Heart of Bamboo: Poetry & Music in the Zen Traditi: A Listener's Guide to the Poetry of Sam Hamill

Sam Hamill reads poems and translations to the traditional and improvised melodies of the Japanese bamboo flute (shakuhachi) played by Christopher Yohmei Blasdel and the thirteen-stringed koto played by Elizabeth Falconer. Thebooklet contains two essays by Hamill: "Listening in the Zen Tradition," and "Editing by Ear." "The roots of poetry inevitably return us to music," Hamill writes. "All peotry aspires to the conditions of music."

Sam Hamill, editor of Copper Canyon Press and The Gift of Tongues, has published a dozen volumes of original poetry, most recently Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995 (White Pine Press, 1995). He has also published more than a dozen volumes of poetry translated from ancient Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Latin, and three volumes of essays. His anthology exploring thirty centuries of erotic poetry, The Erotic Spirit is published by Shambhala.

He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation.