I re-posted this interview on this website and it’s gotten about 200 hits and will be translated into Spanish by Hamill’s translator, Esteban Moore. An excerpt:
The editor of Copper Canyon Press for over 30 years, author of over 40 books of poetry and translations, Hamill says poetry can be the antidote for what ails our culture: “In order to transcend a materialist culture we have to have spiritual values. We have to have a spiritual economy, an economy of the soul. Poetry is part of that commerce. It lives outside the mainstream economy.”
Paul Nelson is founder of SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) in Seattle, the Cascadia Poetry Festival and the August POetry POstcard Fest (PoPo). www.POPO.cards He wrote a collection of essays, Organic Poetry & a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, WA, A Time Before Slaughter (shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award by The Stranger.) The tenth anniversary edition of that book includes Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. He’s interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Wanda Coleman, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Eileen Myles, George Bowering, Diane di Prima, Brenda Hillman, George Stanley, Joanne Kyger & many Cascadia poets, has presented his poetry and poetics in London, Brussels, Bothell, Cumberland, BC, Qinghai and Beijing, China, Lake Forest, Illinois and other places & writes an American Sentence every day. www.PaulENelson.com
