam Hamill. Poetry saved him from
a life of violence, self-destruction and incarceration.This first poem is dedicated to him.
Blasphemy
For Sam Hamill
Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save
us,
not the way a fisherman pulls the drowning
swimmer
into his boat, not the way Jesus, between
screams,
promised life everlasting to the thief
crucified beside him
on the hill, but salvation nevertheless.
Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems
from the prison library, and I know why
his hands are careful not to break the brittle
pages.
***
Allow me to introduce Sam Hamill.
Sam was born in 1942
or 1943 to unknown parents. Adopted and
raised in Utah, he was beaten and abused, a runaway, a petty thief, in trouble
with the law, in and out of jail.
In the moving poem,
“Plain Dumb Luck,” he writes of being “huddled in a cell in Fredonia, Arizona/
rolling cigarettes from a Bull Durham pouch/ locked up for the crime of being
fourteen and homeless.” A sheriff tells
him to “Go home, son,” but “Home was the road/ for a kid whose other home was
hell./ I’d rather steal than taste that belt again./ I stole.”
And yet, by poem’s
end, forty years later, the poet concludes that he is “the luckiest
son-of-a-bitch alive.” It was his “dumb luck” to discover poetry. From the practice of poetry everything else
would flow.
At City Lights bookstore in San
Francisco, there was more “dumb luck:” a serendipitous encounter with poet,
translator and critic Kenneth Rexroth, who would become Sam’s first
mentor. As Sam recalls:
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.
What became of Sam Hamill?
In the words of Hayden
Carruth, “No one—I mean no one—has done the momentous work of presenting poetry
better than Sam Hamill. His editing and publishing, his criticism and
translations, his own very strong and beautiful poems have been making a
difference in American culture for many years. What a wealth of
accomplishment!”
Sam has published over 40
books. His collections of poetry include Destination
Zero, Gratitude, Dumb Luck, Measured by Stone, and Almost Paradise. His essay
collections include A Poet's Work and
Avocations. He taught himself
classical Chinese and Japanese, and is the leading translator of poetry from
these ancient languages. His translations include Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings of Basho, Crossing the Yellow River, The Poetry of Zen,
and the Tao Te Ching.
He has received fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation, and the Mellon Fund.
In 1973, he co-founded the legendary Copper Canyon Press, serving as editor
there for more than thirty years, publishing Rexroth, Carruth, McGrath, the
posthumous works of Neruda.
When
Sam began his Zen practice and declared himself a conscientious objector, he
took a “bodhisattva vow” to become a peacemaker. (Sam is a tough pacifist. I used to tell him that he put the
“fist” in “pacifist.”)
Small wonder, then, that Sam felt (and I quote) “overcome by nausea” when he was
invited to participate in a White House symposium called, “Poetry and the
American Voice,” hosted by First Lady Laura Bush. The symposium, set for
February 2003, was cancelled when word got out of Sam’s plan to gather anti-war
poems for presentation to the First Lady.
Never tell Sam: Don’t say that. He fought back by founding Poets Against the War.
PAW collected, posted and archived more than 20,000 poems and statements
against war. As Sam puts it, “Never before in recorded history have so many
poets spoken in a single chorus.” He also edited the anthology Poets Against
the War, published by The
Nation Books.
In the foreword to that extraordinary
anthology, Sam Hamill writes:
Can (thousands of) poems inhibit this or
any administration planning a war? It is only one step among many. But it is an
important step, as each is. We join physicians against the war, teachers
against the war, farmers against the war, and others. Poets Against the War
helped bring about hundreds of poetry readings and discussions around the world
while compiling a document of historic proportion. And when our critics on the
right suggest that poetry might somehow divorce itself from politics, we say,
‘Read the Greeks, read the classical Chinese; tell it to Dante, Chaucer, Milton
or Longfellow. Tell it to Whitman, Dickinson or Hughes. Tell it to García
Lorca, to Joseph Brodsky or to the Chinese poets living in exile in our
country…A government is a government of words, and when those words are used to
mislead, to instill fear or to invite silence, it is the duty of every poet to
speak fearlessly and clearly.
Albert Camus wrote: “henceforth, the only
honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more
powerful than munitions.”
Sam Hamill has become the
living embodiment of this principle. He and PAW defined a culture of conscience
in this country. When future generations want to know the truth of these times,
they will not turn to Colin Powell’s testimony at the United Nations. They will
turn to the words of Sam Hamill. They will read Poets Against the War.
Sam is a true visionary. He sees through ancient
eyes, “fearlessly and clearly.” His
translation of the poem, “Song of the War Wagons” by Tu Fu, written in China
more than 1200 years ago, speaks to us of war today:
We’ve shed a sea of blood.
Still the emperor wants more.
East of the mountains, a thousand villages,
ten thousand villages, turn to bitter weeds…
Our boys lie under the weeds.
Being right is necessary but not sufficient. In 2003, when he founded PAW, Sam was right
about the “sea of blood” and the “emperor” who wanted more; but he also had the
integrity to take action, regardless of consequences. Ultimately, Sam Hamill is
the kind of visionary who rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. This is from his poem, “Ars Poetica:”
We go down to the sea and set sail
For a world beyond war,
knowing
we will never find it.
We
are not heroes.
We sail The
Justice and The Mercy
because these boats need rowing.
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