Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

In a benefit for the Petaluma Poetry Walk on July 1st, San Francisco Poet Laureate and visual artist Jack Hirschman and his wife, poet and visual artist Agneta Falk read at Petaluma’s Phoenix Theater after opening act, Baba Shibambo, played a short set of South African Marimba Dance Music.

Agneta Falk, the internet tells me and, I believe the emcee for the evening, Carl Macki, reiterated, was born in Stockholm, Sweden and moved to Yorkshire, England in the late sixties where she lived for some thirty years before relocating again to San Francisco. She read mostly from her book “It’s Not Love, It’s Love (Multimedia Edizioni, 2000).” She also read a poem from an anthology she co-edited (with Judi Benson), “The Long Pale Corridor” (Bloodaxe, 1995) about grieving and death and from some new poems on paper. Well, they were all new poems for me, it was the first time I saw her read. She is a very good reader as well as poet, very clear. She has a Swedish accent but, after her years in England, it was endearing and not a liability to a somewhat deaf American ear sitting in the very back of the theater. I especially loved her last poem, “Yorkshire Rap,” which was what I’d call a tone-poem. At least, I didn’t pick up any obvious meanings this time around. There could have been. (I remember the word, “Heathcliff,” was repeated several times. I’ve never read Wuthering Heights, nor seen more than a few scenes with Olivier in the role.) I was so thrilled with how she presented each word on its own, with the human voice music I was hearing, perhaps I didn’t want meaning too. After the strong, heart-felt poems that preceded it, it seemed such a change of pace to bring the intensity to the words in themselves and not only to their meaning. It made a wonderful and generous transition poem as it opened the poetry space for the next poet.

I have seen Jack Hirschman read many times; I wish I’d have seen him more times than I have. I moved to SF in 1973, the same year he moved up from LA. The rumor on the street then was that he was Jim Morrison’s poetry professor at UCLA. I have no idea whether that is true or not, but I was told that several times in those days. I know he taught at UCLA. Anyway, he seems always to have been legendary. I enjoy his New York accent. I enjoy how he uses it. He is the author of over 100 books of his own poetry and translations. On this afternoon, he read from three of his books, “Front Lines, Selected Poems” (City Lights, 2002), “The Arcanes” (Multimedia Edizioni, 2006) and “Only Dreaming Sky” (Manic D Press, 2007). He began his reading with the poem, “NY, NY.” The poem in a sense echoes Falk’s poem, “Yorkshire Rap,” only instead of individual words, he uses emotive phrases, it begins: “It’s big/It’s ugly/I hate it/I love it”. He utters each of these phrases as a youngster would who wants his words to mean a lot more than he’s able to express, and they do. Each line adds up to a non-linear conclusion, full of contradictions. It’s humorous and serious at the same time. The poem takes up two pages in “Front Lines” and when he has finished repeating “never” for the fifth time (in three lines) which echoes “I’ll never stop/loving it,” you know he loves the city, warts & all (&/or all the things a city can represent, e.g., Hirschman’s Marxist politics) and love is bigger than a city. During the afternoon, he read three of his Arcanes. which is his masterwork that was published by an Italian publisher (listed above) in an English only edition last year. This volume contains all (at the time of printing anyway) 126 Arcanes, 940-something pages of poetry (10-point print) written over 34 years! David Meltzer in his introduction calls it “one of the major poetic achievements of American poetry.” The first Arcane he read us was “The Big Gothic D Arcane.” The “Big Gothic D” is the Detroit Tigers baseball cap insignia. Hirschman was/is a Tiger fan. The poem uses the language of baseball for its metaphor, with the Tigers playing the Yankees, but it goes deeper…

             there’s a
     war on, there’s always a war on in America, I’m in there to strike

     out the Yanks, who are everywhere now and must be mowed down.
     I’m a Tiger. I got Africa and Asia in me. The Yanks have the money,

     but we’ve the hunger.

But it goes beyond that. Besides his own personal history and baseball fantasies, Jack has so many vocabularies (Hirschman has translated poems from several languages and cultures. Meltzer, who claims his memory is faulty, lists eleven.) he works & plays (puns) with. & I haven’t mentioned Kabbalah, alchemy and other spiritual pursuits that are also at work here. (Meltzer also names Heidegger as a source.) Given this, dear Reader, you should know I am sometimes out of my depth, but not out of my appreciation. The Arcanes are from an embodied spirituality. You might not know how everything was put together, but you are not left out in the cold either. When I don’t understand or can’t make connections, I think scat singing, there’s plenty of rhythm to hear. With Hirschman, there will always be a line that “makes sense” & ties together some of the loose ends.

         …The longing for home. The neck one wants
     to throttle & simultaneously

     kiss. The blond cascade over the diamond, wet after the rain. Leaves of
     that grass.
     That’s your call. You’re hot to get in there, show how your curve works,
     how sizzling

     your stuff, how the screwball you’ve developed takes off like a country
     woman
     in an untouchable huff…

Hirschman’s poems show a lot of stuff, real heat & “wicked” spins.

I was doing double duty, so I didn’t catch the title of the second Arcane he read. It was more overtly political. I believe it was the Quntzeros Arcane, which I found a week after the reading, but that may be because I attached myself to the poem when I was scanning The Arcanes with the reading fresh in my mind and not finding the resonance. I believe he said the title was the Hebrew word for “tract, doctrine.” The third Arcane Hirschman read was “The Birth Arcane,” written for the birth of his granddaughter. It shows yet another side of the poet, one stanza reads:

       O good sun rising
     and, somewhere in each of us,
     never setting, touching
     all suckling,
     peeing, shitting
     with the glow
     of the natural
     miraculous.

Hirschman’s poetry has many facets and is full of contradictions, or is “bigger than life,” you make the call. He keeps it human and isn’t cowed by the possibilities of that term.

Jack Hirschman will be hosting and reading, along with the three SF poet laureates that preceded him, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Janice Mirikatani and Devorah Major, at the San Francisco International Poetry Festival at the end of this month, July 26th through 29th, with poets from fifteen different countries attending, including Agneta Falk. All events are free. Check the internet for times and places, www.sfintlpoetryfest.org

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