A Poet’s Work: The Other Side of Poetry by Sam Hamill, and: Passport by Galen Garwood (review)

Reviews 175 A Poet’s Work: The Other Side of Poetry. By Sam Hamill. (Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1990. 229 pages, $19.95.) Passport. Paintings by Galen Garwood; poems by Sam Hamill. (Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1989. 43 pages, $22.50.) Shadow-work, according to Sam Hamill, is work done without pay: charity work, family work, community work—often what’s referred to as “woman’s work.” It is also poet’s work, therefore feminized in the popular imagination—the reading, studying and meditating that ispreparation for the “gift” of the poem. Mr. Hamill’s volume of social and literary criticism, A Poet’s Work: The OtherSide of Poetry,is basicallyfor, by, and about “shadowwork ”—a long, hard journey through the conscience and consciousness of a great scholar and artist. An ex-con who teaches in prisons, an ex-batterer who counsels battered women, the highly engaged and engaging Mr. Hamill is also very much a Pacific Rim sensibility. A Zen practitioner, steeped in the poetry and history of China and Japan, the politics of the disenfranchised, he is inevitably drawn, in his American readings, to Jeffers, Haines, Snyder and Rexroth, especially Rexroth. And the astonishing erudition and moral fervor he brings to the page islike Rexroth’s, and Pound’sbefore him. Connectedness and accountability in the interest of a better civilization are his themes, just as they were theirs. He lascerates Brodsky (admittedly in translation) in favor of Paz, Vic­ torian bourgeois decorativeness in favor of the classical plainness (one might say, planed speech) of the Greeks, the Latins, the Chinese and the Japanese; he aligns our tradition of poet to Talmudic history and thought, as well as Greek, decries the amnesiac poetry of workshop conventions, the corruption of money, the cults of personality and the language of psycho-babble. He com­ ments astutely on the art of translation, the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry (and translated poetry generally) on American poetry of the latter halfcentury , and commends Rexroth as the great poet/mind of the mid-century. That society has almost always conspired to demean the poet’swork is one of the lessons of the book, but that there are also riches to be had in the life of exile—like the frozen dewdrops handed down centuries in the pages of Basho —might be considered one of the Zen motifs of the work, enriched on the European flank by Hamill’s deep and abiding relationship with Camus. Indeed, the 8th-century T’ang poet, Tu Fu, emerges as something of the ultimate master in this exploration of self-mastery in the grist of myriad poems and sensibilities, a poet whose almost Nietzchean undergoing and vanishing left poems of such supreme limpidity (a favorite Hamill word) as to have outlasted dynasties and crossed continents. * * s s Out of such heated engagement, then, into such cool detachment: the work of the artist. Passport, a collaborative work with painter Galen Garwood, does what every poet dreams of doing, piercing our common dream/nightmare in a suit of just 20 immaculate small poems (like Pavese poems miniaturized, 176 Western American Literature chiselled into stony, but still almost colloquial quiet),the moral fervor here not in the words but in the icy whiteness around the words, the deft craftsmanship of excision and compression that allows the poetry to echo, leaving the seashell ear mouthing these sudden myths of Nagasaki, Dresden and Treblinka, of Berryman flinging himself from Hart Crane’s bridge, of the edges of love and light—each small, dream-like poem perfectly matched and anticipated by the haunting blacks and whites of Garwood’s images reading like doors into our collective consciousness. “Such conversations,” writes Denise Levertov of the collaboration, “far from mixing media and thus blurring both, are best described in Rilke’s figuration of true marriage: ‘a mutual bordering and guarding of two solitudes.’” Here isone of my favorites. NEAR THESSALONIKI I have loved this shore. I have lain on it hours only to get up and walk away, and turn and look back on the trough in the sand my body made. I have walked this coast in summer, passed the beautiful bodies, the ambiguous bodies smelling...