RATTLE Conversations

Sam Hamill

66 rattle conversations m Hamill is the author of fourteen volumes of original poetry, including Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995, Gratitude, and Dumb Luck; three collections of essays, and two dozen volumes translated from ancient Greek, Latin, Estonian, Japanese, and Chinese, most recently, The Essential Chuang Tzu, Narrow Road to the Interior & Other Writings of Basho, and Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese. He is editor of The Gift of Tongues: Twenty-five Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press; The Erotic Spirit; Selected Poems of Thomas McGrath and (with Bradford Morrow) The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. He taught in prisons for fourteen years, in artist-in-residency programs for twenty years, and has worked extensively with battered women and children. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, two Washington Governor’s Arts Awards, a PEN Anti-censorship Award, and other honors. He is Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press. In 2003, he founded Poets Against the War. His new and selected poems and translations, Almost Paradise, was published by Shambhala Publications in March, 2005. A collection of essays on poets and poetry, Avocations, is available from Red Hen Press, 2007. Sam Hamill September 3, 2004 Fox: First, I have to ask, how did you come by this unusual, wonderful location? Hamill: Well, I was looking for a place for Copper Canyon Press in the Northwest. I was even actually thinking about moving to Canada in 1974, when the folks at Centrum started the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and they thought it might be a good idea to have an editor and a press in residence. So, through Centrum, Copper Canyon was able to rent this building and become artist in residence under the umbrella corporation of Centrum. We’ve been here now for thirty years. Fox: Wow, that’s neat! Some writers feel that they write well in one place and not in another. Does this affect you at all? Hamill: Well, no. [Fox laughs] Although the poetry of place, as it is often called, or what John Haines calls the “Place of Sense,” I think is a very important ingredient in who and what I am and who and what Copper Canyon is. We are Northwest Coast, we are Pacific Rim. That’s a direct connection to Asia. I translate, as you know, classical Japanese and Chinese poetry. The landscape, the geography, the flora here, is very reminiscent of northern Japan. We have volcanic mountains. The land-bridge, anthropological idea that the people we often refer to as Native Americans may in fact be Mongolian, Chinese, Inuit, who knows? Fox: Yes. Hamill: So all of that, I think, comes into play, both in my poetry and in, sort of, my general sensibility. Certainly in my Buddhist practice. Fox: And how does your Buddhist practice impact your poetry? 67 68 rattle conversations Hamill: Well, Zen mind is Zen mind. [Fox laughs loudly] I can’t really answer that question. People sometimes will come up to me and say, “You know, I really like your Zen poems.” I don’t know what that means. Which of my poems are not Zen poems? [Fox laughs] But, Zen is an attitude and a conduct, and that attitude and conduct infuses one’s poetry, theoretically, with the spirit of Zen. I don’t often write about Zen as a subject. But, certainly, Zen, Mind-Zen attitude, um, ever present in . . . I mean, I hope it’s ever present in whatever I do. But I’m the last one to know. Fox: [laughing] Yes. Over the course of your career, has your writing changed in any significant way? Hamill: Well, it’s certainly evolved. For the last ten years, I’ve been writing a lot of poems in classical Japanese measure, so that requires 5-7-5-7-7. A block of short poems. Except I link them together and turn them into long poems of thirty-one-syllable stanzas. That happened because I translated so much of that poetry, and began performing with a shakuhachi player named Christopher Blasdel, who uses a lot of classical Japanese bamboo flute music in our performances. Those rhythms became just sort of part of my body knowledge. And I found that I could write a certain kind of discursive poem in...