World mourns loss of renowned “Red poet”

by Chris Mahin

The world has lost a great poet – and a militant communist. Jack Hirschman died suddenly on 22nd August at his home in the North Beach district of San Francisco. He was 87 years old. He died in his sleep, shortly before he was scheduled to take part in a Zoom meeting of the World Poetry Movement (WPA), a group of which he had recently been appointed coordinator.
    As the sad news spread, expressions of sympathy poured in from around the world – from other poets, former students, and fellow revolutionaries and political activists. In a statement issued to the Turkish news media, the World Poetry Movement called Hirschman’s death “a great loss to American and world poetry.” The organisation’s statement pledged that “WPA and the poets of the world, who share his humanist and revolutionary ideals, will keep the memory of this great poet alive; will continue to work … for a freer, more just and egalitarian world.”
    Jack Hirschman was a brilliant poet, scholar, and translator -- and a proud communist. (The documentary film made about him in 2010 is fittingly entitled Red Poet). In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he stated: “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 addition to publishing more than 100 volumes of his own poetry, Hirschman translated over two dozen books from languages including Russian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Albanian, Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Creole. He was deeply committed to ensuring that the works of revolutionaries like Pablo Neruda of Chile, Nazim Hikmet of Turkey, and Rene Depestre of Haiti were available in English in the United States.
    Hirschman was named poet laureate of San Francisco in 2006 by then-mayor Gavin Newsom, a post that allowed Hirschman to create the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. Three years later, he became the poet in residence at the San Francisco public library.
    Jack Hirschman was born on 13th December in New York City in 1933 into a Russian Jewish family and grew up in the Bronx. While still a teenager attending the City College of New York, he worked as a sub-editor for the Associated Press. Later he taught at Dartmouth in New England and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Hirschman was fired from UCLA in the 1970s for encouraging his students to resist the draft during the Vietnam War.
    In 1973, he moved to San Francisco where he became part of the city’s vibrant literary scene, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the writers from the Beat generation grouped around City Lights bookstore in North Beach.
    For decades, Jack Hirschman was a constant presence in San Francisco’s streets and cafes, attending innumerable poetry readings and political rallies, distributing copies of his poetry and the People’s Tribune newspaper. Hirschman served as the assistant editor for the literary journal Left Curve, formed the Union of Left Writers in San Francisco and was a founder of the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
    I first met Jack in the early 1980s. He was always warm, funny, and totally unpretentious. He went out of his way to encourage anyone who wanted to write – provided they were going to stand on the side of the oppressed. Whenever I sent him an issue of the New Worker containing an article on US history that I had written, the man who wrote more than 100 volumes of poetry somehow always found the time to write back. His response would invariably contain kind words of praise for my article and for the New Worker – often with a few exclamations in Italian or Russian thrown in for emphasis.
    Above all else, Jack Hirschman had a warrior’s spirit, a fierce determination to oppose injustice anywhere in the world. As he himself once wrote: “Poetry is really a weapon. It’s a spiritual weapon for the transformation of the world. And, of course, all my poems are love poems. The nicest thing in the world is to propagandize for love.” Rest well, Comrade Jack. Others will take up your weapon.