Latest Sam Hamill Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

• 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.

• Of course, there are some people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up in public and take his clothes off. I don't do that, but I liked Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy.

  Sam Hamill

  Nice, Clothes, People

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

• 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.

• I haven't seen any poet in this country behave nearly as rudely as Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly. I'm not asking these people to approve of everyone's manners. I don't feel obliged to defend the manners of every poet who submits a poem to my web site. That's not my job. My job is to provide them with an opportunity to speak from the heart. If there's not much in the heart and if the mouth is running wild, that's not my problem.

  Sam Hamill

  Running, Country, Jobs

  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.

• The oldest cliché in the world is about "what's lost in translation," but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's gained by translation, and the answer is everything. Our language is a compendium of translation.

  Sam Hamill

  Intelligent, Answers, World

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

• 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.

• One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain.

  Sam Hamill

  Voice, Self, Chinese

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

• I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.

  Sam Hamill

  School, Law, Dynasty

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

• I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do.

  Sam Hamill

  Taken, Swimming, Thinking

  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 got interested in Zen when I was a teenage beatnik on the streets of San Francisco. And it was my interest in Zen, in part, that got me into the Marine Corps, because that was a ticket to Asia. So I spent a couple of years on Okinawa and began reading and thinking about how I wanted to go about conducting my life.

  Sam Hamill

  Couple, Teenage, Reading

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

• 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.

• All I'd ever heard my entire life in my family was, "Nobody wanted you, and we took you in." When you get that into your head at a tender age, you really feel like you are an unlovable human being, and then you behave like one. That's exactly what I had done. It took me many years to deal with my own violence and find my own niche.

  Sam Hamill

  Years, Age, Done

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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