Return to Left Curve no. 25 Table of Contents
Interview with Jack Hirschman
by Marco Nieli
Marco Nieli: You were born in New York from an originally Russian-Jewish family. How was your family and social setting?
Jack Hirshman: It was my only living grandparent, my grandmother Mollie Dannemark Hirschman, who was born in Russia, in fact in the same town as the grandparents of Allen Ginsberg, in Kamenetz Podolsk in southern Russia. My parents, Stephen and Nellie, both were born on the lower east side of New York City. We lived in The Bronx in a largely Jewish and Italian neighborhood. My father was an insurance agent; my mother didn't work during the '30s Depression years and through the war. There were aunts, uncles and cousins (my father was part of a large family, my mother a moderately large one). "On the block" there was a sense of community amid these working-class poor, a neighborly care surpassing personal bad habits, a sense of jewishishness but also--in those years--a secular sense of having to "pull together" in the hard times. When I think of the first seven or eight years of my life (I was born in l933) I cannot not recall the many smiling and loving faces of relations as well as my parent's friends--a sense of extended family, to be sure, that included shopkeepers and neighbors and gave me hope beyond the boyish pains, sicknesses and scraps with friends, or early traumas at school which were also part of growing up.
MN: You grew up in the '30s and '40s, when intellectuals and artists had to take sides politically: what were your experiences as an adolescent during this period?
JH: I was still a child in the '30s so I knew nothing of the political climate, and my father's politics, as were many New Yorkers', was New Deal. I was eight when the war began for Americans and lived through it doing what kids did--collecting paper for the war effort, helping my father, who was an Air Raid Warden on the block, constructing model airplanes like P-38s bought at Woolworths, when I wasn't sitting on the stoops with friends looking for those same planes in the sky. And at the same time playing stickball, tracing the covers of the new Superman and Batman & Robin commix--the kid stuff. I do recall a very important moment before the end of the war when, in l943, my mother said to me that if the Russians did not defeat the Nazis at Stalingrad, Hitler was going to take over England and then come to New York. She said this with a terror I shall never forget. Much later I came to understand that the Battle of Stalingrad was perhaps the last "total" moment--in the sense of a moment's being experienced worldwide with the full range of existential angst and fear, in what was still the "modern" world. When the war ended my father led a block party (he was a very public guy, a comedian and master of ceremonies) in celebration of the victory of the Allies. I wrote a song-poem which I sang at that 1945 event. That was the first poem I recall ever writing.
MN: What perception had you in the '50s about what was going on poetically? Did you have any contact with Williams or Pound?
JH: William Carlos Williams was invited in l954 to my literature class at City College in Harlem. He was a friend of the teacher, John Thurwall. In fact, Williams sat next to me in the room, in a beat-up old dark blue suit. But I was not then into his work. As for Pound, I defended the fight by Hemingway, Frost and others to keep him out of the penitentiary, even after almost a physical fight with my father (who loathed Pound as a fascist and anti-semite). My defense was partly because I was strongly under the influence of Hemingway at the time. Later I would change my view on Pound.
Poetically at that time I was just opening up. The Huk movement in the Philippines, the Korean War and the struggle against McCarthyism put political texture into the way I saw things, and I was working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in The Bronx, as well as being a copy boy for the Associated Press. I was reading Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Paul Eluard, Stephane Mallarmé, Novalis, Rilke, and Dostoyevsky and felt closer to European lyricism than American poetry. In America I read Pablo Neruda's "Let the Railsplitter Awake" (still the greatest poem against McCarthyism), Hemingway (his anti-fascist poems and Spanish Civil War accounts, and of course For Whom the Bell Tolls), and Hart Crane. I recall once seeing, on a bookrack in the Gotham Book Mart, where I'd go on summer lunch breaks from the Associated Press, "In Cold Hell" by Charles Olson, noticing how he seemed to be doing something really new with phrasing on the page--different from what seemed to me to be the more contrived constructions of e.e. cummings--but I was still more interested at the time in the musical spacing of Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dès, which had come out in a translation by Daisy Aldan.
