Sam Hamill Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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 Hamill

  Lying, Important, Elements

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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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 Hamill

  Summer, Spring, Flower

  Sam Hamill (2002). “Dumb Luck: Poems”, p.88, BOA Editions, Ltd.

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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 Hamill

  Country, Want Something, Done

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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 Hamill

  Struggle, Knowledge, World

  Sam Hamill (1995). “Destination zero: poems, 1970-1995”, White Pine Pr

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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

  Humanity, Concern, Humans

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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 Hamill

  Powerful, War, Writing

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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

  Government, Sound, Culture

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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 Hamill

  Government, Groups, Doe

  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 Hamill

  War, Teenager, Self

  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 Hamill

  Writing, Our World, Chance

  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 Hamill

  Perfect, Leader, Political

  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 Hamill

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Compassion

  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 Hamill

  Men, Wings, Order

  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 Hamill

  Nice, Bed, Would Be

  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 Hamill

  Men, Political, Doe

  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 Hamill

  Lincoln Center, Chinese, Scholar

  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 Hamill

  Beautiful, Political, Riding

  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 Hamill

  Jobs, Wife, Feel Good

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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.

  Sam Hamill

  Religious, War, World

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• George W. 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."

  Sam Hamill

  Struggle, Mirrors, Evil

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• 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?"

  Sam Hamill

  People, Littles, Sometimes

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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.

  Sam Hamill

  Running, Suffering, Way

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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.

  Sam Hamill

  Reading, Kids, Years

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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.

  Sam Hamill

  Art, Thinking, Humanity

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• 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.

  Sam Hamill

  Writing, Numbers, Bird

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

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