Sam Hamill: "Ars Poetica"

PREFACE: ARS POETICA

Some say the poem's
best made from natural speech
from the inner life.
I say, That is sometimes true.
The poem's a natural thing.

Some say the poem
should rise into purest song,
a formality,
articulate expression
achieved through complex structures

derived from classics--
which also is true enough.
Let the song arise
as it will.  Learn to revise
the life.  Beware.  Disguises

rise up everywhere:
most dangerously, self-in-
fatuation.  "More
poets fail," Pound declared,
"from lack of character than

from lack of talent."
Some insist the poem is
heaven-sent, claiming
angelic heirs.  The poem,
I believe, is a failure

elevated in-
to triumph, a form of truth
wrought from mortal flesh
and blood that will soon perish,
but which--for one brief moment

or an hour--reveals
the tragic human spirit
in the very act
of imagining itself
cured of the sickness of self.

The poem cannot,
finally, be explained nor
defined.  The true gift
poetry bestows begins
and ends with humility

before the task.  All
the suffering of this world
can be truly felt,
absorbed adn transcended, just
by the act of listening

to that deepest voice
speaking from within.  Forget
hagiography.
All the great masters are dead.
Forget rime and irony.

Forget words, meter,
diction, whole syllabaries--
the literary.
The heart by way of the ear.
What's that you wanted to say?

--SAM HAMILL



from Gratitude,
BOA Editions, Ltd.
Rochester, NY  1998


(This one is for Eric, a very welcome house-guest)

Sam Hamill: "The Nets"

THE NETS

Somewhere someone is untangling
the heavy nets of desire
beside a small fire at the edge of the sea.

He works slowly, fingers bleeding,
half thinking, half listening, knowing
only that the sea makes him thirsty.

--SAM HAMILL


from Gratitude, 
BOA Editions, Ltd.
Rochester, NY  1998

Sam Hamill's "The Gift of Tongues," the Generous Spirit, and PIracy

THE GIFT OF TONGUES


Everything I steal, I give away.
Once, in pines almost as tall as these,
same crescent moon sliding gently by,
I sat curled on my knees, smoking with a friend,
sipping tea, swapping Coyote tales and lies. 


He said something to me
about words, that each is a name,
and that every name is God's. I who have
no god sat in the vast emptiness silent
as I could be. A way that can be named

is not the way. Each word reflects
the Spirit which can't be named. Each word
a gift, its value in exact proportion
to the spirit in which it is given.
Thus spoken, these words I give 


by way of Lao Tzu's old Chinese, stolen
by a humble thief twenty-five centuries later.
The Word is only evidence of the real:
in the Hopi tongue, there is no whale;
and, in American English, no Fourth World. 

--Sam Hamill ~


"The Gift of Tongues," for me, voices a certain generosity of spirit that I admire, a certain spiritual perspective or dilemma that I sometimes inhabit.

Hamill's poem also speaks to the linkages of appropriation and use that ought to be infused with that sense of generosity in ways that parallel, say, Gary Snyder in his poem "Axe Handles" and in his life as well.

Hamill's poem came up in a conversation with a friend about piracy, Internet and media piracy in context, but generally piracy vs. theft and piracy vs. copying.  I quoted the above poem's opening line--"Everything I steal, I give away"--to highlight what I feel is the proper generous spirit of Internet sharing, say, or of classroom teaching.  Give credit where credit is due,  certainly, and encourage everyone to seek out the originals in whatever format, whatever venue.  (I quote Shakespeare or Byron in part to foster an interest in, a curiosity about, such writers.)

Piracy lacks such a generous spirit, despite all the attractive emblems of the piratical.

"Take what you can." 
"And give nothing back."
--those sentiments belong at best in a Hollywood fantasy, not the real world.

And while I love those lines in the moment of watching that first Pirates of the Caribbean film,  I think part of the charm of such costumed and indulgent selfishness comes from context, as ever.  These are down-and-out, though irrepressible ne'er-do-wells--Captain Jack Sparrow and his first mate, Mr. Gibbs--and such voicing of the pirate's code is as much fantasy-projection for them as it is for most of us in the audience.  The lines would have a much different flavor being spoken by Wall Street bankers and brokers, suited up but ties loosened, perhaps, with whiskeys in hand.


Sam Hamill, Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995, 
White Pine Press: Fredonia, New York, 1995.

(Thanks to MR for the conversation.)

The poster presented at the top is self-expressive, a wonderful promotional tool and work of art for a worthy anthology from an excellent publishing house: Copper Canyon Press.  In that particular anthology I first encounted Hamill's poem quoted above, though I have just reread and presented the poem from Hamill's volume Destination Zero.