The European avantgarde--the surrealisms and dadaisms--of the '20s-'40s was being migrated along with the Joyce industry of that time. It was riding the horse known as existentialism which soon would be overtaken and surpassed by the emergence of the Beat movement and its relationship, through jazz especially, to what was coming down the road: the most important social and political movement in modern America, the civil rights movement of the late '50s and the '60s. The martyrdom of Charlie Parker, the explosion of Jack Kerouac's books, and the publication of Howl were all part of the surfacing of a hip and dopey social contract contributing to the sense if not the demands for change embodied in the civil rights movement.
MN: When did you start writing poetry? Were you aware of the Black Mountain experience and the underground flowering of the new poetics?
JH: I started writing with a novel, which I composed between copy-boy tasks on my job with the Associated Press. That was in '5l-'52. Then I began writing poetry. It was after hearing Dylan Thomas, who gave his last public poetry reading at City College. I was not at that time aware of the Black Mountain experience. I came to Olson's work in the late '50s, in Indiana, and actually through reading poets he'd influenced or was influencing then: Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, for example.
MN: What were your poetic models when you first started writing?
JH: To judge from my first book, A Correspondence of Americans, published in l960, Hart Crane and the Djuna Barnes of Nightwood were strong linguistic influences--naturally in a way because I was student-teaching in Indiana at the time and both of those poets resonate to Shakespearian American-English. I sought also a lyricism modeled on Thomas. In the introduction to that book, Karl Shapiro said he liked my work because I took the forms as they came. This is important not simply because I sought from early on to let the poem write itself, so to speak--and damn the criticisms of stylistic eclecticism--but because I'd fight to make my life as open as possible, as unencumbered by any forces that would prevent my being-taken-hold-of by language. Which meant living as a poet completely. This would take me a dozen years and down many paths--academic, media--but that open/ within, which for me signifies the notion of ceaseless beginning, is at the heart of what my disposition as a poet is all about.
MN: Did open form and composition field procedures affect your writing and in what measure?
JH: Mallarmé's experimental poem was my first experience with "field" writing. Then, through Crane's "The Bridge" and by way of it readings of Ouspensky's Tertium Organum, I early conceived of what I'd call a spatial dream of a long work. By l955-56 I'd read some of Williams' Paterson and Olson's early Maximus. But at the same time, for "openers" (to use a pun) I actually found Neruda and Mayakovsky more to my liking because I was growing lyri-politically--amid the "purer" poets--toward what, ten years later, would lead me to Marxism. That is, I was still interested in lyric directness, full-bodied openness of expression. Without even a full understanding of the meaning of Papa (here I don;t mean Hemingway but Walt Whitman) I was writing , or trying to, as things blew through me. At that time, in the late '50s, I was still student-teaching and so there;s the pretentious effect of that situation. I mean that I could only pretend to a validly total vision of the world, as it is not possible for a poet to create an authentic world-vision if he or she is inside the university world. He can only pretend to it through a literariness that is without bottom. Here I don't mean bottomless in the majestic sense of an immeasurability. I mean that the poems therein are removed from the street, the class--whether you call it the working class or the new class of poor.
In those days, a rather rhymie, clanky translation of Mayakovsky by Herbert Marshall was the only text available. But Mayakovsky, the first street poet of the century, caught my attention, also because of his relation to the Bolshevik Revolution and because Ginsberg's Howl had evoked something of Mayakovsky's journalistic notation. So, before I had learned Russian (which was to come l8 years later) I had Victor Erlich, a friend at the time in Indiana, give me the translations of the texts and I wrote Mayakovsky into American in free verse form. And it was that translation (though I'd written a short praise poem to Allen after Howl's publication) that actually began my friendship with Ginsberg, when I brought the text to New York in the late '50s.
MN: Let's come to the political side of your personality: when did you join the Communist Party and in what circumstances? Were you more on the Trotskyist or the Marxist-Leninist side?
