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Articles by Sam Hamill
Nodes of Growth
Skip to main content Find and share the perfect poems. for Molly Peacock My mother thinks she cannot grow orchids: the initial blooms shrivel, turn to dust on the window ledge. The stalk, once green, becomes a dry stick, soon appraised for the same value she gives every crinkled brown leaf: She cut it off. She did not know to wait to examine turgid base leaves, jungle vibrant, roots brimming the pot’s rim, testing the drainage holes, seeking sun, trickling water.
Smart growth for Mount Desert Island
With well over 100 nonprofit, independent civic groups on Mount Desert Island, how surprising that none is chartered to address growth and its impact – arguably the Island’s most pressing challenge and the topic of such intense public conversation. We know from opinion surveys that most year-rounders and summer residents – and many visitors – agree that tourism and related commercial growth have strained the Island’s environmental, social and governmental carrying capacity.
Nothing Wants to Suffer by Danusha Laméris - Poems | Academy of American Poets
after Linda Hogan Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it. The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust. The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey. These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth to take their hunger.
What the Water Knows
Norwegian Fjord I, Fredericka Foster, 2004, oil on linen, 42 x 64 inches. Courtesy of Fischbach Gallery, New York City What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive. A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world. Still, the heart is a river pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed. It opens on a bay and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in, it carries the cry of the loon and the salts of the unutterably human.
On Galway Kinnell
NOVEMBER 3, 2014 Poet Galway Kinnell passed away on October 28, 2014. We asked a number of poets and critics to reflect on his life and his work. — The Editors ¤ Galway Kinnell ONE OF THE FIRST encounters I ever had with contemporary poetry was with Galway Kinnell’s poem “The Night” in his 1994 collection, Imperfect Thirst. I was a freshman in college and I wrote poems furiously but still in a kind of secret, although I was beginning to have friends who were interested in poetry.
All I Can Have are Field Recordings of the Field by Kristina Martino - Poems | Academy of American Poets
I can never have the field. I can never halve the field, make a helix of my hands and hold the halves like pictures of the field—or fields—and affix one feeling to the fields—or the infinite field—and stay that way I can walk down to the bog, the field under-foliate-feet, in a bloodflow motion towards the beating of the bullfrogs’ black-lacteous tactile pool and listen to the unilluminable below-surface stirring, gravid ruckus of drooling purr and primordial bluebrown blur.
What the Water Knows
Half broken on that smoky night, hunched over sake in a serviceman's dive somewhere in Naha, Okinawa, nearly fifty years ago, I read of the Saigon Buddhist monks who stopped the traffic on a downtown thoroughfare so their master, Thich Quang Dúc, could take up the lotus posture in the middle of the street. And they baptized him there with gas and kerosene, and he struck a match and burst into flame. That was June, nineteen-sixty-three, and I was twenty, a U.S. Marine.
The Spring of My Life
An autobiographical blend of prose and haiku from one of Japan's greatest poets. Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and playful sense of humor. Issa's most beloved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the tradition of Basho's celebrated Narrow Road to the Interior.
Narrow Road to the Interior
"One of the undisputed masterpieces of Japanese Literature. . . . Hamill achieves a kind of luminosity of language that I find unparalleled in other translations of this work." —Burton Watson, Columbia University "Lucid and engaging, this translation, a gift of careful attention, does not separate poetry from spiritual practice. Basho becomes our guide on the way of insight. Such is the magic of a fine translation." —Margaret Gibson, Tricycle
Natural History
Late afternoon, autumn equinox, and my daughter and I are at the table silently eating fried eggs and muffins, sharp cheese, and yesterday’s rice warmed over. We put our paper plates in the woodstove and go outside: sunlight fills the alders with the geometries of long blonde hair, and twin ravens ride the rollercoasters of warm September air out, toward Protection Island.
True Peace
Sam Hamill authored fourteen volumes of poetry including Almost Paradise: Selected Poems & Translations (Shambhala, 2005), Dumb Luck (2002), Gratitude (1998), and Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995 (1995).
The Orchid Flower
Sam Hamill authored fourteen volumes of poetry including Almost Paradise: Selected Poems & Translations (Shambhala, 2005), Dumb Luck (2002), Gratitude (1998), and Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995 (1995).
Orchids Are Sprouting From the Floorboards
Find and share the perfect poems. Orchids are sprouting from the floorboards. Orchids are gushing out from the faucets. The cat mews orchids from his mouth. His whiskers are also orchids. The grass is sprouting orchids. It is becoming mostly orchids. The trees are filled with orchids. The tire swing is twirling with orchids. The sunlight on the wet cement is a white orchid. The car’s tires leave a trail of orchids. A bouquet of orchids lifts from its tailpipe.
Those Winter Sundays
Find and share the perfect poems. Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.
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