Jack Hirschman was born on December 13, 1933 in New York City and grew up in the Bronx. He wrote and performed his first poem at the age of 12. At 15 he was a reporter for the Bronx Times which was ultimately charged with operating an illegal bookmaking operation and shut down. He attended the City College of New York, where he learned Latin and Greek, graduating with a BA in 1955. While there he sent a short story to the author Ernest Hemingway who famously wrote back: “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 gave up any idea of becoming a novelist and focused on poetry instead. In 1954 he married Ruth Epstein, a pioneer in public radio, and they would have a son and daughter together. Hirschman obtained an MA in 1957 and a PhD in 1961, both from Indiana University. His first volume of poetry was published in 1960.
After obtaining his PhD Hirschman taught English at Dartmouth College where he met Lawrence Ferlinghetti[1]. In 1961 Hirschman moved with his family to become an assistant English professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of his students was Jim Morrison, lead singer of the rock group The Doors. Hirschman’s teaching career came to an abrupt end in 1966 when he openly encouraged his students to dodge the Vietnam War draft. His marriage ended as well, and he moved to Venice, returning to the States in 1973 and moving to North Beach in San Francisco where his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti lived. Hirschman moved into a single room in the now defunct New Riviera Hotel above Caffe Trieste[2] at 601 Vallejo. He became a regular at Caffe Trieste and later claimed that he got free meals there for six months because he had no money. Opened in 1956, Caffe Trieste was the first espresso house on the West Coast. Giovanni “Papa” Giotta (1920-2016), who had immigrated with his family from Italy in 1951, imported and roasted his own beans. In 1971 Giotta launched the Caffe Trieste Saturday Concert which became the longest running musical show in the City. The walls are still adorned with pictures of famous celebrities and it was not only a prime hangout during the Beat Movement spearheaded by Ferlinghetti, but it is where Francis Ford Coppola[3] wrote his screenplay of The Godfather.
By the time Hirschman moved to the City at the age of 40 he was sporting a push broom mustache, long wild hair and a weathered face. He translated over two dozen books from Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Russian, Albanian and Greek into English. He also began an illustrious career as a political poet. He supported the anti-war movement, the Black Panther Party and identified as a Marxist. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle[4] he was quoted as saying, “The most important thing as a poet is that I worked for the Communist movement for 45 years, and the new class of impoverished and homeless people.” In San Francisco Hirschman would distribute leaflets of his poetry to people on the streets. His 50 plus volumes of poetry were published by small independent presses in small runs and distributed across the United States and Europe.
In June 1999 Hirschman married Swedish poet and writer Agneta Falk, whom he had met while giving a lecture in London. The couple moved to a cottage behind an apartment house on Union. He still kept his room above Caffe Trieste and visited the coffee house every day. In 2006 he released his most extensive collection of poems, The Arcanes, published in Salerno, Italy and containing 126 poems spanning 34 years. That same year he was appointed San Francisco’s Poet Laureate by Mayor Gavin Newsom. With that honor, Hirschman was able to reprise the San Francisco International Poetry Festival and organize the Latino Poetry Festival, the Vietnamese Poetry Festival and the Iranian Arts Poetry Festival. He also curated the Poets 11 Anthology, a collection of works from each of the City’s eleven districts. Once a week he could be found at the North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library[5] for Tuesday night poetry readings.
Hirschman died on August 22, 2021 at the age of 87, moments before he was slated to speak to an online gathering of the World Poetry Movement.
One of my favorite Hirschman poems was one he wrote for friend Allen Ginsberg:
Allen, your anti-Stalin remarks are
Lousy with the old lies of zionism
Lacquered up with buddhism’s
Eternal Nirvana of spontaneous
Narcotic Now.
Go on, you don’t believe the shit you’ve
Instigated in poetry’s good name.
Not even forty-years later.
Sex, dope and capitalist drivel.
Before you can even say Cockadoodledo,
Elemental Leninism emanates
Radiant collectives of the real and the
Georgian still tunes all black laughter.
——————
[1] Lawrence Ferlinghetti: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=4625 [2] Visit them at http://www.caffetrieste.com [3] Francis Ford Coppola: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=4666 [4] San Francisco Chronicle: story coming January 16th [5] San Francisco Public Library: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=4605