JH: It was the Communist Labor Party, not the CPUSA, that I joined in l980. I'd worked with comrades from that smaller but highly principled Marxist-Leninist group since l977, in petition campaigns against nuclear destruction, and had attended events at the CLP's Tom Mooney Bookstore in the Mission District of San Francisco. In l980, after some months abroad working with communist, socialist and anarchist poets and painters in Sicily, where I traveled with the North Beach artist Kristen Wetterhahn, I officially joined the CLP. That Party was born in l974 and voluntarily dissolved in l992, though my work continues to this day with a non-party organization of revolutionaries, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA), which represents the interests of the new class of proletarians here and worldwide under corporate attack, and aligns itself with the recently formed Labor Party.
MN: What was your idea about the New Left and the movement im the '60s? I mean, people like Timothy Leary said people should not seize political power but just drop out of the system. What do you think about the more counter-cultural side of the movement?
JH: I felt the New Left was tied to the Democratic Party and, even in the early '60s, I was in my heart removed from the Capitalist Party, that is the Democrats and Republicans. This presented many contradictions. For one, the Kennedys represented a "youthful" hype and charisma (it was a cover for a dopey entrapment, though there can be no doubt that the Kennedys imagistically represented a great change in government and seemed to have emerged synchronous with the youthful rendings and experiments in the arts.) For another, the Civil Rights Movement was staunchly involved in Democratic politics, which it admittedly wanted to transform.
In the early '60s New Left spokesmen and women appeared on Pacifica's KPFK in Los Angeles. My wife at the time, now Ruth Seymour, headed the Drama and Literature Dept. of that station and organized some excellent programing that overlapped political and cultural dynamics of the day. I recall being part of an interview with Robert Rodzhdestvensky, a great but actually little-known Soviet poet of the time. There were Leary interviews and talks, accounts from the civil rights activities in the south; and when the Vietnam War raged, that station aired programs directly against the war, including the works of poets from all over the world. In those days I saw myself as an anti-war activist (I wrote as well for the counter-cultural newspaper the Los Angeles Free Press, and edited cultural work for another maverick newspaper, Open City). When the Black Panthers emerged after the Watts Rebellion, I found myself moving more and more toward a militant awareness of the role of African-Americans in the revolutionary transformation, though it was not until l968, when I discovered and translated Rene Depestre's A Rainbow for the Christian West, a revolutionary book of poems describing the invasion of the southern and most racist (and most arsenaled from the point of view of the Vietnam War) part of the U.S., by the pantheon of Haitian voodoo gods, that I was pointed in the direction of the Marxist revolution. That translation wasa major turning point in my life. By that time, people like Timothy Leary, whom I'd actually never really responded to with any fervor (even though I'd experimented with L.S.D.) became part of what has been going on since the '60s, what I call the dopey clown show of teeming loneliness, a rather white, leftist and irresponsible tendency spoiled away and removed from the real heartbeat of the working-class struggle.
MN: How come you were fired from UCLA? Do you think the U.S. academic system has changed very much from the '60s as regards ideological dissent?
JH: Officially because I did things "against the State", like giving all draft-eligible students the grade of A (having seen on teevee that such a grade would keep them from being drafted). And raising anti-war issues in classes and for final exams. Unofficially I've heard said that I was "turned on" but I never taught after smoking grass. What actually led me to certain "strange acts" at that time was that, in 1965 in London I began a vast experiment that carried over when I returned to Los Angeles: I'd decided to push the writing form as far as it could go, and that meant surpassing Joyce, Miller, Kerouac. So I began "writing" the first "talking" novel, a huge improvisation novel for which I used a tape machine, acting out all the parts so to speak, and afterward having it transcribed in book form. When I returned to Los Angeles (the day of the Watts Rebellion) I was filled both with rage against the war machine (that underlay the Rebellion), and pretty dislocated from the tape sessions. The book, JAH, in three sections, was "talked" over an eighteen month period. And I was pretty paranoid during that time, even as I was also quite lucid.
As for the academic system today, since I've not been part of it for more than thirty years I can't be expected to say much that is expert. Clearly universities have become more and not less incorporated during this time, and that of course means that dissidence and ideological bravery is in generalized minimized. Since there has not been major outbreaks of political activities coming from the university world, one can say that the corporate-throttling and bribery has been very effective. At the same time there has emerged a generation of young fighters--vis-a-vis Seattle, D.C., Prague and Nice protests against the International Monetary Fund--and some of them certainly are university students. There definitely needs to be greater dissent coming from the academic world, especially in relation to the conditions of poverty in the street. Of course. That means a breakthrough of guerrilleros of education to counter the corporate education that students are being brainwashed with.
