Nelson: So you call it “Habitation” and you have a suite of poems by this name. But it has a deeper meaning than that?

Hamill: Well, the trilogy of poems were inspired by Ian Boyden and his paintings, and by our shared concerns with history and ecology. But I suppose because I was an orphan, and I suppose because I was homeless in my life, the idea of home is a recurring theme to me —and I think it is to many poets— it’s just that I’ve not been subtle about it.

Nelson: When you look back and read all the poems you’ve ever written, and we’re talking about almost fifty years of work…

Hamill: Well, almost fifty years, yeah…

Nelson: Can you tell us about the track of your work and some of the earlier work? You mentioned discarding the occasional poems, but what about the quality of the earlier work you don’t care for? What is it about the poems that didn’t make it in, that don’t make the grade?

Hamill: Well, some were just not very good poems. When I was a young poet I was pretty experimental. My masters in those days were Creeley, Duncan, Rexroth and Ferlinghetti when I was a teenager. I still admire Lawrence’s work. Then I was trying to find a voice and trying to find a vision. Which is why I wrote a big long vision quest poem that is not included here. It’s one work I separated out because it’s a hundred pages, a trilogy.

Nelson: Triada.

Hamill: Yeah. I found that vision quest was very important to me and I came to a point in my life when I took what I call a monk’s vow to expend my life’s work in temple of words – which is the Chinese character for poetry. And that poverty would be a part of my practice, as it often is with those who take religious vows. It took me a while to develop the voice that became my voice. Meanwhile I was still writing and publishing poetry. And some of those early poems are not necessarily bad poems but, in my retrospective view, I didn’t want to re-publish sonnets.

I wrote a lot of sonnets when I was young and that’s how I schooled myself in formalism. I’m not interested in forms that are peculiar. I don’t write villanelles. But a sonnet is part of the English-American tradition of poetry. Including Edna St. Vincent Millay and other radical poetry which I read a lot when I was young. But, no sense re-printing experiments that didn’t produce anything particularly striking.

Nelson: That’s why they call them experiments, sometimes they fail. Hamill: Yeah.

Nelson: But at least you were trying something different. And that’s the notion. You’re of the school of poetry where the work is about discovery. Your good friend Denise Levertov wrote so eloquently of that discovery. You mentioned to me, though, about the early work, that you were trying too hard then to make a point.

Hamill: Yeah. When you go to the poem with an idea that “this is what the poem is going to be,” you’re not going to be discovering anything. You have to begin the poem in a state of not know- ing and let the poem reveal itself organically.