The Modern Renaissance Poet
By JASON CARLEY
If Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson had a child, I imagine he would turn out something like Bill Hamlett, perhaps with frizzier hair. Admittedly it’s nine o’clock in the evening and Bill has been working on a new poem for hours, but he seems giddy, almost mad scientist-like. The bronze glasses pushed up high on his nose are strikingly reminiscent of Harry Potter’s circular frames and behind them, his eyes are penetrating, all-knowing.
Bill’s dorm room is a scholarly dungeon filled with rows of faded books and lit by a single lamp in the far corner. A child-sized skull on his desk adds to the bizarre 15th century atmosphere. Bill takes apart a rolling chair and squats on the base, only inches off the ground, then laughs throatily and lets a smile linger on his face. He just might be the nicest genius you’ll ever meet.
In reference to his current poetry project, still fresh on his laptop screen, Bill says, “I’m really trying to get used to approaching poetry from a standpoint of the unknown—to embrace it as an unsure act—and that has implications philosophically and religiously.” Listening to Bill talk is like skimming through a polished academic journal article, but he’s natural and genuine, and rarely comes across as pretentious. “So really,” he says, “my whole life is turning around poetry right now, no matter what I’m doing.”
Though only a sophomore at TCU, Bill is already making a serious statement with his writing. Until this year, he has had no formal training in fiction writing or poetry, but you would never know it from reading his work. Consider one of Bill’s recent poems, From Venice Near Ponte De Rialto:
When in the church-garden I found my love
She wore spring floral and a countenance
Of sun-burst pedals, so our lady of
Wherever paled in the liquid light-dance
Of her soul-smile and those ocean eyes who
Played me the raven to her precious stone
In that pealing moment my heart formed to
The gentle heart of she who stood alone.
Bill’s poetry drips with imagery, but there’s also something strikingly aural about it. “I like writing that deals with image and the beauty of language,” says Bill, “the interaction between the sounds and the physicality of the description.”
While Bill is self-taught, he has been inspired by writers who, like him, focus on the symbiosis between written language and sound. “My favorite prose writers are Nabokov and Saroyan and Joseph Heller, but Nabokov especially, because he listens to the music of what he says and at the same time perfectly illustrates ideas in his specific language.”
These days, Bill finds himself gravitating toward short image poetry and really anything that focuses on language. According to Bill, “not all poetry pays attention to language. A lot of it is about ideas—especially in post-modernism. But that’s something that’s really important to me—to play with the sounds and the images at the same time.”
Perhaps most of all, Bill’s poetry is inspired by the way he sees the world. He admits, “I really do a lot of thinking about the way I think, which is mostly in emotion. I’m always looking for my origins and I’m very context-oriented. I was trying to distill down the moment when I found the urge to write poetry, even before I wrote it.”
Bill attributes much of his passion for writing to his childhood years spent in Saudi Arabia where his father trained Saudi fighter pilots for the U.S. Air Force in the early nineties. “That whole period in my life, though it was short, was very influential. That was when I felt like I woke up and came out of childhood, because something very traumatic happened, and that was the Khobar Tower Bombings.”
In 1996, Hezbollah terrorists attacked the U.S. Air Force barracks where Bill was living at the time, killing 20 people and injuring 372. “I had this sense that shook me out of childhood—that there was someone out there who for no particular reason, besides the fact that I was white, American, and Christian, wanted to see me dead, and they wanted to see me burning. And that exposure to such strong hate so early on really changed the entire way I looked at the world.”
After the bombings, the American government began evacuating Air Force families from Saudi Arabia back to the States, but before leaving, Bill’s family made a final excursion into the southwest region of the country. “We visited these mountains near the border of Yemen and hiked into a valley, and we caught a sight of something in the distance.” He leans forward and tells the story as if he’s seeing it all for the first time. “As we approached, we could only see this white shape, but as we got closer we realized that it was a hill that was entirely covered in crystals—that was its entire composition—and I still wonder if it really ever happened, because it was so dreamlike. That experience, for the first time, turned on that heightened perception that’s required for one to be a writer, especially considering the emotional trauma that had just occurred.”