MN: What were your poetical affiliations during the '60s? Do you prefer Denise Levertov, Amiri Baraka or Robert Duncan, from both a political and poetical point of view?
JH: All three poets I was aware of: Denise's consistently engaged work; Amiri's first imploded, then break-out, polemics, and Robert's literate condemnations of the war machine. In a sense, before the translation of the Depestre book, my '60s associations in Los Angeles were verbo-visual, engaged with and under the influence of a group of hip artist-poets--Wallace Berman, Dean Stockwell, George Herms, Bob Alexander, Russ Tamblyn and James Gill. In part this was because I was on the west coast and in the most spatially absurd part of the States. From them I learned a great lesson: that the gift of art or poetry was an expression of brotherhood itself, indeed of brotherly love. That lesson, in the next decade, when I would create agitprop American-Russian posters, "talking leaves," and distribute them to people in the name of communist culture, was one of the essential parts of my education.
Berman, a powerful influence, manifested a kind of hip kabbala with his use of Hebrew letters amid the most contemporary scenes of fotomontage. My interest in kabbala, which had begun in the '50s, was intensified; then, in London in '65, I met up with my oldest literary friend, from my neighborhood in The Bronx, Asa Benveniste, who, after fighting in WWII, remained in Europe where he wrote his poems and published Trigram Books and was also involved in a kabbalistic approach to language. When I returned to Los Angeles and was no longer teaching, another poet interested in the kabbala, David Meltzer, an old friend of Wallace Berman, began a correspondence with me from Northern California. Meltzer, who is one of the most knowledgeable poets in the country with respect to both popular and literary culture, literally saved my "correspondential" life because at the time I was living and writing quite alone in a small house at the end of Venice, California. I wrote and translated much for his magazine, Tree, a kabbalistic experiment. The poets and painters interested in kabbala at that time felt it as the poetic Left of Judaism that was moving more and more to the Right in embracing Zionism. Kabbala also provided an opening into Black culture (the letter-permutations seen as a kind of verbal jazz improvisation.)
Toward the end of that decade I became friends with an Italian-American poet, Paul Vangelisti, and there were years of activity of translating European and Americas poetry for his journal, Invisible City, with much African-American texturing in our approach to the word.
MN: Your poetry derives much from the street jargon of the disinherited, and much of what you write is really metropolitan in mood and style. I sometimes think of Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems or Vachel Lindsay... Do you reckon such influences?
JH: Actually neither, though I like both their works. The major influence on my writing after l980 is not a poet but the revolutionary movement itself and the conditions of poverty. It can however be said that there is a relationship between my street-specific descriptions and a history of reportage that is part of my writing life. As said, I began as a young reporter at fifteen and a half. In Los Angeles I wrote for the alternative press. And I've always been interested as a Marxist in poetic fact as propaganda. One of the reasons why Dylan Thomas and Ernest Hemingway interested me was that both had had news-paper experience and managed also to forge powerful poetic styles. And of course Mayakovsky was extremely interested in notating the facts of life in a kind of lyric journalese. When I joined the Communist Labor Party, poetic "peership" vanished (in the sense that, prior to that, I was consciously aware of writing to or for a community of other poets), and for me the actual task of poetry began. I use one of Lenin's favorite words here--actual, meaning the Now of the class moment. It was then--and that continues to this day--that my poetic asociations have been with those comrade and brother and sister poets who write and read their works as if they are part of a spiritual force that is closely connected with the material transformations of the times. With them, the literary ego vanishes. Whether working with Alejandro Murguia (a poet who fought on the southern front for the Sandinistas); Jorge Argueta (an El Salvadorean immigrant poet); John Ross (an activist especially in Mexican political matters): Q.R. Hand (an African-American poet of jazz politics); Boadiba (a Haitian poet who not only embodies the best of the spirit of the Creole language, but the importance of Haitian women's role in the shaping of Haiti's future); devorah major (a wonderful African-American voice, who responds to the world from an internationalist Black perspective); and the great Paul Laraque (Haitian poet in exile who has never