spuytenduyvil

Here, finally, the full-blown Trance Poetics of our homegrown Jersey girl surrealist, Janet Hamill.  As she travels the world, from Hollywood to Canyon de Chelly to Mardi Gras to Key West to Jersey, back to Tijuana, forth to Morocco and Ethiopia, landing like a rocket-headstone in New York, she creates a new world in a new language.  Knock is new form, as yet unnamed, hypnotic, beguiling, gestural—as close to ritual as a poem text can be. Mix it—the Azmiri poets in Addis will drink their honey wine, the Yaquí shamans will eat their peyote, and New York will hallucinate poetry but no one but Hamill will Knock. Enter this world at your own risk. Prepare to change everything. Relax, it’s all laid out in front of you, a prescient shadow. Just Knock.

          Bob Holman

 

Knock of tribes, knock of tides, knock of spirit, knock of solid earth. To read Janet Hamill’s Knock is to be taken under a spell, shown the whole of everything, hypnotized by the pulsing rhythm of real, free, wild experience. In these pages are the secrets of one who wanders with an open heart and the knowledge that we are as ancient and immortal as we are a fleeting flash above an ever-changing sightline.

          Tamra Carraher, editor of Alexandria Quarterly

 

Janet Hamill’s Knock is intensely visual and invigorating. The interwoven shifts of its seductive language tenders a third dimensional reading experience. This is an ambitious work, rich with unexpected juxtapositions—Casanova and the Huns, Rothko and Goat’s Head Soup.  A bounteous world into which we’re drawn by one of our true poets.

          Patti Smith

 

Janet Hamill’s bouquet of pantoums in Knock translates into a map of autobiographical palaces. The pantoum itself knots into a hypnotic doorknocker shaped like a woman and we reach for it, plane ticket in hand. The poetic line becomes our new horizon. The poet Robert Kelly once wrote “the poem must have a door,” and this is a book of gorgeous doors, at once placed in front of us closed, but they come with an extravagant and controlled invitation. You’ll find yourself in a book of the senses, a cinema of “azure splinters” and interruption. Knock is not without “slaughter,” “acacia.” You’ll find filmic poems made out of nitrocellulose here. Read them before they burn. Roll them like dice into “the loving affection of distances.” You’ll be glad. In this book, “we were assigned a small cabin,” and it forces us outside.

          Anne Gorrick

 

Knock is a field guide through the ages. A tapestry of drowsy lovers, masks, sweat, rain, oblivion, knowledge & secrets. A meta/physical travelogue as we navigate through language & dream entering doors behind which are statuary & lullabies of the earth. It’s a poem become living museum where science & sorcery carry equal weight out toward the periphery of ART, or as Hamill so eloquently puts it “the storm of revolution” and the unending “pearl image of [her] soul.” Knock before entering this unique dwelling.

          Steve Dalachinsky

Janet Hamill was born in Jersey City, NJ and raised from the age of five in the northern New Jersey town of New Milford. She received her B.A. in English from Rowan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from New England College. She is the author of six books: Troublante (Oliphant Press), The Temple (Telephone Books), Nostalgia of the Infinite (Ocean View Books), Lost Ceilings (Telephone Books), Body of Water (Bowery Books) and Tales from the Eternal Café (Three Rooms Press). Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals, including Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, The Low-Tech Manual, Living with the Animals, The Unmade Bed, Deep Down: The New Sensual Writing by Women, Bowery Women Poems, Have a NYC, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, In/Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley, Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, Bomb, City Lights Review, Café Review, New Wilderness, The World, Recluse, Kansas Quarterly, Poetry Flash, the Hart Crane Newsletter and Alexandria Quarterly: A Curated Journal of Art and Literature.

 

A strong proponent of the spoken word, she has read at The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, The People’s Poetry Gathering, The Walt Whitman Cultural Center, the WORD Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Knitting Factory, CBGB’s Gallery, the Nuyorican Café, Central Park Summer Stage, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, the Andy Warhol Museum, Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, the Liss Ard Festival in County Cork, Ireland, Patti Smith’s Meltdown Festival in London, the Latitude Festival in Southwold, England and Liverpool’s Heartbeats series. In collaboration with the band Lost Ceilings (formerly named Moving Star) she has released two CD’s of spoken word and music, Flying Nowhere (Yes No Maybe Records) and Genie of the Alphabet (Not Records). A documentary about the creative process of Janet Hamill and Lost Ceilings, Bearing Witness, is viewable on You Tube.

 

She has been a writer-in-residence at Naropa University and a MFA teaching assistant at New England College.  She has also lectured and taught workshops in New York City, the Hudson Valley, London and Liverpool.

 

After living in New York City from 1967 to 1993, Janet moved to New York State’s Hudson Valley.