The Practice of Compassion, the Practice of Poetry

An Interview with Sam Hamill by Farideh Hassanzadeh ( Mostafavi)

Sam Hamill is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry including Dumb Luck (BOA Editions, 2002), Gratitude (1998), and Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995 (1995), which won a Pushcart Prize; three collections of essays; and two dozen volumes translated from ancient Greek, Latin, Estonian, Japanese, and Chinese, most recently, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (2000), Narrow Road to the Interior & Other Writings of Basho (1999), and The Essential Chuang Tzu (1998). He is editor of The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002, with Bradford Morrow), The Gift of Tongues: Twenty-five Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press (1996), The Erotic Spirit (1995), and Selected Poems of Thomas McGrath (1988). Hamill 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 Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, and two Washington Governor's Arts Awards. He is Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press and director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. Hamill currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
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Farideh Hassanzadeh ( Mostafavi) is an Iranian poet and translator. Her published translations include : T.S.Eliot’s selected poems, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life ,by Ian Gibson ,Anthology of Contemporary African poetry , Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, Women Poets of the world , Latin American Poetry in the 20th Century and the last one : Iaroslav Sefert's Selected Poems . Her anthology of Contemporary American poetry will appear in autumn

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F.H. - How did you find poetry ?

S.H.: I was orphaned during World War II. My father came back from the Pacific War and found me being abused by my mother. He took me away. He was a fry-cook for a carnival, an illiterate. He gave me to some people in Utah, telling them his life would leave me illiterate, and that he wanted me to “read & write.” They read the Romantic poets to me, and Robert Service and Longfellow and Carl Sandburg. As a teenager, I dropped out of high school to go to San Francisco in the late 50s, to be around Rexroth and the Beat poets. R. H. Blyth says, “Poetry is Zen; Zen is poetry.”


F.H- Unlike many contemporary poets who never listen to anything but the loneliness of their heart, you involve yourself in the disasters of the modern world and sympathize with victims of war and of Imperialism. This not only has not moved you away from poetry as a form of art but has also taken  you closer to the true essence of poetry. I like to know your own idea about the social verse and other kind of poetry. 


S.H.-Poetry is social speech. Whether the poem is whispered to one’s paramour or presented to a huge public audience, whether it’s said in a conversational way or sung or chanted, the poem is social communication. We often hear of people “speaking from the heart.” ”In Buddhist practice, we have a bodhisattva, Kannon (Japanese) or Kuan Shih Yin (Chinese). Her name means she-who-perceives-the-cries-of-the-world, and she’s called the Bodhisattva of Compassion. She embodies the practice of compassion. All Buddhist practice is rooted in compassion. “Being is suffering.” The First Noble Truth. To be so self-engaged that one becomes disengaged from the conditions of one’s brothers and sisters, one’s community or country, or the community of nations and cultures, is disastrous. The good poem connects us more deeply with the world, whether through a flower or a war.

F.H.- You confess in your poems that you have not God . But I am sure that God loves all true poets like you. I am sure that your poems encourage Him as much as any sincere prayer. Any way I wish I knew your idea about religious literature or the relation between religion and literature


S.H.-Religion is based upon faith. The major religions (including some forms of Buddhism) believe in a “next life” or a “paradise.” I have no such faith. Nor do I believe in some magical guy sitting on a cloud somewhere and passively taking in all the suffering of suffering humanity. And doing nothing about it.
I am in THIS world, and I haven’t long in it; therefore I plan to pay attention to what’s before my eyes in a rational way. I suppose I am an existentialist.
More people have been slaughtered in the name of “god” than we could possibly number.


F.H.: You say : More people have been slaughtered in the name of “god” than we could possibly number.
one can say : More people have been slaughtered in the name of "love" than we could possibly number.
or : More people have been slaughtered in the name of “freedom” than we could possibly number
I don't ask: Is this a good reason to deny love and freedom ?

S.H.- “God” is a proper noun; “love” and “freedom” are abstract nouns. People have also been killed for apples and oranges. And for water.
I “believe in” love and freedom. I PRACTICE them. I do not believe violence is a solution, no matter what the problem is. My beliefs in no way impinge upon your right to claim God. But “true believers” impinge upon me constantly and are in fact killing each other all over the world
 

F H - My next question is about love. In your poems, even political ones, especially political ones, love gushes out of the lines. This is why they never sound like slogans. Please tell me about love. May I ask if in your life "the imperious call of art” has ever put”a tragic end to love? “----May I ask if in your life "the imperious call of art” has ever put "a tragic end to love ? "

S.H.--My first marriage ended when my daughter was not quite 3. I was working for bill collectors and loan companies, and I was dying inside. I had to go to college. I mean I HAD to go to college. I was smart and I wanted to continue a writing life, and I simply was not built for the American middle class. Having been orphaned myself, leaving my daughter was "tragic" is every way, psychologically. I was risking her (psychological) life as well as my own. But the tragedy worked out fine. Eron is an intensive care nurse in Vancouver, British Columbia (her daddy used to take her to BC to show her "what a non-aggressive, non-threatening, non-war-mongering country feels like." She's been in Canada for 20 years.My second wife was Tree Swenson. We divorced after 20 years. I fell in love with my wife, Gray, in 1978.
She is my first wife because she is the first to whom I made those traditional vows—along with a Buddhist vow..