ceased relating Marxism and the progressive dimensions of voodoo to the quest for a new world of progressivity)-- whether writing or reading or organiziing with such poets, as well as with close comrade poets like Sarah Menefee (a great voice of the new class of poor); Carol Tarlen (whose work reveals the fighting heart of the unionized poor the world over): Luis Rodriguez (a giant among the young for all the work he has done with teenagers throughout the world); or Csaba Polony, with whom and for whose important Left Curve magazine I have worked for a number of years because he embodies what the U.S. lacks: independant intellectual bravery, the important thing is that the individualisstic oppor-tuning of the "literary"" dimension no longer is the primary song. We are all conscious of our roles as cultural workers and antennae, and even though we would--as street people--choose a Beat or hip texture of anarchism over that of the more academic life,we are more engaged and more conscious of the revolutionary necessity of our works than are even the crop of second-generation Beats. We feel culture collectively--even in sporadic times--and continually refer ourselves to the cultural brigades we have formed down through the years, brigades named after Roque Dalton, poet of El Salvador; Jacques Roumain, poet and co-founder of the communist party of Haiti; and Bob Kaufman, the political-jazz core of a Beat movement thrown to the dogs of commerce.
MN: At the same time, I guess you owe much to the Beat poetics, both from a thematic point of view and a rhetorical one: how do jazz improvisation and Afro-American culture enter your compositions?
JH: It is impossible not to relate the rage in my poems of the '60s and, to African American plight and culture in my book Black Alephs, to the sense of rage at the situation of the Blacks at that time. In fact the title of my book was a putting together of a (at that time--Islamism has changed the situation since then) Black and Jewish dynamic. Beat poetics itself is infused with Black spirit come from the world of Jazz, the influence of Amiri's outcries, the invisible but ubiquitous influence of the phenomenon of Charlie Parker, all part of the thirst for Liberty embodied in the African-American dimension. Later I would write, and it's clearly true, that I regard the Blacks of America as the real Hebrews (in the Biblical sense). For my writing part, with respect to that dimension, I still regard the most verbally experimental poem that I've written to be one utterly informed by jazz notation. It's called "Schnaaps Son," and in the early '70s I experienced the most fecund night of creation of my life when, using the typewriter as a piano (going back to Charles Olson's idea in his Projective Verse essay), I wrote 8l Rifficals---each one a page or two in length---listening to a record of Thelonius Monk (perhaps the most dialectic musical artist of the past century) playing his and others' compositions.
As for Beat poetics, really an enunciation by Allen of Kerouac's mastery, they of course were utterly influenced by jazz rhythmics as well.
MN: What I admire most in your poetry is that you're never flatly rhetorical in your political positions. You're a political poet as Blake and Shelley could have been The relationship between vision and political action is a difficult one to maintain. What do you think on this point?
JH: Well, that's very flattering but I think you're basing your perception on the reading of my Arcanes only. In actual fact, I've written many rhetorical (maybe even flatly rhetorical) poems for specific situations i.e., break-ins and occupations of buildings in the name of the homeless, solidarity demonstrations for other countries. In fact, I'm not above using bar-room ballad quatrains and sentimental images to try to persuade or convince a crowd. The point is, I¹m not interested in satisfying a literary tradition's idea of what a revolutionary poet is about. In even my most yawpish or sappy poetry, there's going to be something that hopefully moves the class and revolutionary sensibility forward.
MN: Your imagery is very pregnant and precise in its surrealistic/hyper-realistic conciseness: do you recognize any debt to Breton and the Surrealists and in what sense? What is your opinion about Deep Image poets like Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg?
JH: In Black Alephs I apostrophize my hip LA friends in a surrealist poem that mentions Breton, and in the early '70s I published an essay called Kabbal Surrealism, which is about where I was at the time, trying to put together the many strains of French Surrealism, Negritude, North American poetics and politics, along with the sort of hip kabbalism I was involved with. But surrealism was never as important to me as Russian futurism. which really took hold of me as a revolutionary cultural tradition in the mid and late '70s and spurred on my own creation of communist cultural posters.
