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CM: First, I have to ask, there was a time when you became involved in politics, wasn’t there? Can you tell us about that?

 

SH: I ran for California state assembly in 1968, while I was a student at L.A. Valley College. It was mostly an antiwar campaign. I ran on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket, but broke with the party when they nominated Eldridge Cleaver for president. I supported Gene McCarthy. I did voter registration drives and visited the Chamber of Commerce et cetera. I also did my first public poetry readings with Veterans Against the War and in conjunction with Robert Bly’s Poets Against the War in Vietnam... inspiration 35 years later to found Poets Against the War in Iraq.

 

CM: Despite U.S. surveillance run amuck, Special Operations forces in 134 countries, more than 2400 dead from President Obama’s drone campaign, our material support for, or direct involvement in, the bombing of civilian populations, child refugees of our drug wars at our border, and the global environmental crisis, politicians today seem more polarized than ever. Many U.S. voters feel impotent to affect change. It seems we are left with the choice of voting for “the lesser of two evils,” voting for a candidate who won’t be invited to the debates, writing in the name of a political prisoner, or boycotting elections all together. Do you have any words of wisdom for those of us navigating this fractured political reality?

 

SH: I’ve said for years that the problem is not the candidates, but the system itself. As long as candidates are owned and operated by corporate barons, their first allegiance will not be to justice, to democracy, but to their handlers. A politician can’t get elected without money to advertise, and it takes a million donors to make up for a single multimillion dollar contribution from the Koch brothers. The same people who control the candidates own the very media that are supposed to examine them for the voting public. The “liberal media” in this country has never been liberal and never less liberal than it is today. So if corporate thugs control both media and candidates, it’s little wonder that anyone with revolutionary ideas is excluded, automatically, from the (fake) election “debates.” When I founded Poets Against the War, the “liberal New York Times” trotted out a former Richard Nixon speech writer to post an ad hominem personal attack on me. The Wall Street Journal did exactly the same, albeit with a different Nixon speech writer. No diversity of opinion allowed.

 

Every election cycle we're told that voting for the lesser evil is far more important than voting our conscience, that, for instance, voting for Obama and his murderous drones and his claim to have the right to imprison and torture and execute people, including American citizens, "saves us" from the monstrous evils of his opponent. In other words, our conscience has no power in the face of corporate capitalist enterprise and those who profit from arms and wars. If voting one's conscience is a "wasted vote," then how can one pretend to live by such a conscience at all? The system is a highly orchestrated obliteration of human conscience, of human empathy and compassion. And those who profit from mass murder and human suffering are never, ever, called to account for their deeds. Most often, they are held up as "patriots" —like the war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, et alia. If we do not vigorously oppose murder, then we are its accomplices, no matter how we hide our eyes and turn away from our slaughters.

 

CM: You were just fourteen when you ran away from abusive parents and were on your own for the first time, experiencing a new freedom of movement and thought. Do you think your ability to empathize with the oppressed played a roll here? Could you highlight for us that first moment where poetry caught your attention?

 

SH: My foster parents were college educated English majors. The Depression turned my father from writing/teaching to farming. My mother was a grade school teacher. I think of them as perfectly Dickensian—they were the best of parents, they were the worst of parents. Adopted at 3, at 4 I had begun to read. And my father recited the Romantics and Robert Service, Sandburg, etc. Even as a small child I loved the rhythms and sounds of poetry.

 

My rebellion was born with late 40s, early 50s social phenomenon, the anti-hero, the birth of rock’n’roll, jazz, and Delta Blues. I played piano and trumpet. McCarthyism and The Bomb ruled Utah culture along with the Mormon Church. My parents were “non-believers.” Worse, they were Democrats who admired Adlai Stevenson. All of this led me to reading poetry—Robert Service to Dylan Thomas—just as the Beat Scene unfolded with Kerouac and Rexroth and Ferlinghetti landing in my lap like a bomb.

 

Many of my heroes in the early 50s were black singers/musicians—Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Delta and Piedmont blues people, early rock soul singers. The Mormons said they all carried “the mark of Cain” and could never go to heaven. The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 sparked a revolution in my mind. I watched the white establishment sic dogs on freedom marchers. I was an outsider in every way in lily white Holladay, Utah. The civil rights struggle, the rebelliousness of rock’n’roll, my appetite for John Steinbeck and other engaged writers—all of this fed my sense of revolt.

 

CM: The term “Mark of Cain” originated in Genesis with the story of Cain’s murder of his brother. The spilt blood rendered the ground infertile, and Cain was made a fugitive. Interpretations of the mark itself varied from an actual Hebrew letter placed upon his brow, to a physical disability, or to those later Christianic interpretations of dark skin, once used as justification of the Jim Crow laws of that era. Since then there has been some progress; we have an African-American president and there are no longer “white” and “colored” water fountains at drug stores. Do you believe civilization has moved beyond the elitist notions of the cursed “other”? Do you see parallels in the world events of today in Gaza, Ferguson, or elsewhere?

