Measured Stone
By
Sam Hamill
Curbstone
Press, 2007, $13.95
The first poem in Sam Hamill’s new book is appropriately titled “Ars Poetica,” It ranges through
the perspectives of the old masters—Homer, Seferis, Elytis, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus,
Dante, and the poet’s old friend Ransom—concerning the journey that all poets
take toward Paradise. The important
thing is the going-forth, not the end of the journey, as in the poem’s final
lines:
No. Not for us, salvation.
Sustained by a few
essential metaphors—
the tale, the telling,
the
mind’s music, the heart’s vision…
we
venture out, each alone, to find
that
going-forth is home.
These
lines project the essential theme of the entire collection: leaving salvation behind in the tradition of
the bodhisattva, and instead setting forth on the journey (samsara) as a poet, carried by “a
few essential metaphors,” and the role of the teller of tales, conveyer of
music and vision. In these poems, Sam Hamill, author of fourteen volumes of poetry, translator of
two dozen more, and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press, is celebrating his own
multi-faceted life and contacts in poetry and the various places where he
travels to bring and find serenity.
One of the poems that reflects such a literary contact and place is “Arguing with Milosz in Vilnius.”
The first line addresses Czeslaw Milosz after his death in 2004 in a way that establishes
both affection and respect: “You are
recently dead, old man / with your thunderous brows / and a voice like the vast
sea / hinting at a dangerous undertow—.”
In the poem Hamill is wandering the streets of
Vilnius (Wilno), Lithuania, the home town of Milosz, remembering the old argument between the two of
them concerning Robinson Jeffers and the relation of nature to poetry. Milosz says, “I
dislike nature,” which he calls “a huge museum of inherited images.” To this, Hamill
counter poses his own response to the local
countryside, celebrating the life of the senses in nature:
How I loved the slender
birches
among the red
pine,
the
forest floor a bed of moss
and a hundred
kinds of mushrooms.
Bury a trout in
mushrooms,
cream and wine,
and
bake it, and hear me sigh.
Later
in Hamill’s poem, Milosz
completes his objection to nature poetry:
“ The struggle for poetry in the world cannot
take place in a museum.” To this, Hamill,
remembering the occasion when Kenneth Rexroth
introduced Milosz and him in San Francisco, replies:
Nevertheless, I say, the
world’s a museum
the poem a
record of survival
and betrayal, of human
longing—
vision and
commitment—
and if I smell the bear or the
wolf
that once
haunted the woods near here,
I say the wolf is alive
in the eyes of
men, alive
in the hearts of all
who survive.
Though
Sam Hamill treats the argument lightly in the context
of a poem about remembering his contacts with Milosz,
so recently dead, the argument itself is an ongoing one, primarily between
Eastern European and American poets.
Emerging from the horrific wars and holocausts of first half of the
twentieth century, emerging again from the dark days of control and
surveillance under communism, Polish poets such as Adam Zagajewski
in his essay “Against Poetry” express contempt for what they regard as “naďve”
American poetry: “Some poet in Idaho
wants to write about flowers—what’s the problem? Let’s admit that there’s something appealing
about this naďve, rather amateurish stratum of poetry. Certainly it’s harmless enough, even if it
doesn’t help us to understand the world.”
On a more sophisticated level, Milosz
objected to the “inhumanism” of Robinson Jeffers, who
privileged nature over human culture in his world view. There are many facets to this argument, and
toward the end of the poem, Hamill can only exclaim: Vive la
difference!” This reviewer, as
co-editor of Windfall; A
Journal of Poetry of Place, inclines to identify with Sam Hamill’s position in this argument. However, the whole issue might rapidly become
moot as the environmental crisis lays bare the intersection of human culture
and nature in ways barely acknowledged and relatively unexplored in poetry—so
far.
Milosz,
strong Polish Catholic that he was, rejects out of hand Hamill’s
“eastern wisdom.” Indeed, Hamill’s Buddhist-Taoist (or Zen) outlook and devotion to
ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry is evident in various ways throughout Measured Stone. Perhaps the most committed lyric to “eastern
wisdom” is the poem “Nine Gates,” written in nine sections of three to six tanka stanzas each.
In section 2 Hamill profess humble aspirations
for his poetry, which he assumes will “very likely die with me.” Rather, he says, “It’s just my way of getting
/ through another day, / of trying to be alive / as often as I / can be.” And in section 3, he says “Poetry is just / a
moment when things appear / exactly as they / are--,” that is, like “Basho’s frog captured / forever airborne.” This mystery glimpsed between images reflects
the Tao of eastern poetry at its most
sublime. The humble aspiration for
poetry is taking the way of the lowest, or as Hamill
says in section 4, “The ordinary. That’s
all.” Also Hamill
evokes Saigyo (1118-1190), the great Japanese poet
who wrote many tanka about
the moon, reflected beautifully in Hamill’s, own
concluding tanka of section four:
Saigyo’s
whole bright moon
is
a mirror reflecting
a
world as it is:
a
world of practice, a world
of
this night being born.
In section 9, Hamill evokes
the bodhisattva, which the poem defines as one who “takes a vow to wait at the
/ gates of Nirvana /until all sentient beings / become enlightened. That wait’s / likely to be
long.” Meanwhile, the poet waits
for the poem, a gate of its own kind, which one enters at one’s own ris
In Sam Hamill’s work the
political is an essential aspect of poetry, and we are never far in his work
from the impulse that led him to found in 2003 the Poets Against
the War web site. This reviewer does not
subscribe to the idea that “all poetry is political,” because such a sweeping
generalization denatures the very term “political poetry,” depriving it of its
power. Rather some poetry is more
political than others, and in Measured
Stone, the term applies to a poem like “On the Third Anniversary of the
Ongoing War in Iraq.” The war “out
there” is reflected in the war “in here”:
women abused by men, and the war within the heart. Hamill says he has
been opposing war all of his life, and in the poem
“Awakening in Buenos Aires” we find the poet in the sensuous city of the
“February summer sun,” where he comes to a resolution of sorts:
Unabated,
the world’s wars drag on,
and what can any of us do but dream
of peace, and act accordingly
and once again begin?
There’s plenty of work to
be done.
After
another poem, “Strolling Calle Florida,” set in the
warm south of Buenos Aires, Hamill ends Measured Stone with yet another poem in
that city, titled “To William Slater.”
The work of his artist friend inspires the poet, taking his ease amid
the songs of birds and the oncoming heat, to take one more lick at the bane of
war:
Today
I read: six hundred thousand dead
in a dirty little President’s
dirty little war.
on the innocents of Iraq.
The
sands shift, and we learn—
too often too late—that the heart
is the only gift we can make.
And
then he arrives at the state—not of Paradise--but of calm waiting that has been
there all along:
I rise and
fold these old, arthritic legs
and gently close my eyes
and breathe.
And wait
for what each breath alone redeems.
Sam Hamill’s Measured Stone is the book of a man
looking back over a long career, full of the wisdom and perspective that age
can bring. Like the poets of ancient
China, such as Tu Fu, who even when young aspired to
old age for precisely the wisdom and respect it engendered, Hamill
brings us the riches of hard-won serenity.
Such a book deserves a wide reading, and Sam Hamill
deserves our thanks for bringing us his human vision, his straight talk about
real conditions, his love of the world.
As Milosz himself put
it in his poem “Encounter” in 1936:
O
my love, where are they, where are they going
The
flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I
ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.