Sam Hamill - The Progressive Interview - Interview

Progressive, The, April, 2003 by Anne-Marie Cusac

"This is where I come to hide," says Sam Hamill as he pulls the car into the grove of fir and cedar surrounding the house and studio he built himself. But he is not hiding. He has scheduled his Progressive interview hard upon his return from New York City, where, during a blizzard, he and poets Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Martin Espada, and others read to a large and enthusiastic audience at Lincoln Center.

It is a late February day near Port Townsend, Washington, and Hamill has had little chance to retreat from public attention since mid-January, when he received a note from Laura Bush requesting his presence at a White House symposium on Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

Hamill responded with an e-mail to friends. It read, in part: "When I picked up my mail and saw the letter marked `The White House,' I felt no joy. Rather, I was overcome by a kind of nausea.... Only the day before I had read a lengthy report on the President's proposed `Shock and Awe' attack on Iraq, calling for saturation bombing that would be like, the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians. The only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam." Hamill called upon all poets "to speak up for the conscience of our country" by submitting poems for "an anthology of protest."

Within thirty-six hours, the submissions of poems to Hamill's project had overwhelmed his e-mail account. The First Lady heard of the poets' plans and canceled the symposium.

On February 12, the day the White House symposium was supposed to happen, poets participated in more than 135 readings and events around the country denouncing Bush's war moves against Iraq. By that date, Hamill's new web site (www.poetsagainstthewar. org) had published more than 6,000 poems.

At first glance, Hamill might seem a surprising person to cause an uproar. The esteemed editor, translator, essayist, and poet is, by his own admission, reclusive. But his life of contemplation and dedication to poetry prepared him more than adequately for his confrontation with the U.S. government.

Among many other things, he is the translator of Lu Chi's When Fu: The Art of Writing, a book that stresses the importance of calling things by their right name, a Confucian idea that applies as much to political rulers as it does to emotional states or descriptions of the natural world.

Hamill is a founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, which is known for its independence, as well as for its accurate and graceful translations. The Copper Canyon list includes such poets as Olga Broumas, Hayden Carruth, Cyrus Cassells, Odysseas Elytis, Carolyn Kizer, Thomas McGrath, Cesare Pavese, Kenneth Rexroth, and Eleanor Wilner.

An avowed pacifist, Hamill opens his book A Poet's Work with a quote from the Albert Camus essay "Neither Victims nor Executioners," which he says changed his life. "All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice," Camus writes. "After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being."

Q: Why did your call for a new Poets Against the War movement elicit such support?

Sam Hamill: It was almost as if they were waiting breathlessly for someone to step forward and say, "Enough is enough." We became a chorus. Last week, the poems were coming in at one per minute. We have twenty-five editors downloading and formatting poems. We're well over 11,000 poems already, and we'll publish an anthology of probably about 225 pages of theoretically the best.

Q: Who inspired you to do this?

Hamill: The spirit of Denise Levertov, and listening to Galway Kinnell and Philip Levine and Etheridge Knight and June Jordan during the 1960s. That made me decide when I received the invitation to the White House that I simply couldn't just say no thank you and pretend that it was OK.

Poets should speak out against what we see as the assault against our Constitution and the warmongering that's going on. I'm perfectly willing to lay down my life for my Constitution, but I am not willing to take a life for it or any other reason because I think killing people is counterproductive.

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, although it was one of those lifetime moments, as they say.

Q: Can you describe what the Poets Against the War movement was like during Vietnam?

Hamill: Well, I can remember, I think it was 1967, sitting in the First Unitarian Church in Isla Vista, Santa Barbara, and seeing Phil Levine come out on the little stage. He sat on the edge and said, "You know, sometimes it's hard not to hate my country for the way I feel, at times, but I won't let that happen." And then he read, "They Feed They Lion," this incredibly powerful, incantatory poem that was inspired in part by the burning of Detroit in 1967 and the riots that followed. And then 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.