Justin Hamm : part five

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I have a couple of writer friends whose opinions I value deeply. Some of my poems come into the world via emails to those poets. Other poems I can sense are the way I want them to be. Those tend to enter the world by facing editorial judgment more quickly. I’ve also become more invested in reading and performing my poems. So I will occasionally debut poems in front of an audience to see how they work in that setting. I don’t have a set routine. I go with what I feel I need for a particular poem or set of poems. 

Justin Hamm : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

There are a couple of aspects I find difficult. The first is getting started, especially as the world becomes more and more chaotic and worrisome. Under those circumstances it is hard to remember that poetry has value. It can even be guilt-inducing to think about poetry when there is sickness and war everywhere. Of course, that’s total nonsense--poetry is, among other things, a form of prayer. But it can be hard to remember that.  

Then there’s the matter of going to the heavy places it takes to write good poems, ones that are personal and full of truth. It can be overwhelming to dig through the psyche, like punching the time clock in hell every day.

Justin Hamm : part three

What poets changed the way you think about writing? 

Raymond Carver taught me the pleasure of a poet’s voice that feels like it is in the room with you, leveling with you, speaking openly as if to a close friend. His poetry is highly underrated in relation to his fiction. 

Linda Pastan is a master of controlling and addressing the movement of time. Her poems manage to evoke aging and change in such a compressed space. It makes her poems feel large and adds a gravitas. It makes them hard to forget. 

Robert Bly, not so much for his own poetry, though I do love it; his translations introduced me to Transtromer, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, and other poets of the broader world. 

James Wright is a pillar for me. Who else? Cornelius Eady, Frank Stanford, James Wright. Ginsberg. Audre Lorde. My friend Michael Meyerhofer. Adrian Matejka. David Lee. Doriane Laux. Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. 

I fall in love with poets and books; so much of what I read ends up changing the way I think about writing, at least for a while. Then the next obsession comes along and alters that a bit. I like that there’s always another poet to discover. 

Justin Hamm : part two

What is poetry important?

Nobody would ask why sign language is important. And I’d guess most people who never use or even think much about sign language would still agree the whole world is better from its existence. Poetry is much the same. It’s a language that, to mis-paraphrase Jim Harrison just a little, allows souls to speak--souls with so much truth and fire and experience and power in them,  souls that would otherwise be trapped in a frustrated silence. And the world would be without their beauty and insights too, without poetry. 

Justin Hamm : part one

Justin Hamm is the author of four collections of poetry–Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin–as well as a book of photographs, Midwestern. He is the founding editor of the museum of americana. His poems, stories, photos, and reviews have appeared in Nimrod, Southern Indiana Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, and a host of other publications.

What are you working on?

Spartan Press in Kansas City just released a retrospective of the last fifteen years of my poetry. It’s called Drinking Guinness With the Dead, Poems 2007-2021. It includes my first three collections plus new poems. I thought this would be a great time to explore a new challenge, so I’ve been collaborating with singer/songwriter Greg Dember on a series of songs. It has been a really fun and educational experience. Sometimes Greg sends me a melody and I write lyrics, sometimes I send him lyrics and he creates the melody, cleaning up phrasing or reworking lines as he goes. On one song I finished a tricky lyric for him. In another he put together two completely different sets of words, one by him and one by me, and brought the song to life that way. I really enjoy working with an album in mind, and collaborating with a partner so knowledgeable and adept at songwriting pushes my writing and thinking into new places. We’ve probably got a half-dozen songs now. Hearing them come to life when Greg puts the melody to them is exciting in a fresh way.