 

SH: “Civilization” thrives on otherness, on demonizing anything foreign. Just consider the American racist terminology of the past century—from Redskins to Rag Heads. Every new group of immigrants faces racist and religious bigotry. Every country our corporate masters wish to exploit becomes another Banana Republic as we foist one terrorist after another into seats of power serving Standard Oil or Chiquita Banana or Monsanto. The very “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned us about back in the days when the richest 1% paid 90% in taxes while we busily overthrew governments all over Latin America. The Abrahamic religions have provided firepower mythology in a god that sanctions murder and promises eternal life. Politicians thrive on creating an “other” for us to fear and hate, whether it’s commies under the bed or dark-skinned people in our lily white urban zones. If we look at our system of “justice,” we see the odds of prison for black or brown men vs. white men, the odds of being shot down in the street, and the odds of a college education. Jim Crow is alive and well at every level of this culture.

 

 

Border Song

 

 

 

Sometimes I like to read

the poets of the borderlands,

some in English, some to wrestle

slowly from their native tongue,

my scant Spanish failing at each turn,

the gists and piths of poetry.

 

There are images, there are tones,

that cross the rivers

of time and space and cultural bounds

to touch the heart of one

who struggles in the journey.

Poetry is made from flesh and bone.

 

What is a nation, what is our song,

and what is a man, a woman, but

a tear and a smile, un abrazo fuerte

por favor, tender and temporal,

wine in the cup, a song in the ear,

when the struggle itself is everything.

 

It is what we know and what

we have to work with—bare hands,

dreams that restore

big hungry hearts and minds

made whole by what we share:

mi pan, mi agua, mi canto amor.

 

 

CM: Historically, we’ve seen language used to demonize the other in every act of institutionalized aggression, ultimately shaping the public’s perception and acquiescence. Orwell termed it “doublespeak,” and foresaw the use of technology to conduct this war of misinformation, but he didn’t anticipate today’s personal technology. The major media is telling us one story (with shocking audacity), but the people on the ground are capturing the truth with their phone cameras and uploading it to the world. The curtain has been pulled back and we can suddenly see the deception for what it is.

 

There’s a question in here about the power of language and voice and perspective within poetry, about the power of words to open our eyes, or close them. Do you believe the poet has a unique responsibility in this war of language?

 

SH: As Charles Olson made clear, the poet belongs to the polis, he or she is a part of the citizenry, and that comes with responsibilities... Confucius reminds us that “all wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by their right names,” and he called for “the rectification of language.” Camus says, “We can be murderers or the accomplices of murderers or we must resist with our whole being... Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it would be a benefit if it be clearly drawn.” The feminist movement of the 70s and 80s was forged by poets: Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan, et alia. I’ve always felt kinship with the oppressed—women, minority races, the impoverished of the world— and felt a need to be their representative of some kind. Trotsky said, “In order to change the world we must learn to see it through the eyes of women.” My years of work with domestic violence programs and in prisons taught me to see a different America than what most white males perceive. At one time it was true that “a woman is battered senseless every 12 seconds in America.” Peace-making is work; poetry is work. To me it has meant being “a monk in the temple made of words”— the Chinese character for poetry being “words” joined to “temple.” The only meaningful revolution, in my view, is saying “no” to violence, “no” to tyranny, “no” to corporate capitalism that exploits the people and the planet.

 

 

 

True Peace

 

 

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 master did not move, did not squirm,

he did not scream

in pain as his body was consumed.

 

Neither child nor yet a man,

I wondered to my Okinawan friend,

what can it possibly mean

to make such a sacrifice, to give one’s life

with such horror, but with dignity and conviction.

How can any man endure such pain

and never cry and never blink.

 

 

And my friend said simply, “Thich Quang Dúc

had achieved true peace.”

 

And I knew that night true peace

for me would never come.

Not for me, Nirvana. This suffering world

is mine, mine to suffer in its grief.

 

Half a century later, I think

of Bô Tát Thich Quang Dúc,

revered as a bodhisattva now—his lifetime

building temples, teaching peace,

and of his death and the statement that it made.

 

Like Shelley’s, his heart refused to burn,

even when they burned his ashes once again

in the crematorium—his generous heart

turned magically to stone.

 

What is true peace, I cannot know.

A hundred wars have come and gone

as I’ve grown old. I bear their burdens in my bones.

Mine’s the heart that burns

today, mine the thirst, the hunger in the soul.

 

Old master, old teacher,

what is it that I’ve learned?

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Border Song” and “True Peace” can be found in Sam Hamill’s new poetry collection, Habitation, published by Lost Horse Press. To purchase a copy, go to: http://www.losthorsepress.org/catalog/habitation/