WRITING LIKE WATER

 

 

Sam Hamill s recent book of poetry, Dumb Luck, contains much that is valuable not only about living but also about writing. In one sonnet, he regrets the endless stream of bad poems he receives Day after day after day as the editor of Copper Canyon Press and then rejoices when he discovers the one gold nugget:

And then there is the one poem, one line,

that makes it all somehow begin again.

 

This, I think, is the process by which our own revisions should be conducted. And then there is Hamill s quote of the Sung nature poet, Su Tung-p o, for the proposition that great painters painted the spirit, not the form of things, that those who transcend mere form to capture true spirit are very rare, and that the same principle applies to verse. Like Hamill, he professed a simplicity and primitiveness of style, and wrote like water flows it flows when it should and it stops when it should stop. In other words, a poem, a story, a novel, anything we create with words, should be as long or as short as it wants to be, not forced but natural, and speaking from the heart.

In Japanese poetry, an extreme example of this theory can be found in the zuihitsu, an almost formless form. As Hamill explains:

Thus zuihitsu has

no predetermined form, no

prescribed subject or

manner, only the almost

random associations

that one thing reveals

about another.

 

Hamill also seeks simplicity and clarity, something too often lacking not only in contemporary life but contemporary letters. He writes:

I am beginning

at last to understand what

Seferis really

meant when he said, I want

no more than to speak simply,

to be granted that

grace. Simplicity s the end,

just a period

at the end of a compound

complex sentence . . .

 

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