Sam Hamill Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

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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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• 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.

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• 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.

  Sam Hamill

  Country, Powerful, Hate

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

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• 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.

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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.

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• Korea's first Zen Master-poet wrote simple yet elegant poetry of the world he inhabited, both physically and spiritually, and of daily insights-a pause along the way for a deep clear breath, a moon-viewing moment, a seasonal note or a farewell poem to a departing monk. His poems speak softly and clearly, like hearing a temple bell that was struck a thousand years ago.

  Sam Hamill

  Farewell, Moon, Simple

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• 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.

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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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