Jack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.
Born in New York City, Hirschman received a Bachelor of Arts from City College of New York in 1955, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1957 and 1961, respectively. While attending City College, he worked as a copy boy for the Associated Press. When he was 19, he sent a story to Ernest Hemingway, who responded: "I can't help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere with it." Hirschman left a copy of the letter with the Associated Press, and when Hemingway killed himself in 1961, the "Letter to a Young Writer" was distributed by the wire service and published all over the world.
His first volume of poetry, published in 1960, included an introduction by Karl Shapiro: "What a relief to find a poet who is not afraid of the vulgar or the sentimental, who can burst out laughing or cry his head off in poetry -- who can make love to language, or kick it in the pants."
Hirschman earned degrees from City College of New York and Indiana
University, where he studied comparative literature. He was a popular
and innovative professor at UCLA in the 1970s, before he was fired for
his anti-war activities. Hirschman has lived in California ever since,
making an artistic and political home in the North Beach district of San
Francisco. He is known for his radical engagement with both poetry and
politics: he is a member of the Union of Street Poets, a group that
distributes leaflets of poems to people on the streets. He has also been
instrumental in the formation of the Union of Left Writers of San
Francisco.
In keeping with his political values, Hirschman’s books are published with small, independent presses, often in small runs. According to the poet David Meltzer, Hirschman is “a great teacher who refuses to work in the university, a scholar of great merit who refuses to publish in the mainstream presses; most everything is published by himself, 150 copies.”
Though Hirschman has rejected mainstream success, he has
published prolifically. His 50-plus volumes of poetry include A Correspondence of Americans (1960), Lyripol (1976), Front Lines: Selected Poems (2002), and All That’s Left (2008). His 1,000-page masterpiece, The Arcanes, was published in 2006. The work, written over decades, was heralded by Alan Kaufman in the San Francisco Gate as “unlikely and historically significant a literary production as, say, the appearance of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or James Joyce’s Ulysses…
like Whitman’s and Joyce’s masterpieces, it traces the progress of an
individual consciousness through landscapes teeming with the horrible
glory of modern life.”
The former poet laureate of San Francisco, Hirschman’s style has been compared to poets ranging from Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, and Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg. His poems’ commitment to leftist politics draws comparisons to Vachel Lindsay and Pablo Neruda. A communist since 1980, Hirschman told Contemporary Authors: “It is vitally important at this time that all poets and artists collectivize and form strong socialist cadres in relation to working-class cultural internationalism.”
Hirschman married Ruth Epstein, whom he'd met and dated when they
were students at CCNY, in 1954. Following graduation, Ruth became a
program director for National Public Radio and eventually general manager of Santa Monica public radio station KCRW. The couple had two children. In the 1950s and 60s, Jack Hirschman taught at Dartmouth College and University of California, Los Angeles.
During his tenure as professor at UCLA one of the students enrolled in
his class was Jim Morrison, later to be a cofounder and lead vocalist of
the American band The Doors. The Vietnam War,
however, put an end to Hirschman's academic career; he was fired from
UCLA after encouraging his students to resist the draft.
Hirschman has been hailed as “one of the left’s most prolific and consistent poetic voices,” by Contemporary Poets. But while he is known throughout San Francisco, his real literary fame has blossomed in Europe, where he frequently publishes both his original work and volumes of translation. Meltzer noted that in France “they consider him a major Communist poet.” Part of Hirschman’s dedication to politics and poetry can be traced to his numerous translations of radical poets from around the world. The many languages he has translated include Russian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Albanian, Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Creole.
In interviews,
Hirschman has acknowledged his political involvement began by reading
Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as through his contact and
friendship with the Beats. As he told Marco Nieli in Left Curve, “Mayakovsky,
the first street poet of the century, caught my attention, also because
of his relation to the Bolshevik Revolution and because Ginsberg’s Howl
had evoked something of Mayakovsky’s journalistic notation.
So, before I
had learned Russian (which was to come 18 years later) I had Victor
Erlich, a friend at the time in Indiana, give me the translations of the
texts and I wrote Mayakovsky into American in free verse form. And it
was that translation (though I’d written a short praise poem to Allen
after Howl’s publication) that actually began my friendship
with Ginsberg, when I brought the text to New York in the late ‘50s.”
Since then, Hirschman has continued to translate unabated. He both
co-edited and co-translated the collection Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry (2002). Kai Maristed remarked in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that “With Open Gate in hand, one is tempted to say that news of the death of responsible American publishing may be premature.”
The greatest living American poet.
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