Mac Hammond

Mac Hammond was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1926. One of his earliest memories was of sitting under the quilting frame at his grandmother’s house listening to the women talk while they sewed. After his parents separated when he was five, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his mother and stepfather, who worked for the Cola industry. They lived on Peach Tree Street. During his first two years of college at the University of South Carolina he began to seriously write poetry. He served two years in the U.S. Navy, and the G.I. Bill enabled him to complete his B.A. at Sewanee: the University of the South, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. While in graduate school, he became a member of the Poet’s Theater where he acted in several productions including V.R. Lang’s verse play, I Too Have Lived in Arcadia, and Mary Manning’s adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Mac wrote his dissertation on a single poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar, by Wallace Stevens. He studied and worked for Roman Jakobson, pioneer of structural linguistics – an experience that would shape Mac’s approach to language and the conveyance of meaning for the rest of his career.

Mac was utterly committed to poetry and the world of poets, resulting in many deep personal connections with poets who had worldwide reputations, including Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, and Billy Collins as well as the students he encouraged to devote themselves to poetry, many of whom went on to have serious careers as writers.

Mac was the author of four volumes of poetry, The Horse Opera and Other Poems (1966); Cold Turkey (1969); Six Dutch Hearts (1978), and Mappamundi, New and Selected Poems (1989). He also published several chapbooks and monographs over the years. His poems appeared in magazines such as the Paris Review, Poetry and Choice. In 1980 he was one of 100 poets invited to the White House by Jimmy Carter for a program honoring American poets.

He first taught at the  University of Virginia, then Western Reserve University, and then moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) English Department in 1963 where he stayed until retiring in 1993. Mac was one of the progressive, radical writers who arrived in Buffalo in the 1960s to create what was considered at the time to be one of the most avant-garde English departments in the United States.

From 1979 to 1983 Mac was director of UB's graduate program in creative writing. He had a long-standing interest in the combination of poetry and other media, was co-founder of the Student Faculty Film Club at UB, moving on to a video collective, Squeaky Wheel, of which he was president in the mid-1990s. He had made audio and video recordings long before, including The Holidays in 1968, a three-track tape comprising a selection of poems for simultaneous voices. In his later years, he combined video art and poetry in videos shown in Buffalo, Chicago and San Francisco. He was the co-founder of the Nickel City Poetry/Video Association.

He died at his home in Buffalo, New York in 1997, with poetry at his side, and the love and support of family and friends, many of whom played a large role in his life as a poet.