Sam Hamill

My Little Poetry Pep Talk

The shit is hitting the fan. In my life, in my friends’ lives, in everyone’s lives—or so it seems. I’ve been thinking a lot, more so than usual, about poetry the past few weeks. And by that I mean I have been dreaming about it, since I was already thinking about it nearly every waking moment.

If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

What I think is this: We are all going through tough stuff. Every one of us. And poetry is more important to us than ever. We need it. Others need it. The gift economy is where it’s at when the other economy fails.

We are at war. I see us—every single committed poet—as being at war against silence, against sloth, against insult, against injury, against conventional thinking, against greed, against selfishness, against the turning away from self, against depersonalization, even against fear.

I see some poets turning away from poetry, out of necessity in some cases. But in any case, the turning away is an act of betrayal. I had a poet email me two days ago saying he had to stop focusing on poetry and start focusing on what would pay the bills. Yes, pay the bills. By all means. I am in the same boat, so I know where you are coming from. But don’t leave poetry behind in the process. Do not commit that betrayal because it is a betrayal of self and of the life you’ve given yourself over to as a poet.

I see poets leaving the ranks, and it makes me sad. Because of money, because of fear about poetry, or because of the perceived inability to write poetry. Because of any and every impulse in society that tells people poetry is not a worthwhile endeavor or that it is only a worthwhile endeavor by and for certain poets or through certain mechanisms of study.

Sam Hamill says, The way of poetry is a way of being alive. I believe that. Poetry makes us stronger. It changes us. It is our gift to ourselves and to each other. If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

Yes, it is difficult to stick with poetry, to turn to poetry when our world and our lives are a mess. But that is the trick. That is precisely the trick: to create poetry in the midst of the mess. To create poetry, you must enter the mess. Poets enter the mess of the world in ways most can’t or won’t. We have to do that work, and report back: to articulate the confusion and frustration inside the poem. To let the mess be the poem. But in a way that conveys, that communicates. For, as Hamill also says, The possibility of the poem exists in communication.

We must be here for the poems, and in doing so, be here for one another. This is how we talk. This is how we talk to each other about what matters.

I’ve been trying to ask myself every day when I wake up: How can I use poetry today to change my life and the lives of others. That is how I am entering the mess and staying deep inside the mess.

Backer-Bryom

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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My birds of prey are not bomb / droppers, but my broken immune system clawing / and pecking inside my body’s basement. — Sara Backer

Are we willing to put love into action even if we ourselves don’t physically survive? — Carolyn Baker

If the answer is ‘yes,’ then two things are essential. First, bearing witness to the deepening horrors of climate chaos; and second, committing ourselves to compassionate service to all other living beings—since they are going to suffer with us. — Carolyn Baker

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

—

by Li Bai, translated By Sam Hamill

To be disabled is to have a minority body, but not to have a broken or defective body. — Elizabeth Barnes

Midfield,
attached to nothing,
the skylark singing.

— Basho

Wherever we are in life, whatever people we are responding to, let us be witnesses to those who are most abandoned, who need our care. — Father Michael Bassano

I think nature is personal. — Jan Beatty

On this thoroughly unique and irreplaceable Saturday morning, it was like this. This is my inadequate attempt to capture it, even though it can’t be captured, can’t be preserved. — Lynn Behrendt

This is my inadequate attempt to capture it, even though it can’t be captured, can’t be preserved. — Lynn Behrendt

It is silly: this constant falling, this ebullient animal / tumble, this dizzy, over-worded, breathless groping / to some place only named in ancient, unknown tongues. — John Belk

When the hot air fades / when the dampness comes / in sleep / in waking / when I am ancient in my movements / a humming corpse / resting on / pillows / How will I be found / will they feed me the coins I will need / Who will kiss my falling / when I fall — Chase Berggrun

I give my best to the shape / of clouds and the dead / in their resting places — Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

I give my best to the shape / of clouds and the dead / in their resting places — Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

There are four channels on the black and white TV which seem swept from the cosmic corners of an emptiness you’re learning about in school, along with Sex Ed and its ragged chalkboard diagrams of ungainly organs deployed with all the dignity of trying to smuggle accordions across state lines. — Simeon Berry

There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. — Wendell Berry

Even after we called the neighbors for water, more water, and the volunteer fire department came to mist the dying herd, cattle kept falling. They died all day long until even the sun grew tired of watching. — Darla Biel

Each moment / builds a new universe / and I need to find / you there. — Simeon Berry

The only way people can be writers is if they feel like they can be one. — Lisa Bickmore

When you memorize a poem, it inhabits you, and you inhabit it. — Kim Blaeser

Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by visible marks. — Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933)

A cocktail dress achieves its effect through elegant abbreviation; shouldn’t the poem do the same? — Dave Bonta

And in any case the whole notion of luck represents an absurd attempt to project consistent, self-centered narratives onto chaotic, impersonal events. — Dave Bonta

We are little more than large and awkward guests in a world of insects, I sometimes think.— Dave Bonta

we bought it all / the cheat and the war / and the nothing / but night tomorrow — Dave Bonta