As for Kelly and Rothenberg, I was a school chum of Kelly's at CCNY and actually read some of his earliest poems, written when he was l5 or l6. He was already then a kind of vanguardist of the imagination. So is Jerry who has done much vis-à-vis surrealism, dadaism, the holocaust and kabbala too, as well as ethno-poetic excavations, though as part of an imaginative project within the academic pleroma, which of course has included and privileged poetic experimentalism for the past two decades. My journey, and the journey of others in and of the "street," especially with respect to revolutionary transformation at the material levels of existence, is actually concerned with "truth"--not over and or against "imagination" but as the possibility for a more totalizing transformation, with poetry as a weapon in that struggle, and a sense of collectivity and the struggle for it as the dominant ground.
MN: What is poetry's contribution to changing the world, according to you? What is the role of the poet and the one of the revolutionary? Can they be combined?
JH: Poetry is ultimately what belongs to all. That is, everyone is a poet. People still reject that idea only because they have never lived in the historical conditions where that truth is realized. That's one of the reasons I struggle for the material transformation of society, to bring about that spiritual consciousness of the fact that everyone is a poet. In addition, poetry is the expression that carries within its moment much more than that moment, pointing ever toward a future through its rhythmic cries and revealed heartbeats. And the poet and revolutionary certainly can be combined. I'm not talking about an armchair revolutionary either. A poem is a great weapon in battles against poverty, for example. Poems read before occupations of buildings in the name of the homeless, or at prison walls in protest against capital punishment, or to rouse a crowd in defense of Cuba--all take on a revolutionary character because of the urgency of the situation, an urgency that doubles the urgency that any poet feels when he or she sits down to write a poem. Indeed the world and certainly the U. S. needs more and more poets to take their works not simply into streets and cafes for the ears of the already converted, but to the wider struggles, the objective revolutionary struggle that is going on everywhere in the world now that capitalism has control of us all and has deepened its agenda to enslave us to spiritual bankruptcy and the technological superficialization and disembodiment of all natural and universal values.
MN: I've always read the Arcanes as a Postmodern patch-work, with a very radical point of view as their political base. I use the word Postmodern in a very technical sense, as the triumph of chaos and disorder in art, which brings about a new conception of form (like Ezra Pound's "I cannot make it cohere"). What is your opinion about order in poetry?
JH: Poetry that breaks new ground always defies moulds of order. In fact such poetry takes everything that has gone before it, whether ordered or chaotic and, driven by birth, by the big urge toward a big new beginning, transforms seemingly everything. In that, great poetry returns to the original order or chaos of things within the instinctive meditation and desire to give birth on the part of the poet. In effect, then, to a poet there is no such thing as chaos really. Everything disparate, dislocated or alienated is a veil for the opposite conditions of each of those dispositions, which the poem discovers, exposes and reveals in a transformed way that at the same time shows the roots (as Charles Olson correctly suggests) along with it.
MN: You're still not very appreciated in the U.S. because of your political engagement as a Communist: what's your opinion about the publishing market in that country?
JH: The most human art--poetry--is still treated rather badly here so far as the demands of the market are concerned, and revolutionary poets within that expression are treated even worse. I'm speaking here of the big publishers, who make their bucks on prose and thus treat the center of language as if on the margins. And even many small press publishers that began with poetry collections soon find themselves unable to continue unless they publish prose. Nevertheless--and this is I think important--poetry is very much alive in the lives of more and more Americans, despite what cynics think and despite the sickening corporate-market values that seem ever to be proliferating. And this life of poetry, even if it manifests in desktop books or the like, is in fact the real stuff of the art, just as the real visual art of painting is not in the museums but in what is made in rooms or studios and shown and or given away. Our revolution will come from the bottom up. No point in thinking those top-down guys in publishing power don't know that fact. Meanwhile there are zines and newspapers and other avenues open to poems--many more in fact than when I was young. I myself have published more than l00 books and chapbooks and not one was published by a big publisher. In part those houses are either for the dead or the opportunistic dead. The important thing is to keep at the writing and the sharing of it in the most immediate and if possible extended way possible without going to what will only deaden one--the fame game offered by those big old dead houses that for the most part are the final resting places for poets.
