Jack Hirschman: Poet Laureate of San Francisco

Below is article from tenants rights activist in S.F. about Jack
Hirschman, the poet laureate for S.F. I've known Jack for years
Jack in his poetry and their activism was tireless in working
for working people to better their lives in S.F. He put put his
body on the line illegally feeding the homeless for years. He supported Matt
Gonzalez, the Green Party candidate for Mayor who nearly won in
the last mayoral election.

Jack was head of a group of political pro-labor poets headquartered
at Cafe Trieste in North Beach, and an inspiration for many in California
--not just poets, but many young activists like the writer below.
As internationalist, he translated poems from many other languages
and was celebrated in Italy.

It was a surprise that a mainstream mayor Newsome appointed
Jack poet laureate, but his appointment was a victory for the
S.F. labor movement.

As poet laureate as he promised Jack brought
poetry to the people with readings in libraries across the cities
and supported labor poets with poetry competitions in each city council
districts. Two fine labor poets won in their council districts--David
Joseph and Alice Rugoff. Jack also kept his promise being an
internationalist by holding late July an International Poetry Festival
bringing in poets from around the world

Julia




\\Who is Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco?
by Ken Werner, Trinity Plaza Tenants Association (TPTA)‚ Jan. 18‚ 2006

Last Thursday, 72-year-old San Franciscan Jack Hirschman was inaugurated as the fourth Poet Laureate of San Francisco, and several stories have already been written about Jack, but all have presented only a two-dimensional image of the real person. That Jack supported Matt Gonzalez for mayor, that he's lived an alternative lifestyle (the Chronicle story used "bohemian," a word that went out of style in the 1960s), that he's published numerous books -- all have been mentioned in the various accounts.

When our newest Poet Laureate speaks, his thick East Coast accent gives him away to reveal his New York roots, where he was born in 1933. Jack moved to San Francisco in 1973 after a brief university teaching career he left in the 1960s.

But who is Jack Hirschman?

Jack Hirschman is a passionate social justice activist who shares with his friends his warmth and affection. He opens his heart in discussions to share his feelings about the injustices of the world, and offers a hug when you greet him and a hug when he leaves.

As an active member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, he travels extensively for speaking engagements and to promote his plethora of published poetry, including several months a year which he spends in Europe. And wherever he goes, Jack is greeted as what one person describes "America's most important living poet."

Whenever I talk with Jack and the subject matter steers to poetry, Jack expresses his admiration for the three San Francisco Poet Laureates who preceded him, but he is most fond of 86-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti who he speaks of with reverence.

During last Thursday's press conference and inauguration, Jack described himself as follows in his acceptance speech:

"Philosophically, I am an internationalist who knows that neither homelessness and poverty globally and specifically here in San Francisco, which the Mayor is much concerned with, as well as war and street violence, will ever end until and unless the wealth of this world is re-distributed and/or appropriated for the benefit of all, according to our needs as human beings. All of my poetry and intellectual expression is in one way or another directed to that end. And since I believe that all human beings are poets in fact, and that the writing of a poem is the most powerful action given to humankind (because unbuyable and unsellable in essence, and because a child of 5 years and a man or woman of seventy years, in the act of writing a poem, evoke the equality that is love at the heart of the world), I write to unfold the future of that equality with all my brother and sister human beings."

Other accounts made note of Jack's insistence of and persistence in speaking out about the plight of the homeless, yet none of the accounts recalled Jack's reading of his 1987 poem simply called "Home," which he read at the inauguration. In case you missed the broadcast on SFGTV and you haven't read the piece, here it is in its entirety:

"Winter has come.

In doorways, in alleys, at the top

of churchsteps,

under cardboard, under rag-blankets

or, if lucky, in plastic sacks,

after another day of humiliation,

sleeping,

freezing,

isolated, divided, penniless,

jobless, wheezing, dirty

skin wrapped around cold bones,

that's us, that's us in the USA,

hard concrete, cold pillow,

where fire? where drink?

damned stiffs in a drawer

soon if, and who cares?

shudders so intimate,

our hands finally closed in clench

after another day panhandling,

tongues hanging out;

dogs ate more today, are curled

at the feet of beds, can belch, fart,

have hospitals they can be taken to,

they'll come out of houses and sniff

us dead one day,

pieces of shit lying scattered here

in an American city

reknowned for its food and culture.

The concrete is our sweat hardened,

the bridge our vampirized blood;

the downtown, Tenderloin and Broadway lights --

our corpuscles transformed into ads;

our pulse-beat the sound tengtengendeng

of coins piling up on counters,

in phone booths, Bart machines, tengtengendeng

in parking meters, pinball contraptions,

public lavatories, toll booths;

our skin converted into dollar bills,

plastic cards, banknotes, lampshades

for executive offices, newspapers,

toilet paper;

our heart -- the bloody organ the State

gobbles like a geek in a sideshow

that's become a national circus of the damned.

O murderous system of munitions and inhuman rights

that has plundered our pockets and dignity,

O enterprise of crime that calls us criminals,

terrorism that cries we are fearful,

greed that evicts us from the places we ourselves have built,

miserable war-mongery that sentences us to misery

and public exposure as public nuisances

to keep a filthy republic clean --

this time we shall not be disappeared

in innercity ghetto barrio or morgue,

this time our numbers are growing into battalions

of united cries:

We want the empty offices collecting dust!

We want the movie houses from midnite til dawn!

We want the churches opened 24 gods a day!

We built them. They're ours. We want them!

No more doorways, garbage-pail alleys,

no more automobile graveyards,

underground sewer slums.