The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. — Louise Bourgeois

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. — Louise Bourgeois

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. ― Jorge Luis Borges

Something signals me / to skulk the pasture with the soft paw / of the body, to snap the hasp / and climb inside the kitchen window. / A wolf’s no scavenger. / Hunger licks its tongue / across the danger of my teeth. — Ash Bowen

It seems illogical to preserve a social order when the social order is itself only a false dilemma of death. — Anne Boyer

Emotions … continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body. — Tara Brach

Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life. — Tara Brach

When we leave our bodies, we leave home. — Tara Brach

When you’re with fear and befriending it, the who you are enlarges, and [the fear] becomes like a wave in your ocean. — Tara Brach

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. — Ray Bradbury

The comfort / of unhealthy patterns blushing harder than rubies. / I would do what I couldn’t as a child and turn from you. — Traci Brimhall

We gender people as soon as we see them. That’s just the American way. — KB Brookins

Dying or illness is a kind of poetry. It’s a derangement. — Anatole Broyard

Accessibility wasn’t one of the virtues I learned coming up. Great poems are rough, crude, loud, gnarled, hermetic. They are thinking great ideas but they aren’t talking to you about it. — Sharon Bryan

When you know what a poem is trying to do and understand how it is working, then you become useful. The poem has every clue you’re ever going to get. Stop worrying about what’s not there. You can do what you want with a poem, but it’s only OK if you take it back to the poem and the poem says, Yeah, that’s OK. — Sharon Bryan

We are all born in Oklahoma, in a certain way. — Andrew Brusletten

and when people come to visit and / shoot my hours through the head they / offer nothing interesting or constructive. / I find myself resenting them and / their chatter / their idle ways / since I am always fighting for each minute — Charles Bukowski

Like a hummingbird in our hands, we must hold our convictions with a relaxed fist — Laura Caitlin Burke

You can tell them anything if you just make it funny, make it rhyme. And if they still don’t understand you, then you run it one more time. — Bo Burnham

We grow wings to fly but have roots to return to and there, and there, for the grace of God, go I. — Mark Burns

One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know. … Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough. … So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. — William S. Burroughs

it takes me 10 minutes / to write a poem / sometimes / & then / I want to whisper or / shout it about / town — Mairead Byrne

With our thoughts we make the world. — from the Dhammapada, as translated by Thomas Byrom

Halinen-Huth

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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Henceforth, may your heart be three trinities of birdcall and birdsong and caw. — Jeremy Halinen

Grief makes one family / of us all. — Sam Hamill

If you love poetry, you are charged with finding poetry that helps you change your life. — Sam Hamill

In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing can be by itself alone, no one can be by himself or herself alone, everyone has to inter-be with every one else. That is why, when you look outside, around you, you can see yourself. — Thich Nhat Hanh

This body is not me. / I am not limited by this body. / I am life without boundaries. / I have never been born, / and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, / manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free. / Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, / sacred thresholds on our journey. / Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek. So laugh with me, / hold my hand, / let us say good-bye, / say good-bye, to meet again soon.We meet today. / We will meet again tomorrow. / We will meet at the source every moment. / We meet each other in all forms of life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

— Kobayashi Issa, trs. Robert Hass

Girl sprawled on a couch, a girl on a horse, girl in a mirror. / The orchid’s tender stem in a hipped-shaped vase. / How long before the vessel breaks? — Terrance Hayes

This torso is a hard seed, / this mouth a lodestar guttered. / The greater sky above this one is the dream / we ever wake from, and remember — Rebecca Hazelton

I write by hand (first draft) / because it’s harder to lie / dissemble or distract / when my body’s involved — Mark Hein

Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. — Lyn Hejinian

It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient. — Ernest Hemingway

Write hard and clear about what hurts. — Ernest Hemingway

I’ve, I’ve got a bone / to pick and a crow to pluck. / I’ve got my tail tucked, wound / to lick. I prefer not to talk. / I said, I prefer not to talk. — Andrea Henchey

How can I make it beautiful? That’s always my goal. — Sara Henning

Nights I give myself / to memory’s epithet, your chin hard / on my clavicle, your hands / pinioning my wrists to the pillow / as though they were nectar- / containing spurs of delphinium — Sara Henning

tell me the story / of the body we carry with us. — Sara Henning

Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges? Hold the nape of the neck just so—carry the pieces of the body just so— — Sara Henning

The noisy rooks pass over, and you may / Pace undiverted through the netted light / As silent as a thrush with work to do — John Hewitt

This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart. — Bill Hicks

Don’t try to sell anything door-to-door would be my advice, particularly your poems. — Bob Hicok

You never really know / if you’ve done any good with your life, / so why not act as confused / as everyone else — Bob Hicok

My mother’s smile a swing-bridge / to an island city, her voice a parachute / that possessed everything it is possible to know. — Alan Hill

I remember that eight-year-old boy / who had tasted the sweetness of air, / which still clings to my mouth / and disappears when I breathe. — Edward Hirsch

