The Sam Hamill workshop happened on Sunday, October 5, 2008 at the Richard Hugo House. It was co-sponsored by Poets & Writers and the Hugo House, and presented by the Northwest SPokenword LAB as part of the Red Sky Reunion Series.
Workshop participant Dana Guthrie Martin took down some of Sam’s quotes:
The poem has to be an
act of discovery. I insist on this.
If you know what the
poem is about, you're already in trouble.
In the open form, the
poem is about the impulse and the discipline to feel that impulse out.
When a poem has no
music, it's prose. I don't care how you chop up the
lines.
All poetry aspires to
the condition of music. Which is to say poetry aspires to be
heard. Not read. Heard.
In poetry, I don't
have to be an old fat white guy. I can be anyone I want.
Do we tend to overexplain ourselves? Absolutely.
Presumably we turn to
poetry in part because it has no marketable value.
Write like me: That's
the secret message of every workshop, isn't it.
The greatest gift I
could give you is a reading list.
Learning to think and
act in the active voice is good for you. It breaks slothful habits.
The trick is to feel
and think inside the poem, not reflect on thinking and feeling.
The elegy's going to
come when you're not expecting to write the elegy.
Learning the line is
like practicing your scales as a musician.
There's more jazz than white jazz. Trust me on this.
I'm often asked 'Who
do you envision as your audience.' My answer is, I
don't.
For me this is an
ingoing conversation.
The demands that you
make of your readers varies from poem to poem.
You can't write a poem
with an audience in mind unless you are writing for children or idiots.
Poetry exists as a
body attempting communication.
The possibility of the
poem exists in communication.
Who the hell wants to
argue with Billy Collins when you can argue with Aristotle?
Even how you break a
line is political.
This stuff was settled
in the 1950s: The New Critics lost. We won.
The only reason I
became a poet is because I loved the company.
The way of poetry is a
way of being alive.
--
Dana Guthrie Martin
the writer formerly known as funny
mygorgeoussomewhere.org
* thepoetrycollaborative.org
* postalpoetry.org
Selective perception imposes the illusion of consistency.
— Nathan Moore
From another workshop participant, John Anderson:
Paul,
I am grateful for your facilitating the opportunity to attend the workshop yesterday.
After this workshop, I could do nothing else but go home and boil some soba noodles and
contemplate my feet. But here are some afterthoughts --
“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” - W. Blake
I admit my lineage with the fool.
Prune pretention and abstraction. Throw your work into your own
ear with re-lineation according to your own
muse. Sam won’t get in her way, even
if you ask him to.
He has the sense of humor to take
the ego and let it hang
out on the back porch – sliding glass door closed.
Some vague lessons learned:
Like Kung Fu-Tze, strive to call things by their names. And by revealing the truth about
the such-ness of things, like the secret message of “workshops” (‘write like me’), you
can allow yourself to be freer in poetic being.
I will occasionally play Miles Davis CD’s when writing.
I promise from now on to write everything with one-and-a-half line spaces.
I will see what this “Strunk and White” is all about.
I will throw out the artificial constraints that I have been convinced that every good
editor wants --something to fit exactly on one page.
I give my voice the permission to gather in the meadows of the page where minor epics roam.
Thanks.
John A
Here are some of my notes, including an email from Sam before the workshop:
Sam Hamill Workshop, October 5, 2008
Basho – kado “the tao or way of poetry.”
Aspire to be a minor poet.
The practice of poetry is the central feature of being an actual poet.
Everyday is a good day for knowing one’s limitations.
For me poetry has always been an oral or aural tradition.
Beat and
There has to be certain defining principles to our practice.
What you read is what you feed your Muse.
30 years ago American poetry was THE poetry of the planet, equal to Tang Dynasty poetry. The rest of the world was going to school on American poetry.
Open forms are attitudinal; they’re relative to one’s stance toward reality.
Donald Hall bragged about 44 drafts. He’s trying to make an object. The poem is almost a stasis; whereas the poem of Open Form follows the movement of the mind, the dance of the intellect among the 10,000 things. Revision can often kill the poem. Poetry shouldn’t be too much work. Give yourself permission to fail. That’s a really tough thing to do in the arts.
Lu Chi – When studying the masters I watch the workings of their mind. (See Sam’s related essay, here.)
The poem has to be an act of discovery. I insist on this. Gary Snyder. I write poetry to find out what’s really on my mind. In the open for it’s finding the impulse and having the discipline to following that impulse. This is why open form poems rarely have that punch line people expect from poems. The words put us in the right place and what lies beyond the words…there’s always a poem lying beneath the surface. This way we discover the natural rhythms of the mind. Ezra Pound called it The Musical Phrase.
