Saskia Hamilton: World Poetry Day

Saskia Hamilton (1967- 2023) was my teacher when I was a student at Columbia. She was on the faculty at Barnard, and one of the first classes I took was her Poetics, a lecture of about thirty students. A couple years later, I took her Advanced Poetry Writing seminar. 

Can I start by saying I had a crush on her? No; that everyone did? It seems foolish to start there but first impressions are important, and, lest we forget, I was 18 when we met and she was everything I had imagined a professor to be. She wore the uniform: slim jeans, button-down shirt, blazer, an occasional pair of glasses. To which she added straight hair that she wore loose past her shoulders. And that voice. To this day, there are a few people whose voices I can hear in my head when I read poetry. Hers is one of them. I swear she could have made the Manhattan phone book sound beautiful and mysterious. This was back when there was such a thing.

You can hear that voice here.

Saskia Hamilton: Scholarship Distilled

If this much and no more had been true, she might have been any one of half a dozen professors I knew with good public speaking voices and dress sense. But there was this way she had of smiling when a student said something that she enjoyed (I remember her smile being quite asymmetrical). It felt like she was showing our enthusiasm back to us: See? Isn’t it wonderful? We all love poetry! And it was. It was wonderful.

There’s an old piece of wisdom that when you love someone, you love them for them; but when you have a crush on someone, you love them for how they make you feel about you. And that’s exactly what was happening. As I spent more time with her and took a second class with her, I learned what was really happening: Saskia loved poetry so much and loved teaching so much. And for those of us who were nerdy and distant in high school, here at last was an adult who was just as nerdy but not distant at all. Suddenly, poetry could be a source of connection and warmth and play and intimacy; not just a consolation for lonely hours and thoughts too angry to say out loud.

But taking that first class all of that understanding was in the future. What I knew at the time was that being near her gave me the same feeling as being near all those dusty books in a great academic library. It made me feel like I was closer to the springs of wisdom itself.

What did I learn from Saskia?

I’ve been very clear–it’s even right up there on the banner of this website–that it’s not important to do everything perfectly the first time; the important thing is to find something you love enough to do it badly and then to do it a bit better and then feel like you’re backsliding and then to course correct and try to do it a bit better and better and better still. I did not learn all of that from Saskia Hamilton.

There were other wonderful teachers in my life; other warm-voiced people, patient and curious, who respected the first frail efforts of a tween or teenager or twenty-something. But Saskia’s teaching, yes and her general attitude towards her students, became a kind of goal for me. Something to strive for in all of my doing something badly and then trying to course-correct and so on. Back when I wanted to be a professor, it was because I wanted for myself and for my students a version of what I saw in her classroom. In a way, I still want that.

Saskia Hamilton and Poetry Joy

When I think back to Saskia’s classroom, my first association is joy. My second association is “try it and see.” She put her trust in her students as few professors do. If a student had an idea, she made it her business to facilitate; to help the student grow that idea.

That was and is my goal as a teacher. No matter that I was naive back then in a way I have been cured of.

For instance, I didn’t know back then that you could love poetry and love your students as much as Saskia did and not automatically find your way to a cushy professorship in a deep-pocketed university. Nor did I know–well I might have known but I didn’t much consider–that you could love poetry and love your students and find your way to a cushy professorship… only to die, as she did, in her fifties, leaving behind a young child. 

Fuck it. I still believe in believing in your students. And I still believe in joy.

Saskia Hamilton, Poet

I have gone on this long without even mentioning the poems she wrote because that, too, is who she was. Saskia never mentioned her own poems even once in class; not even when she was teaching that poetry writing seminar. You’d think it would have come up: “Oh! You all write poetry? I write poetry too! That’s fantastic! Let’s sit and talk about it!” Nope. Nothing. She once said, in commiseration with a student who was complaining about the rough treatment a professor was getting at the hands of their tenure committee: “The tenure process is really rough. So don’t take your professors for granted.” Then: “Well. You can take me for granted.”

I read her poetry on my own, starting a year or two into our association. There’s no one poem of hers that I would say is my favorite. But there is a particular way her poems affect me. Most of them are so short they appear lost on the page–four or six lines. They manage to complete a thought and yet leave it open-ended. Finishing reading one of her poems feels like getting up to go after sitting with a loved one in the hospital, holding their hand. There’s no right time or place to stop. You have to stop sometime. But for the length of the visit, for the length that you are holding their hand you feel a kind of sadness, a kind of peace that comes of knowing you are doing as much as you can do in an impossible situation. An example:

Zwijgen

I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.

Notice how the fact that our language does not have a word for something is not castigated as a failing. It means, rather, that that idea is tucked away like an heirloom. It’s still there. You still think about it sometimes, like an old grief.

Saskia Hamilton and World Poetry Day

If I can say no more on this, World Poetry Day, than what Saskia taught me, it will be enough: think beautiful, challenging thoughts. Thoughts that are so huge in their honesty and intimacy that they hollow you out, so that you can laugh and cry and love just a little deeper just a little more joyfully and fiercely and sadly. Then write them down. And share them. And don’t take your teachers for granted.

Editor’s note: World Poetry Day

We usually use World Poetry Day to give you a preview of what we have in the works for April (National Poetry Month). 

30 Days 30 Poems Project

This year, as every year, we are doing the 30 Days 30 Poems Project. If you have a beloved poem that hasn’t been featured yet, please send it to us with a line or three about why you love it / what it means to you. You can sign up for a reminder to receive a new poem every day of April along with a short reflection by the person who submitted it. If you’d like to share a poem to include in the Project, we are looking for poems outside the typical canon of famous dead white men… but if you just LOVE T. S. Eliot, go ahead and send us a poem and tell us why.

Annual Poetry Reading in Honor of National Poetry Month

We are hosting our annual poetry reading in honor of National Poetry Month. Not to be confused with our annual reading in honor of starting this site/magazine/community. Or our other impromptu readings throughout the year.Follow us on Facebook or Discord for exact times and Zoom address.

New: Poetry Workshops

New this year: Workshops throughout April on writing and publishing poetry. Please sign up here. Follow us on Facebook or Discord for exact times and Zoom address.