And within my body, / another body … sings; there is no other body, / it sings, / there is no other world — Jane Hirshfield

I don’t want to scream forever, / I don’t want to live without proportion / like some kind of infection from the past — Tony Hoagland

Let it keep falling / Until maybe it lands in the basin of the hips / Let the Earth hold it / Like a giant seed / That’s been waiting to find the soil — Thomas Holmes

Throw out the Cartesian dualism and bio-reductionism AND psychological reductionism. Our minds are embodied, emotive, enacted, socially embedded, and extended through tools, physical and symbolic. No good mental health treatment neglects any of these aspects. — Thomas Holmes

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. — Homer

But the newborn rabbits— / no, they were not so lucky. They didn’t live / for forty years like the crane does. They saw only / grass and a few flowers, maybe the sky / and a black vine moving quickly, a dark mouth. — Patricia Hooper

It is fascinating to see into other minds, especially across culture. It has given me the impression that experience and perception are much more commonly shared than doctrines of cultural difference often suggest.  — Paul Hoover

Resurrect my day and night, the fire of each star. — Kate Houck

I always felt like reading a poem was an experience analogous to that of encountering language. Sure, there’s persona, and the world of the poem, and voice etc etc etc. But it’s all made out of language, and the language is the first thing I am made aware of. — Lisa Howe

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk / down a sidewalk without looking back. / I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, / calling and calling his name. — Marie Howe

Truth is / we have been long upon the trail / of this disaster, this smile of stove in boats / and grit along the shore. Does everyone / come home at last / to ruin? — Christopher Howell

At night / deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. / They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, / of course, they’re beautiful. — Andrew Hudgins

A hunger catches in our throats. Desire hikes up. / The night swims, fluoresces. This cannot be cured. — Amorak Huey

Saving superpowers for the last act / is such a classic mistake. My body has no plans & no prototype, / though I still expect to rush in & rescue myself. — Amorak Huey

I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way). When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken—the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength. — Richard Hugo

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. — Richard Hugo

Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. — Richard Hugo

in less than a small / touch I crumple down, and the tea / I am holding is immersed in the / puddles, and my body turns / the waters fragrant. — Tung-Hui Hu

Most days are crushed / breathless by something far away, / too beautiful, true in a fiery / and glorious way. — Tom C Hunley

What killed this man? / The chorus answered, Bare, bare fat. — Zora Neale Hurston

By this pond-sheened curve of trees and sunset/cloud, I hush. I let quietude creep closer, a wild thing nosing / at my heart — Alison Hurwitz

I want to say that / home’s the place you are: a branch, a rubber tire, abandoned cedar shingles, / bones. We’re those that always find a substrate we can cling to. — Alison Hurwitz

This is what poetry is now: the presentation of self, the presentation of words (and of images [and of images of words]), links to other content, self-promotion, and the integration of poetry into the entirety of one’s personal (and sometimes also professional) life. All of this is good and all of it is dangerous. — Geof Huth

This is what a black bear sounds like. A low deep moan, like I have disappointed him yet again. The yard is littered with sticks. A winter’s harvest collected one at a time. How we count the days. I am running out of hunger. Why do we cry? What does it mean to lose a person when we are all temporary anyway? It is an irrational reality, how beautiful a hewn beam is. How one thing can become another. — Leo Hwang

Sam Hamill on Poetry

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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All poetry aspires to the condition of music. Which is to say poetry aspires to be heard. Not read. Heard. — Sam Hamill

Do we tend to overexplain ourselves? Absolutely. — Sam Hamill

Even how you break a line is political. — Sam Hamill

I’m often asked ‘Who do you envision as your audience.’ My answer is, I don’t. — Sam Hamill

If you know what the poem is about, you’re already in trouble. — Sam Hamill

In poetry, I don’t have to be an old fat white guy. I can be anyone I want. — Sam Hamill

In the open form, the poem is about the impulse and the discipline to feel that impulse out. — Sam Hamill

Learning to think and act in the active voice is good for you. It breaks slothful habits. — Sam Hamill

Poetry exists as a body attempting communication. — Sam Hamill

Presumably we turn to poetry in part because it has no marketable value. — Sam Hamill

The demands that you make of your readers varies from poem to poem. — Sam Hamill

The only reason I became a poet is because I loved the company. — Sam Hamill

The poem has to be an act of discovery. I insist on this. — Sam Hamill

The possibility of the poem exists in communication. — Sam Hamill

The trick is to feel and think inside the poem, not reflect on thinking and feeling. — Sam Hamill

The way of poetry is a way of being alive. — Sam Hamill

This stuff was settled in the 1950s: The New Critics lost. We won. — Sam Hamill

There’s more jazz than white jazz. Trust me on this. — Sam Hamill

When a poem has no music, it’s prose. I don’t care how you chop up the lines. — Sam Hamill

Write like me: That’s the secret message of every workshop, isn’t it. — Sam Hamill

You can’t write a poem with an audience in mind unless you are writing for children or idiots. — Sam Hamill

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Source: A workshop Sam Hamill led in Seattle in 2008.