Hayden liked resolution in his poems, not unlike Miles Davis doing his version of Someday My Prince Will Come. His famous poem about the cows at night…(Linked here.)
When poetry has no music, it’s prose.
Composition by ear, and by line and to be open to the experience that allows the poem to come organically.
How does Denise’s notion of scoring the poem fit it? Sam says, what’s on the page is like a musical notation. If the line is measured by the breath, longer lines will create deeper rhythms. You can do a lot more with the longer line musically, but the short line allows more attention. Creeley’s emphasis was often on the preposition.
One of the great weaknesses of contemporary poetry is sloppy line-breaking. Heard aloud those poems sound like prose. It should sound like language elevated into music. All poetry aspires to the conditions of music. It demands to be heard.
A lot of experimental poetry gets bogged down in one’s own ego.
To
find in musical language, authentic experience.
Because he did not have a lot of time running
What is our role as poets? Do we owe anything to anybody? We belong to a tradition in both Eastern and Western civilizations. In 250 BC, the anthology by Confucius, most poems are about war. War, love and wine tend to be the main themes. American poets have (failed.) We have responsibilities as poets. We have ancestors. The nice thing about poetry is that we get to choose our ancestors. I don’t have to be an old, fat, white guy.
What poets are still living up to
their responsibility? Adrienne Rich, Martin Espada’s
Poetry ran the drug lords out of
Sam says read Strunk & White. One of three books, with Lu Chi’s Wen Fu. (see this link.)
Sam says narrative is one thing often missing in current narrative poetry.
Most open form poems have a debt to Sinology. (Pound, Cathay – 1914.)
The Art of Writing, page 38.
Rexroth – Poem to William Carlos Williams – little poems with nothing to say…
Pound – go in fear of abstraction. When you tie the abstract to the concrete, you get into trouble.
Dexter Gordon at Centrum story…we’re gonna play scales.
Line breaks
active voice
concrete imagery
Sometimes, as in longer poems, you have to earn the poems.
kagean = shadow hermitage
son jao – three systems: Confucius, Buddhism, Taoism.
Poets and Writers
----- Original
Message ----
From: Sam Hamill
To: Paul Nelson <splabman@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 9:03:52 AM
Subject: Gawf
That was a nice day yesterday. But I let myself slip
when the stop-
and-go started wreaking havoc on timing and pace... I shoulda
kept
that round in the 70s. And you, with a mediocre putter on the day,
shot an altogether admirable 86.
Gray has a ride into
Tuesday. 10:30 or 11 would be a perfect tee time.
Just got the most recent "Copper Canyon Classic"— The Poem's
Heartbeat: "a handbook of prosody" (e.g. "How to write 19th
century
verse") by my friend (seriously) Alfred Corn. He devotes only the
last one of ten chapters to "unmetered
poetry," and spends most of it
defending the iamb. Olson is passed over, presented as an eccentric,
as is Creeley. Levertov is
not even mentioned. Neither is
I mention this in part because I've been thinking a lot lately about
the poem's intentions: Is the poem like a sculpture, the carefully
sculpted word carefully polished? It can be. That was the dominant
poem of the last five hundred years (since Shakespeare, really). But
what happens when we approach the poem not as High Composition—
like Beethoven, say— but as improvisation? Miles, Trane,
Mingus, Bruebeck as opposed to Brancusi or
Kotaro. Well, from sculpture to music, so it is with poesie:
one metaphor will never suffice, one song will not adequately serve, one
perfected form will be inarticulate as long as
it stands alone.
There is a definable sculpture to Trane's whole Olé, an elegant
rollercoaster ride through Bruebeck's "Take
Five" with Gerry Mulligan
on baritone sax and with the mad Jack Six on drums. Would we have
serious conversations about "cutting" them or reshaping them? The
young jazz musician goes to school on this work, but NOT as
"composition" beyond first-year theory & practice classes; the
young
musician learns to play Take 5; learns to feel it from the inside
out; learns to breathe it, to embody it. That fact that the
"composition" is in 11/32 time (if I remember correctly) is merely
a
footnote.
The Greeks thought rhyme was for children, and western poetry (other
than Arabic) did not rhyme until the Arabs brought it to
Some ancient meters are variable (Greek) and some are not (Latin).
And yet the Latin Church took its "divine" or "heavenly"
music from
Sappho's "Mixo-Lydian"
mode. I laugh: Sappho and Mother Mary as
sisters from one minor Greek dialect going back 600 BCE.
Okay. Saturday morning. I got a week to read all these poems and
figger out what to do with a workshop.
Hail Mary. Holy Sappho.
Sam