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JANET HAMILL. POET.
Janet Hamill. You may never have heard the name of one of our greatest living poets. In case you have not, here is a map.
Janet grew up in New Jersey, and as a little girl spent time gazing across the Hudson River toward New York City. She majored in English at Glassboro State College where she met Patti Smith, who would later refer to her as a mentor and has been a lifelong friend and collaborator. After graduation, Janet moved to NYC and began her life as a poet, writing, working in bookstores, traveling the world… Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya. Marrakesh, Tangiers. Spinning dreams and visions into poems, waking into works of deep beauty and mysticism. She began reading her work in New York City in 1975 when she published her first book of poetry, Troublante. Readings at St. Mark’s Church followed, readings around town, readings with Patti in the US and Europe. Spoken word performances with a band of musicians behind her, a band she calls Moving Star. |
Seal of Wisdom
Vault of Change Mystical Lantern Cabinet of Solitude Open to me open to me — from Altar Piece, a poem by Janet Hamill Life is full of twists and turns, passageways you stumble upon that make the pulse race... alleyways that confuse and attract like the medina of the Arab cities or the riddle of a woman's love. I have come to much of what has been momentous in my life through risk and chance; a seemingly wrong turn, a refusal to slip into the footprint on the marble step worn there from too many travelers before me. Janet Hamill was introduced to me soon after my arrival in New York in 1977. I call it a lucky accident. New York City felt like tumbling down a dystopian rabbit hole, and Janet, a real poet who had no qualms about referring to herself as such, led me to a moment of reflection and safety amidst the storm. She gave me a place to live, to read and write. She led me to a new understanding of literature and poetry that would change my life. Lorca. Yeats. Baudelaire. T. S. Eliot. Hart Crane. Under her wing I learned how to feel words in the deepest sense. Where her friend Patti Smith opened a world of art to me through her revolutionary vision of rock and roll, Janet guided me into the mystic, teacher to student, coaxing me to follow my imaginings and visualize the word as color and insight. A genie of the alphabet, like the name of her poem, she illuminated, and I was fortunate to be informed by that light. Together, Patti in absentia and Janet in the flesh were Christminster to my Jude Fawley. When I lived with Janet we both worked at bookstores; she at Cinemabilia, I at the Strand. After work we’d prepare a simple dinner and talk poetry, every night. Poetry of words, poetry of film, poetry of a voile ribbon or the boat-necked shirt of a sailor. Janet would read from what she was working on, and I’d painfully eke out a few words, praying for her approval. |
March 1st marks the anniversary of the first reading I did with Janet in 1978. I read my Ragazzi Manifesto, inspired by Pasolini, and played behind Janet as she read her searingly beautiful poem Belladonna. The intensity of her reading is more incantation than spoken word. Electric guitar awash in echo, I picked at the strings, attempting to paint a flock of delicate birds around the dark and glittering ship of words she, the grand mariner, creates and creates again.
Her work is at turns enigmatic, surreal, alchemical. Illuminated internally/eternally today as the manuscripts of Blake were in another time. Her canvas is a deep and breathtaking sea of chance, of shameless greens and blues, ‘dark blue stronger than the Flemish blue of hummingbirds’. A place where Buster Keaton turns somersaults in air beneath a butterfly umbrella, where hands brush a chest, coming away with diamond dust and the night is inhabited by saurian daemons, mendicants, wild dogs. Vermillion tents and altars of alabaster where ‘Victorious dark-eyed sleep embraces you with embroidered flowers and the deep song of subterranean waterfalls’.
Thank you Maureen Owen and Bob Holman for publishing Janet’s recent work, and thank you Patti Smith for helping her voice be heard. In Janet’s 2008 poetry book Body of Water, Patti writes of her friend in the introduction: “The gallery of the eastern sky is dressed, wall to wall, in a vile, seductive drape. The violent arcade is pressed with the flexible statue aslant in a space thoroughly modern; grecian. A space so new, so ambiguous, that only a poet, such as Breton, dared entangle and entitle. And here, a future later, another poet, with precisian grace, beats back to re-echo a universe of eruptive silk.”
A poet shawafa, Janet Hamill is a wise woman, a witch, a jinn. When I approach her work, I say “Quli Taslim!”, (I submit to the powers of the Jinn) and am unafraid of the fires I discover there for they never cease to warm me into new dreams, new journeys.
Her work is at turns enigmatic, surreal, alchemical. Illuminated internally/eternally today as the manuscripts of Blake were in another time. Her canvas is a deep and breathtaking sea of chance, of shameless greens and blues, ‘dark blue stronger than the Flemish blue of hummingbirds’. A place where Buster Keaton turns somersaults in air beneath a butterfly umbrella, where hands brush a chest, coming away with diamond dust and the night is inhabited by saurian daemons, mendicants, wild dogs. Vermillion tents and altars of alabaster where ‘Victorious dark-eyed sleep embraces you with embroidered flowers and the deep song of subterranean waterfalls’.
Thank you Maureen Owen and Bob Holman for publishing Janet’s recent work, and thank you Patti Smith for helping her voice be heard. In Janet’s 2008 poetry book Body of Water, Patti writes of her friend in the introduction: “The gallery of the eastern sky is dressed, wall to wall, in a vile, seductive drape. The violent arcade is pressed with the flexible statue aslant in a space thoroughly modern; grecian. A space so new, so ambiguous, that only a poet, such as Breton, dared entangle and entitle. And here, a future later, another poet, with precisian grace, beats back to re-echo a universe of eruptive silk.”
A poet shawafa, Janet Hamill is a wise woman, a witch, a jinn. When I approach her work, I say “Quli Taslim!”, (I submit to the powers of the Jinn) and am unafraid of the fires I discover there for they never cease to warm me into new dreams, new journeys.
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“Read EVERYTHING from the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians to the present. Read all poetry from all countries and cultures of the world. Do not be put off by translation. Don't limit yourself to poetry written in English. Just read everything you can get your hands on. Value your imagination and your dreams as much as your intellect. "Feed your head" but don't neglect your senses and private parts. Read, write and live with PASSION. Take it all in and spit it out in brilliant, illuminated words.”
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To learn more about Janet Hamill:
www.janethamill.com To read Publisher Weekly's review of Janet's stunning new collection of stories, click HERE. To order that same collection of stories, Tales From the Eternal Cafe, click HERE. Janet and Patti, February 9th, 2011 at St. Mark’s Church. Both read to commemorate Patti and Lenny Kaye’s first performance at the church. All proceeds went to the Poetry Project. Photo by Michael Sean Collins. |