Rexroth used to say, "Erotic love is the highest form of contemplation." In a non-theistic culture, that's probably true.
I'm an atheist. And because I think Deism is nonsense, I had to redefine for myself what is meant by (I always use this term) the PRACTICE of love. The Buddha informs the practice of love, but that love tends toward the ephemeral. He tells us to stop clinging. But then there are the 10,000 milk-maids with whom Krisna frolics or orgies. Erotic love (after that initial "charge") is a marriage of passion and compassion. The tragedy of Romeo & Juliet is not the tragedy of young love, but the tragedy of social imposition, of social hatred working against individual passion and compassion. The "children" in R&J are the adults, not the teenagers.

One of the reasons Zen became so institutionalized in China & Japan is that in some forms it encouraged "monkish" attitudes toward celibacy and other forms of "non-attachment." But that's a very difficult practice to maintain. The great Zen Master Ikkyu ran Daitoku-ji (the largest training center in Japan) for 9 days, and then posted a note: "Your dharma (teaching/truth) is bullshit. If you want to talk about it, you'll find me in a whorehouse or a sake parlor." The monks had been slipping into civilian attire and sneaking out to go drinking or whoring. Ikkyu didn't object to drinking or whoring  so much, but had very strong opinions about hypocrisy. When he was in his 60s, Ikkyu fell in love with a 27-yr-old blind singer, and he moved her right into his quarters in the temple and wrote erotic poems about their love. Three poems:

Song of the Dream Garden

Pillowed on your thighs in a dream garden,
little flower with its perfumed stamen,

singing, sipping from the stream of you—
Sunset. Moonlight. Our song continues.

*

Face to Face with My Lover on Daito's Anniversary

Monks recite the sutras in honor of the Founder,
their many voices cacophonous in my ear.

Afterward, making love, our intimate whispers
mock the empty formal discipline of others.

*

My hand is Lady Mori's hand
and knows her mastery of love.

When I am weak, she resurrects my jeweled stem.
The monks I train are grateful then.


F F.H.--In 1949, Muriel Rukeyser wrote: "Poetry is foreign to us ,we don't let it enter our daily "lives."
Does poetry have an acknowledged place in America?

S.H.-More people are reading poetry in America today than ever before. There were about 2000 volumes of poetry published in the U.S. last year.

Are most Americans aware of poetry? Of course not. Neither are most French or German or Japanese except in the vaguest way. And for the last century the world has come to American poetry as the vanguard. There are more poets writing better poetry in the USA today than ever before. But learning from poetry requires discipline, and most Americans are utterly lost in a perpetual struggle for immediate self-gratification... so naturally most Americans are oblivious not only to poetry, but to their own history, to art, to the international consequences of the All- American Dream of immediate self-gratification.

Poetry is not for lazy readers. Poetry is not for lazy minds and lackluster hearts.

Most people everywhere think of poetry as museum writing. But of course they are wrong. And because they are wrong they miss the opportunity to let contemporary poetry open their eyes and lift their wings...
Poetry can be a path to enlightenment, but only if one invests enough to make it so.

F.H. Fame, means: condition of being well known. You are a well-known poet. Please tell me what are the good or bad points of being well known? Ann Stevenson in her book: Bitter Fame claims that Sylvia Plath 's greatest mental distress was Fame. She needed it . James Tate in one of his essays says : Fame for a true artist is luxuries .What is your idea?

S.H : I've never thought of myself as "famous." Because I'm not. I'm certainly well-known in the literary world, in part because of my 32 years at the helm of Copper Canyon Press as well as having published more than forty books. Since I haven't experienced fame, I'm an innocent.

Few poets are public figures, and those that are have become so through years of activism, like Gary Snyder and Adrienne Rich. I too am a lifelong activist, but I live 2 hours from Seattle and have kept my nose in my studies more often than not, while serving my conscience through work with battered women and children and through work with imprisoned men. For the past two years I've worked a lot on behalf of Poets Against the war, and that has brought me attention from other parts of the world as well as here in the USA. But I'm not famous and have no desire to be so. I'm often called a poet's poet because my practice is highly literary, both my Zen practice and my poetry practice.
I've always been pretty reclusive. Half ancient Zen hermit in my "Shadow Hermitage," Kage-an.