We want public housing!

No more rat-pit tubing, burnt-out rubble-caves,

no more rain-soaked dirt in the mouth,

empty dumpster nightmares of avalanches of trash

and broken bricks,

screams of women hallucinating at Muni entrance gates,

no more kids with death-rattling teeth

under discarded tarp.

We want public housing!

we the veterans of your insane wars,

workers battered into jobless oblivion,

the factory young: fingers crushed into handout

on Chumpchange St.,

the factory old: spat-out phlegm from the sick

corporate chest of Profits.

Instead of raped respect, jobs

with enough to live on!

Instead of exile and eviction in this,

our home, our land,

Homeland once and for all

for one and all

and not just this one-legged cry

on a crutch on a rainy sidewalk.

(Copyright 2006 by Jack Hirschman)

When I talked with Jack on Thursday night, he noted that while the mayor may have stated he commends those who disagree with him, Jack and I disagreed on our perceptions of how the mayor deals with criticism. Jack feels the mayor easily deals with critiques, but it has been my experience that Mayor Newsom has great difficulty dealing with criticism, indeed, is incapable of understanding contentiousness and is taken aback when so confronted. But one thing Jack and I agreed on is that Newsom probably knows very little about poetry and hence his reliance on the senior William Newsom for advice on picking Jack for the position of Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

While the position is symbolic, Jack feels it is a tremendous honor and was and still is excited about representing San Francisco and feels the honor is a victory for working-class people of The City. Additionally, Jack leaked inside information to me that there might just be a possibility of him receiving a small honorarium for his position. And as Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Jack Hirschman wants to organize an International Poetry Festival of San Francisco and invite other social justice activists worldwide to participate. Jack's first thought for a location was the Palace of Fine Arts.

To learn more about Jack Hirschman, visit LRNA.org, where you will also find an email link to request Jack's presence at an event you are planning. I know Jack would be thrilled to speak so don't feel hesitant about inviting him.

In April, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America will be presenting Speakers for a New America, and Jack will be among the scheduled speakers.

Finally, my thanks to Tony Robles of Manilatown Heritage Foundation for introducing me to Jack, and congratulations to Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco -- his poetry and his deep, booming voice sound the call for social justice for all.

In Praise of Mahmoud Darwish

I've been reading three books of poetry translated into English by the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish:

1. First I read "The Adam of Two Edens" edited and translated by Munir Akash and Daniel Moore which is a selected poems of the last two decades. The book has a wonderful introduction to Darwish's life and work. In this first book I read I was struck by how much Darwish is a poet of exile, or as he says an Adam expelled from the first Biblical Eden of long ago and then recently expelled from the Eden of Palestine during the 1948 war when he fled with his family as a young child. Since then his whole life has spent in exile, and he is great poet about being in exile. Darwish wrote poems of many exiles including a great sad lament about the Arabs leaving Spain long ago and another poem about Native American exile from the poem "Speech of the Red Man":

Don't kill the grass any more
It possess a soul in us that could
Shelter the soul of the earth

That image of Native Americans seeing the grass having a soul that shelters the earth is haunting.

2. Then I read "Why Have You Left the Horse Alone," a book Darwish published in 1996 in Arabic but recently translated into English by Jeffrey Sacks. Reading this book I was beginning to also see Darwish a poet of the Mediterranean speaking in his poems of what we all in North America, Europe and the Middle East have in common. Darwish is a world-class poet familiar with a huge range of poetries who gives us ancient Sumer, Babylon, the Greeks including their great tragic poet Aeschylus, and the Romans in this poem "I See My Ghost Coming From Afar:"

I gaze upon the Persians, the Romans, the Sumerians,
and the new refugees, ....

I gaze upon my language.
A little absence is enough for Aeschylus to open the door to peace,
for Antonio to make a brief speech at the outbreak of war
for me to hold a woman's hand in my hand,
to embrace my freedom,
and for my body to begin its ebb and tie anew.

3. Now I'm reading "Unfortunately, It Was Paradise" a selected poems translated and edited by Munir Akash, Carolyn Forche with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein which has selections of Darwish's poems with three poems from before 1986 to an long excerpt from his masterwork book "Mural" from 2000. In the introduction Akash and Forche tell us that after the young child Darwish and his family fled their village Birwe in 1948, the Israelis destroyed the village Birwe along with 416 Palestinian villages. Then Akash and Forche say that Darwish, without a country, made language his identity, a place where he makes meaning and recreates the lost homeland:

Who Am I? Thais is a question that others ask, but has no answer.
I am my language. I am an ode, two odes, ten. This is my language.
I am my language .... ("A Rhyme for the Odes" 91)

We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing ...
Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. ("We Travel Like All People 11)

Reading these books enables me to bypass the stereotyped and cliched images of Palestinians in mass media and begin to touch at least one Palestinian who others consider their poet laureate.

I love his poems including "The Everlasting Fig" that is a dialogue between father and son, with the father taking the son "wherever the wind blows" but away from the "plains where Bonaparte's soldiers/erected a hill to watch the shadows on ancient Acre's hills." As the father flees with his son from the French invaders and all other invaders, the son asks, "Why have you left the horse alone?" and the father answers,

To keep the house company, O my son,
for houses perish if their inhabitants go away. ("The Everlasting Fig," 65).

So this father loved his house so very much that he left his precious horse to keep it company and keep it alive in the title of the book of poetry "Why Have You Left the Horse Alone," as the horse was never alone.

Anybody who's interested in the world should read Mahmoud Darwish.