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.

In 2006, he was appointed poet-laureate of San Francisco, and founded the city’s biennial international poetry festival.

He wrote over 100 books, including A Correspondence of Americans, The Bottom Line, Front Lines and Endless Threshold. He also translated over two dozen books into English from languages including Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Russian, Albanian and Greek.

A lifelong communist, Jack Hirschman was involved in housing campaigns in San Francisco, as well as in solidarity actions for Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Colombia and Palestine.

He was an assistant editor at the left-wing literary journal Left Curve and a correspondent for The People’s Tribune. He helped create the Revolutionary Poets Brigades, taking poetry to picket lines and demonstrations, and publishing an annual international anthology called Overthrowing Capitalism.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Hirschman once said: “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.”

Ten years ago, he helped establish the World Poetry Movement (WPM), of which he was recently the general coordinator.

He died in San Francisco on August 22.

“He was both tough and tender,” says Francis Combes of the WPM. “He thought that every human being could be a poet and was entitled to express dreams of beauty and a desire for fraternity. With his words full of passion, empathy, and humour, he fought on the front lines of love and hope. We miss him, but we shall follow in his footsteps.”

Andy Croft

Song

Lift it!
Lift its body
spat-down and scorned
these many months.
Haven’t you ever
lifted
a woman fallen to the street,
a man lying on the sidewall,
a child ganged-up on.
Arms on the ground
protecting his head
from the kicks?

The song’s the same.
Lift it! Raise it up.
Let its cuts and wounds
have some air.
It’s not dead.
It’ll never die.
Beaten, chained, slandered –
look, it’s reaching
for your voice.
Lift it.
Let it rise in its place.

The Internationale
shall be the human race.

Jack Hirschman