Given Bill’s understanding of the power of imagery, it’s not surprising that his writing talent extends far beyond the realm of poetry. He recently wrote the screenplay for a short film, Pair, Apart, which won first place at the 2011 Honors College Frog Film contest at TCU and is now viewable on Youtube. The mostly black and white film adapts the avant garde style of new wave directors like Truffaut and Godard to portray the peak and subsequent decline of a young man’s romance. Bill effectively uses the filmmaking medium to combine his interest in language (the film’s dialogue is sparse, but impactful), with his love for imagery; the film is strikingly visual and presents a romanticized, yet tragic outlook on love and life that leaves a lasting impression on the viewer. Bill has plans for another script, but he’s vague on the details. “I want to see what it’s like to write something in secret and to not have readers for now,” he says. While Bill’s fans will have to wait for more info on his next film, there is his reality TV celebrity personality to enjoy.
In February, Bill made his debut on Top Grad—a TCU film department reality series in which TCU students compete for a grand prize of two thousand dollars. Despite the substantial cash prize, all of the attention Bill has received has caused him to have doubts about being on the show. “After the first episode aired,” he says, “people started coming up to me on campus and saying, ‘Hey, aren’t you on Top Grad?’” Bill’s quirky, intellectual personality shines through on the show, perhaps more than he would like. “I’m not a public figure,” he laughs. “I’m just going to find a secluded mountain and become a hermit.”
Even if Bill does at times envy the life of a recluse, he’ll always have that inexhaustible list of interests that forces him to stick with people. “I love film, all storytelling really,” he says, “but outside of that realm, I am interested in religion, and I’m interested in cultures and meeting people from foreign lands. I also have that strange thing for physics and I think that really describes my thought process—it’s in very physical terms.”
While Bill is majoring in writing, he is also studying French, Japanese, and Icelandic in a pursuit that stems from his love of culture that has been with him since childhood. He concedes, “I love the outdoors and people, and astronomy, and cosmology, and I went through a computer phase. I like computer languages.” Concerning his interest in computers, Bill says, “I grew up with very scientific orientation, and very scientific father.” His childhood fascination with math and physics has carried through to his current approach to language, and he feels that it makes him unique as a poet. “A lot of times when words come to me in poetry I can almost see the way they moves through space and the shape they have—it’s very synesthetic. Sometimes when I have those moments I feel like there’s some legitimacy to me being a poet.” That connection between the nature and Bill’s writing becomes clearer when you understand the first moment when he realized the power of poetry in describing the world.
Bill readjusts his glasses and recalls a fond childhood memory of checking a book out from the library and taking it outside to a tree-filled courtyard. “There was something about the outdoors and where I was sitting,” he says, “that captured me more than the book. I stopped reading and just looked at how the leaves were shaking in the wind, and I noticed for the first time that the leaves were different colors on both sides. And that was a realization of what could be created by language and I realizedin that momentthat all these things could be described.” In his moment of reminiscing, Bill has ascended to some writer’s nirvana, and it takes him a moment to come back to the real world.
When he refocuses his gaze, he’s calm, somehow sedated by remembering back to his first experience as a poet. “Realistically speaking,” he says, “I’m going to be writing always, because it’s important to me personally.” He would love nothing more than to contribute to important literary magazines, and to focus specifically on poetry and writing about language. “Long term, I’d really love to bridge the gap between art and science,” he says, “so my ultimate goal would be to be the kind of man who writes poetry but is also analytical about language.”
This college sophomore is likely one of the only intellectuals of the Facebook generation who finds merit in a truly well-rounded education; Bill’s outlook on academia is more reminiscent of the Renaissance mindset than that of our one-track 21st century minds. After TCU, Bill plans to attend graduate school in order to pursue a career in poetry, though he admits that there is not much money in his chosen field. Whether he ends up a famous poet, a reality T.V. star, an astrophysicist, or all of the above, if one thing’s for sure, it’s that Bill Hamlett will be writing for a long time, and you will be hearing his name again.