َF.H. : I strongly agree with Kafka’s statement that: “war, in its first phase, emerges out of total lack of sense of imagination. How do you view the main source of war?”

S.H: War is childish—infantile—behavior. War is a country soiling its diapers
and pitching a fit, a temper tantrum. Kafka's right: no imagination; Sappho's right: war is childish. I like to think of that splendid movie about Gandhi, and the image of him in his loincloth, walking stick in hand, standing up to the British military, absolutely fearless in his convictions about nonviolence. I think of Nazim Hikmet rising up out of the bilge where he'd been thrown, and he throws back his head and looks up at his oppressors, and he sings. The only way to achieve peace is to embody peace. By embodying peace within ourselves, we bring peace to the home. With peace in the home, we bring peace to our community, with peace in the community, we bring peace to the state. Peace comes from within, and it requires great imagination. It cannot be imposed from above, such imposition being, by definition, un-peaceful. That is why the Saddams and Bushes and Osamas and other tyrants wage fear. Fear unsettles peaceful lives. Fear brought the Nazis to power. Fear allows us (Americans) to finance a huge military while our schools and our country's infrastructure are falling apart. Bush wants a fearful future. He's a heaven-or-damnation Christian and believes in an apocalypse. "Believe in me or burn in Hell!" Scary stories keep the children in their beds.

F.H. : Let’s admit that finding solitude for a man to stay home and write is as natural, as for a woman to peel onion in the kitchen. Even if a woman comes from an advanced society; a place where equality is not the slogan among men and women, she feels uneasy with the circumstances when she sits behind a desk to write, she feels unusual, as if she has betrayed others. Her conscious suffers from the guilt that she might have robbed others’ rights.
If you do not agree with this statement, then, would you please express what is the difference between Women’s Literature, and Men’s Literature?
 

S.H.:This is a cultural thing, and maybe a "motherhood" thing as well. NO woman should EVER feel guilty about having a job, whether it's writing or sweeping floors. We are no longer bound by our biology and women NEED to free themselves of that kind of guilt. Would you want Soufi to feel guilty every time she sits down to write a poem? That's ridiculous.

The old cultural models no longer serve us well. Birth control liberated women. We need more female poets and more female government leadership and more liberation, not less. Divorce in our culture doesn't carry the stigma it does in yours. Gray is director of our local Habitat for Humanity program, working long hours to help poor people get in a home they can afford (with assistance). She spent 25 years working with battered women and children—a worldwide problem—and that's how I met her: working for nonviolence in the home, nonviolence within one's self.

When you write or translate you are not "robbing" anyone. You are being a model for future generations. You are making a gift that lasts.

Good men admire and want to be partners with strong women. Your husband is a perfect example.

F.H. - For me ,the letter of dedication in the poetry books are considered the most important poem .It shows the depth of the poet's heart ,while the other poems of the book may only reveal artistry. However, whenever I read Novels, Critics, or Articles, I do not feel this way. As a poet , how much do you value these feelings of a reader such as me?
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S.H. : The very function of poetry is to connect with an emotional content in balance or harmony with an intellectual content AND the music that conveys, clarifies, intensifies those emotional engagements.

There is a lot of pretty good poetry of wit. But wit—being smart, knowing irony and the like—will only take one so far. The bigger vision connects us with the roots of our traditions, with the most ancient human needs to connect—with one another and with the world in which we live. Gary Snyder once observed, "As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth." Yes, exactly. A reverence for where we are and a joy in being fully human, but faithful to the truth and courageous enough to stand nose-to-nose with the tiger when that time comes. "The rhythm," Ezra Pound said, "is the test of the poet's sincerity." The sounds of the poem are its body, its embodiment; they contain the heartbeat and the rhythm of breathing and set those rhythms: to the heart by way of the ear, to the head/mind by way of the eye.

Poetry itself is an erotic experience. That's why erotic poetry is so very difficult to write. Writhing body-parts can't explain it. Gushing metaphors only muddy the waters. It's so very easy to overload the senses. There is more real mature love and eroticism in W.C. Williams's famous plum in the icebox poem than most of Ovid.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


It's so simple, and yet so deeply and beautifully complex. An entire relationship is revealed. Sometimes flirting is better than being in bed together. Sometimes being a little bad is awfully good. Sometimes saying less says a whole lot more.


F.H. -For me, music is similar to the sea. It conquers me. It draws me in. It fascinates me, yet it invokes fear in my guts. I fear the vastness of it. What can I do, since I don’t know how to swim.
 

