PRAGYA AGARWAL recommends a collection of drawings that explore the relation of indigenous people to the land in south Asia, Africa and the Caribbean
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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]
CHRIS SEALE speaks to Palestinian sound artist BINT MBAREH
MARY CONWAY applauds a brave and timely two hander that explores the difference between intimacy and abuse
ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review The Thing with Feathers, Train Dreams, Sisu: Road to Revenge, and Wicked: For Good
GUILLERMO THOMAS welcomes a biography of WA Domingo, a key figure in the anti-colonial struggle in the Caribbean
BRENT CUTLER is intrigued by the imperialist, supremacist and contradictory history of a word that is used all too easily
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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