Sam Hamill Quotes

#1. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

Sam Hamill

#2. Beauty and ugliness have one origin.
Name beauty, and ugliness is.
Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.

Is and is not produce one another.
The difficult is born in the easy,
long is defined by short, the high by the low.

Sam Hamill

#3. We poets don't tend to be certain a lot. Much of our art is made out of our own uncertainty. And there is a not-knowingness, I think, that leads us back to suffering humanity with a more compassionate vision than most of our politicians have.

Sam Hamill

#4. I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

Sam Hamill

#5. Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"

Sam Hamill

#6. If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

Sam Hamill

#7. "Some say the most beautiful thing in the world is a great cavalry riding down over the hill. Others say it's a vast infantry on the march. But I say the most beautiful thing is the beloved." How political can you get?

Sam Hamill

#8. When these idiot rightwingers start complaining about poetry being political, I'm fond of reciting Sappho to them, who excluded men from her world. Why does she exclude them? Mostly because of their warmongering.

Sam Hamill

#9. George W. Bush is using language that's a mirror image of the language of Osama bin Laden when he says, "We have God on our side. This is the struggle of good against evil."

Sam Hamill

#10. I'm basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln Center.

Sam Hamill

#11. Just as I wonder
whether it's going to die,
the orchid blossoms
and I can't explain why it
moves my heart, why such pleasure
comes from one small bud
on a long spindly stem, one
blood red gold flower
opening at mid-summer,
tiny, perfect in its hour.

Sam Hamill

#12. Of course, there are some people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up in public and take his clothes off. I don't do that, but I liked Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy.

Sam Hamill

#13. Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal.

Sam Hamill

#14. Most of the ugly wars in history have been wars of religion. And there's nothing more dangerous than someone with religious certitude who creates consequences in the world that to me are simply inexcusable.

Sam Hamill

#15. It would be nice if all the Republicans could put poetry in a little box and put the box under the bed and sit on it, but they can't.

Sam Hamill

#16. I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do.

Sam Hamill

#17. The only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country, is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something done about it.

Sam Hamill

#18. Don't tell me
about the seasons in the East, don't talk to me
about eternal California summer.
It's enough to have
a few days naked
among three hundred kinds of rain.

Sam Hamill

#19. Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.

Sam Hamill

#20. Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one another and toward our environment.

Sam Hamill

#21. Poets should speak out against what we see as the assault against our Constitution and the warmongering that's going on. I'm perfectly willing to lay down my life for my Constitution, but I am not willing to take a life for it or any other reason because I think killing people is counterproductive.

Sam Hamill

#22. We're certainly not perfect, and we're not probably even better than anybody else, except that perhaps we are given to certain kinds of contemplation that provide a valuable balance to the knee-jerk reactionary behavior of most of our newspapers and political leaders. Poets are great doubters.

Sam Hamill

#23. What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.

Sam Hamill