[Marxism] Jack Hirschman - Poet who bridges the Beats, the New Left and the Greens

[Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

While it is understandable that San Francisco and City Lights  
bookstore want to claim Hirschman as a Beat Poet, considering that SF  
is one of the homes of that generation, it seems to me that Hirschman  
won't fit that Procrustean bed.

He worked for AP, became a professor at leading colleges and then,  
under the influence of the fight against the Vietnam War, got fired  
and began (or continued) his literary work.

I am 70 (Hirschman is 72) and was a participant in the early 1960s  
actions at UC Berkeley, leaving the active struggle only the late  
1970s. At Indiana University, Hirschman probably encountered the  
first awakening of the New Left and undoubtedly was influenced by it.  
However, he became a professor, not an activist. This is not a  
criticism; in fact he remained true to his innermost calling.

Based on this article, Hirschman's deepest roots appear to be his  
precocious youth, journalism, academia, and the 1960s and early  
1970s--not the Beats of the mid- and late 1950s.

He may look like a Beat, walk like a Beat, and write like a Beat, but  
he, and what influenced him, seems much closer to the older  
supporters of the Greens, and the radical left of the 1960s and  
1970s. And we welcome him. I expect to refresh myself when his  
collection comes out.

Here is the URL, but since you have to subscribe, I am including  
major portions of the article.

Brian Shannon


http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/14263946p-15076754c.html

Beat Generation dwindles, but Hirschman remains
By JUSTIN M. NORTON, Associated Press Writer,June 4, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -
 . . . San Francisco’s poet laureate may be the best surviving  
example of the values and dreams of that literary culture, which is  
slowly being consigned to textbooks.

“I believe that everyone is a poet,” the 72-year-old avowed Marxist  
says in his booming New York accent. “Everybody is a poet, nobody  
excluded.”

Dressed in a denim jacket and sneakers with a mischievous twinkle in  
his eye, he’s sipping his second espresso of the day at Caffe  
Trieste, a landmark in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, epicenter  
of Beat culture.

The one-time college professor lost his academic post and became a  
street poet. He has spent a lot of the last 35 years sitting right  
here. He drank several thousand espressos, learned to translate  
Russian, finished books and argued with friend Allen Ginsberg. Most  
of his contemporaries moved on long ago or died, but Hirschman is  
still here.

His poems are angry, provocative and often political.

“Presumably it’s we who now know/what it means to be totally detested/ 
to the point of apocalypse,” he writes in “The Twin Towers Arcane.”
. . .
“Jack is a pure poet,” says Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City  
Lights Books, another North Beach mainstay. He nominated Hirschman to  
be the city’s fourth poet laureate earlier this year and has long  
championed his work. “There’s a lot of poets who claim to be pure  
poets but they don’t really have the talent to justify it. Jack does.”

Hirschman grew up in the Bronx, the son of working class parents, and  
dreamed of becoming a reporter. He worked for The Associated Press as  
a copyboy from 1951 to 1955, writing poems in his spare time.

As a student at City College of New York, Hirschman says he was a  
“very pretentious and precocious” student who wrote an undergraduate  
thesis on James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” considered perhaps the  
most challenging novel in 20th century literature.
. . .
Hirschman abandoned journalism, earned a doctorate in comparative  
literature at Indiana University, and became a professor at Dartmouth  
and UCLA.

“I heard he was enormously popular, especially for a course on  
popular culture that had huge attendance at one of the biggest  
lecture halls in UCLA,” Ferlinghetti says. “He was a brilliant  
teacher I’m sure because he’s warm and magnetic. ... He really makes  
contact with the audience.”

Hirschman opposed the Vietnam war. While teaching at UCLA, he heard  
“A” students were excused from the draft.

“I announced that everyone who was draft eligible got the grade of  
‘A,’“ he says. “So I was terminated.” In retrospect, Hischman says,  
it may have been the best thing that happened to him. “I turned my  
back on the corporations, and universities are corporations” he says.

He moved to San Francisco and became a fixture in North Beach. “It  
wasn’t that losing the job freed me to poetry,” Hirschman says. “But  
I did began to live my life just as a poet when I left the university.”

Former San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez, a  
Green Party member who edited a collection by Beat poet Jack  
Micheline, says Hirschman has continued to live the authentic Beat  
lifestyle, unlike other writers from the time. “That may be because  
they attained a fame he hasn’t,” says Gonzalez.

Hirschman’s now busier than ever. His most ambitious work, a 1,000- 
page compilation called “Arcanes,” will be published this month by  
the Italian publisher Casa della Poesia. Critics have compared it to  
William Carlos Williams’ “Patterson” and Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.”

City Lights’ publishing division recently published a collection of  
his work called “Front Lines” as part of its “Pocket Poets” series.

Hirschman is also reaching a new generation of readers by speaking at  
anti-war rallies. Ferlinghetti says Hirschman captivates readers  
across generations with his obvious love of language

“The only other modern poet who had a voice as good as Jack was Allen  
Ginsberg,” he says. “They both have a great deep voice, a lush voice.”





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