S.H. : ALL poetry aspires to the conditions of music. Our word for poetry comes from the Greek and means "words of the lyre," or words-in-music. Root word: Maker. I love music. Lots of kinds of music, from hardcore, down-home country music (Hank Williams & George Jones & Waylon Jennings) to traditional Delta and Chicago blues, REAL country blues in the black tradition; from the jazz I grew up playing and listening to (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk) to Bob Dylan and early Rolling Stones. About the only music I don't care for is opera and pop. Don't get the former, the latter is ear pollution.

For a poet, the full body of each syllable is a note. The sound of vowel and consonant open the music of the spoken voice. "The rhythm," Ezra Pound used to say, "is the test of the poet's sincerity." My rhythms flow from the body. They are more organic than mathematical. The ta-dum of heartbeat against the rhythm of breathing, the line measuring each musical phrase.


F.H: What is the role of poets and writers in the age of mass media and global terror ? Do you believe that a writer must write as a witness, not as an observer?

S.H. : -I think we should not say "the writer MUST" anything. Poetry is a very large house with plenty of room for both those for whom poetry is a witness, like Milosz, and those for whom poetry is more private, the voice more personal. My own poetry crosses over and back, witness to intimate whispers, public cries to simple songs. Today I'm editing a trilogy by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by one Fady Joudah. Even Darwish isn't entirely a "poetry of witness," one of the three books being very beautiful love poems. The same is true of Neruda, or Lorca, etc etc.


F.H. : -What many young poets don't believe and when they hear from great poets , they believe and think about it .

S.H. - They often don't WANT to hear the obvious. Still in Samasara? Dogen Zenji said, "We are ALL enlightened. We just forget to behave accordingly."
It is one thing to be a poet at 25, and quite another at 65. Young poets often write beautiful erotic poetry, but for great love poetry, read the elders. A great poet benefits from maturing.
Because poetry has been bound up with the Literature Dept —cap L—it is and has been plagued by theories and theorists. Mostly, they examine minutiae, muddying the waters. How can people who don't WRITE poetry, who don't NEED poetry, TEACH poetry? They can't; so they expound on theories.

It's like Zen: You can read all the books in the world, but until you actually SIT (and I mean sit according to Zen traditions), you don't have a clue. It's one thing to read about Picasso, and another to try to copy his paintings.
There's no one way to write, no one way to read. Chinese is read vertically, Hebrew from right to left, English (a compendium of languages) from left to right. And yet all of their poetries share a deep engagement in lyricism.

For the poet: Go in fear, in dread even, of abstraction. School YOURSELF on the masters. And make a commitment to daily practice, both writing practice and spiritual practice.

Then... MAYBE... in thirty years...


F.H. :: Gustave Flaubert in a letter writes : " I want no love, neither wealth, nor fame; what is bothersome for me most is not having enough “sympathy around”, sympathy, sympathy. We could never have enough of this one!"


S.H. : -Want! Want! Want! Want wealth! Want fame! Want love! Want attention! Want sympathy for my wanting!
What a baby is Flaubert!

I want to write a poem that will help open my eyes as well as someone else's. My sympathies are for those whose suffering is far, far greater than any I've even known, for those whose suffering reaches even beyond what I've read about or seen or can imagine.

Today I think of the mothers and grandmothers of Fallujah whose husbands and sons and grandsons are mostly slaughtered and whose city is reduced to rubble. I think of the girls in Muslim culture who are not taught to read and write and I try to imagine what a poem from such a girl might be like... I try to imagine standing on the Israeli / Palestinian border and looking both ways and listening to the people. I try to imagine life in the barrios of Mexico City or in the villages of Tibet.

And my sympathies are for those who haven't yet realized that most if not all of our suffering is of our own making and only we can alleviate it. Neither Allah nor Jehovah is going to stop the killing or the suffering. This religious/cultural war, like all human tragedy, is ours because we made it so, and it is ours to overcome.
I long for a compassionate world.-

F.H.: How do you see lady death?!

S.H. : -This one’s difficult! Since I don’t exactly face death at this moment, I can know death only as it already exists within me. I embody my death as I embody my life. Hence, the sage advice, “Live as though you were already dead.”

That’s not as abstract or philosophical as it may sound. I mean it in a very practical way.

Nevertheless, I must also consider the dead and the disappeared from Vilnus, from whence I just returned: 400,000 people vanished under a tyrannical regime; I must consider the Palestinians and what they face each day; the Jews (and non-Jews) of Israel; the people of Baghdad or in the burnt-out ruins of Brooklyn. There is slow death that eats the soul of the living, or can eat it if we give up hope and the struggle for human dignity. That is the death I fear: the slow social death of our humanity. I see the rise of fascism in my homeland, the growing division between the few wealthy and the vast poor, the ignorance and hate-mongering so prominent in our politics this year.

In that context, my own death means nothing. It will come when it comes. Perhaps I will resist; perhaps I will welcome it. Between here and there? The practice of compassion, the practice of poetry.