Sam Hamill Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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

  War, Reading, Struggle

• 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.

• 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 Hamill

  Writing, Practice, Separation

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

• 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.

• 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.

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