Nathan Hutchinson

English 102

Laura Darrow

Biography

I am excited to write about a newly discovered author . Well he is hardly newly discovered but definitely new to me. His name is Sam Hamill and from the first moment I read the Necessity to Speak I new that he was a great author and he was producing material that I could get excited about.

Sam Hamill was born in 1942 somewhere in northern California. When Sam was age 3 he was given up for adoption by his birth father. Sam Hamill was later adopted by Sam and Frieda Hamill and raised near Holiday, Utah.(Johnston) Sam spent his youth in and out of jails and spent a lot of time on the streets. In his later teen years Sam decided to join the United States Marine Corps mostly to eliminate his juvenile arrest record. During his time in the Marines he had the privilege of visiting Japan where he was stationed in Okinawa. During his time in Japan he began the study of the Zen Buddhist religion.(Hamill 546)

During the Vietnam war Sam Hamill stood out and took an activist position against the war which would later prove to be the stance he would stand behind for the next 40 years and be the source of up and coming literature.(Hamill) Sam had the opportunity to start Copper Canyon Press with 500$ that he won as an editors award at the literary magazine Spectrum and remain the chief editor there for 32 years. He has also spent 14 years teaching in U.S prisons and worked extensively with battered women. The little money he made working for the prisons and with battered women helped support him with his other endeavors. At this time Sam had teamed up with two other colleagues Bill Ransom and Joe Wheeler. Their newest organization was to be called Centrum. Eventually after the company became a corporation and the whole purpose of the business had gotten lost between the necessity to make more money amongst other corporate values and Sam decided to part ways in 2004.(Powers)

Sam Hamill has been the recipient of numerous awards including a fellowship for the National Endowment of the Arts as well as a Guggenheim Memorial fellowship. After September 11th Sam helped start the Poets Against War which is a society that uses poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression. Poets Against War is still very active and has currently published 6,000 poems.

Sam Hamill has been able to take his real life experiences, through his trails and tribulations and apply them to paper. One would ask, well, what is different about what he does that normally any other author is doing. I feel that what makes this author's style significant, is the ability to take serious problems like domestic situations and bring them to your lap with realistic views that touche base with the average reader. These are not simple problems, anyone can reflect on simple problems. These problems are the break down of society as a whole. These are the things that attracted me as a reader to his writing. When Sam Hamill writes, he writes from experiences, this has the ability to reflect much differently on paper. If a normal person with no related experience was to write a paper on battered women it would lack the life that one with personal stories would share. When the cuts and bruises stare back everything changes. This is the passion a person feels when reading Sam Hamill.

Through the years Sam has been able to maintain a safe distance from the mainstream which has kept his poetry pure. When the focus is lost on financial gain one tends to be distracted by production. During this transformation the art is lost in daily business. Sam Hamill has spent most of his years trying to find a way to keep good poetry alive and away from the muddiness of major publishing houses. This lack of conformity has kept him a sought after poet.

Sam Hamill has become a role model in the poetry community as well as leaving some pretty big shoes to fill for up and coming poets. His moderate lifestyle and his devotion to his principles have left readers in awe for generations to come. To this day Sam Hamill is working with poets all over the world starting new Poets Against the War websites.