Jack Hirschman at Caffe Trieste, in San Francisco, on November 23 2016
[Christopher Michel/Creative Commons]
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
JONATHAN TAYLOR is fascinated by the philosophical problems that permeate the art of life-writing
GORDON PARSONS steps warily in between the lines of Britain’s most famous diarist
SIMON DUFF recommends a recording of Arvo Part that takes the listener on a pilgrimage through seemingly distant times and events of the Bible
JACK HIRSCHMAN, who has died aged 87, was a radical US poet, a familiar face on picket lines and at poetry festivals all over the world.
Hirschman was born in New York in 1933 to a Russian Jewish family. He studied at New York City College and then at Indiana University. In the late 1960s he taught at UCLA, where Jim Morrison (of The Doors) was one of his students. The university fired him for giving A grades to students so they could avoid the Vietnam draft.
Moving to San Francisco, he became friends with Beat writers like Corso and Ferlinghetti, and threw himself into the emerging Street Poetry movement. For the next 50 years Hirschman walked around the streets and cafes of the city, reading his poems wherever he found an audience.
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
