Destination Zero, Sam Hamill
(photo by seattlebloggers)
I read Sam Hamill’s “Destination Zero” from under a sun hat,
but I would always forget that. I would slip away from my front lawn to walk
along a grey coast, face stinging with September salt. I noted the “curtsies”
of African Violets, the cries of newborn chicks in a musky barn, and the “choir
of stars” above valleys and mountains. Before reading his poetry, I had never
fully articulated my experience of living in the Northwest. Hamill captures its
throbbing beauty, stormy diversity, and tender loneliness with the skill of a
painter. In other words, he puts watercolor to what was once inarticulate and
paper-white.
Like a painter, Hamill begins with a foundation color. His
poem, “A Lover’s Quarrel,” becomes the significant base for which the rest of
the book can be read. This poem introduces his relationship with nature, which
is a complex character of its own.
Throughout the poem, Hamill examines everything that the wind
touches: the evergreens, “half-garbled songs of finches,” moon, “swollen
skies,” and himself. He longs to feel completely at home in nature but finds
himself grasping. While he is intrinsically connected to the wind, he cannot
hold it. The wind becomes a greater metaphor for his aching for unity and
permanence, for home: “I’d kiss a fish/ and love a stone/ and marry the winter
rain/ if I could persuade this battered earth/ to let me make it home.”
Perhaps Hamill longs to transcend and solidify nature’s
fleeting beauty. Its transient quality makes him feel like an outsider. I
suppose this aching for beauty is something that drives many poets and artists,
as Keats once said, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever/ Its loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass
into nothingness; but still will keep.”
If this is true, then how does this influence our
understanding of the title, “Destination Zero”? What is his destination,
exactly? Can it be reached? These are questions he may keep you asking too.
And speaking of destinations, if you’re curious about where
he resides in the Northwest, Sam Hamill co-founded Copper Canyon Press in Port
Townsend.
Froth Poems, Jaroslaw Mikolajewski
Can the empty spaces on a poem’s page be just as captivating
as its words?
Yes. A resounding yes for “Froth Poems,” a translation of
works by Polish poet, Jaroslaw Mikolajewski. Each carefully selected word
pierces and fills its page with haunting and beautiful images. Mikolajewski
style can be mirrored after his poem, “rome 3:37 a.m.,” in which he writes:“rome
is silent and I think so is the rest/ of the world… the silence is so perfect
that if you sighed/or coughed/rome would be full of you in a moment.” The empty spaces in his writing are a part of
the magic. Like the silence in Rome, his words need room to quiver, breathe,
expand, overflow.
Mikolajewski is a traveler. He walks between the worlds of his
inner and outer conversations, airports, countries, dreams, and generations. Some
poems like “Froth” left me tingling from their ghastly darkness, while others
beckoned me into the intimacy of his treasured relationships. In describing his
wife’s spine, Mikolajewski writes: “And when my wife is pregnant/ her spine is
a bough/ breaking under the weight of apples…” Her spine becomes a scarf, a
zipper in a suitcase, a viper, and even a steel rope: “On nights of human love/
it is the steel rope / rustling in the wind, at the highest voltage.” Ordinary
objects such as these become vessels for intimate and surprising metaphor.
And this traveler does not lock his metaphors tightly inside
a suitcase between poems. The last line on every page ends in white space. Mikolajewski
never uses a period, and his poems often begin in lower case, as if
mid-sentence. This all contributes to the feeling of motion and expansion, as
if “Froth” is really circular, global, all poems blending into each other.
Although translation is essential for English readers, its
essence is not lost. Rather, I felt as if I were traveling alongside Jaroslaw
Mikolajewski through his worlds.
(photo above by http://www.hektoeninternational.org/Intercepted-letters.html)
