The bard pays homage to his two muses: his wife and his football club
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Taking poetry to picket-lines
ANDY CROFT salutes poet Jack Hirschman, an indefatigable communist activist
Jack Hirschman at Caffe Trieste, in San Francisco, on November 23 2016
[Christopher Michel/Creative Commons]
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by an incoherent show that fails to question stereotypical assumptions about the Soviet Union
JOHN McINALLY welcomes a rigorous class analysis of the history and exploitation of sectarianism by the Scottish ruling elite
WILL STONE, JAMES WALSH and MARIA DUARTE review Souleymane’s Story, Sunlight, Good Fortune, and After The Hunt
ALEX HALL recommends an exhaustive investigation of the means by which the Starmer faction assassinated the left
DAVID MORGAN recommends a refreshingly inspiring novel that features encounters with some tremendous women
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.
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