Jack Hirschman
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Jack Hirschman (December 13, 1933 – August 22, 2021) was an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.
Biography
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.
Hirschman married Ruth Epstein, a program director for National Public Radio, in 1954. The couple had two children. In the 1950s and 60s, Hirschman taught at Dartmouth College and University of California, Los Angeles. The Vietnam War, however, put an end to Hirschman's academic career, and he was fired from UCLA after encouraging his students to resist the draft. His marriage disintegrated, and he moved to San Francisco in 1973.
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."
For a quarter century, Hirschman has roamed San Francisco streets, cafes (including Caffe Trieste, where he has been a regular patron), and readings, becoming an active street poet and a peripatetic activist. Hirschman is also a painter and collagist, and has translated over two dozen books from the German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Albanian, and Greek.
He is an assistant editor at the left-wing literary journal Left Curve and is a correspondent for The People’s Tribune. Among his many volumes of poetry are A Correspondence of Americans (Indiana U. Press, 1960), Black Alephs (Trigram Press, 1969), Lyripol (City Lights, 1976), The Bottom Line (Curbstone, 1988), and Endless Threshold (Curbstone, 1992). Hirschman is an avowed Stalinist and has translated the youthful poems of Joseph Stalin into English (Joey: The Poems of Joseph Stalin [Deliriodendron Press, 2001]).
In June 1999, Hirschman married the English calligrapher Agneta Falk. In 2006, Hirschman was appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco by Mayor Gavin Newsom. He also released his most extensive collection of poems yet, The Arcanes that year. Published in Salerno, Italy by Multimedia Edizioni, The Arcanes comprises 126 long poems spanning 34 years.