MN: Do you think we're approaching a revolutionary turn in the actual panorama? What are your ideas about the present situation strongly monopolized by the U.S.?
JH: Well, of course here now we have a fraudulent new president who is not (anyway) my president nor the president of millions of people, who also is a vicious advocate of the most fascist view toward capital punishment in the history of this country. I hope and expect his administration will call forth a great upsurge of opposition. Indeed, after Seattle and the protests in Europe vis-a-vis the IMF, coupled with the deepening of the police state with such a president in power, I do think that a more militant approach will be the order of the day as things unfold, with the least public injustice leading to a wider and more intense response on the part of the people, more and more of whom feel themselves marginalized and disenfranchised politically if not economically.
MN: What is your opinion about the Kosovo war?
JH: I was in Greece in l980 when Tito died. I was amazed to learn that his funeral was attended by the entire international community including the vice-president of the United States and his Soviet equivalent. It told me then that Yugoslavia, resonating as far back as WWI and then to the entire Soviet period which followed, was one of the most important places in Europe. Now we've seen the complete dismantling of Yugoslavia, including two terrible wars, in order to complete the salvation of Europe from the scourge of communism. The ethnic-centric fighting, the nationalist movements that Tito was able to keep under wraps--all are part of a long-range plan on the part of internationalcapitalism to level the world to the dictate that capitalism=democracy (when it actually means the destruction of democracy, the paralysis of the social will, the bankruptcy of the spirit and the technological enslavement of peoples.) The ethnic climate that developed after the fall of Soviet communism did indeed necessitate international action. But the forces and the economic upheavals that ensued are certain, in the long run, to make both kosovars and Serbs suffer on another plane, and the present brothelization of those territories, as well as other territories in the former Soviet orbit--not to mention Russia itself--is but a small part of a cycle of destruction that is going to continue until the emptiness in peoples¹ pockets wakes up and begins a new revolutionary opposition.
MN: A last question. You're a wonderful translator. What are the Italian writers who most struck you? What do you think about the Italian cultural and political situation as compared with the American one?
JH: Actually, I've a long relationship with Italy. The title poem of my first collection, "A Correspondence of Americans," first appeared in an Italian, not in an American, magazine, the rather extraordinary Botteghe Oscura in the late '50s. In l980 a translation I'd made of a very great poet of Sicily, Santo Cali, was published in a bi-lingual edition in Trapani, Sicily. I am still amazed that Cali's work is not better known as his lyrical and political strengths are among the very finest. He wrote many of his poems in Sicilian and that may be the reason for his continued obscurity, though I translated a book he had written in Italian, Yossyph Shyryn.
I had already translated some poems of Rocco Scotellaro, a poet who, a bit like Cali, because Rocco came from the southern part of Italy, has been somewhat marginalized. He writes in an idiom close to the point where the peasantry is being urbanized; but he writes with a mastery of that idiom like no other. Rocco died at 32 after having been the first socialist mayor in Italy after WW2, in his town of Tricarico. In this decade I've published a selection of some of his most political poems.
The most important poet of the past generation in Italy to my mind is Pier Paolo Pasolini. His uncanny ability to combine lyricism with political ideas is unsurpassed, and Italian poetry has not been able to completely heal the void left by his assassination in 1975. One of my forthcoming books is a translation of his Book of Crosses, poems in cruciform on the page which nonetheless are of a revolutionary and non-religious content. Today in Italy I count the poems of Ferruccio Brugnaro to be among the finest. They are written in a direct, open-hearted honesty of feeling that engages, with justifiable rage and yet with tenderness, the most important issues of the day. Ferruccio's background--unlike, say, Pasolini's--is completely workingclass. He labored for more than 30 years in a factory and literally learned how to compose poems from his life therein. I translated his Fist of Sun a few years ago and Curbstone Press published it. Then Ferruccio came to the States and toured California cities such as San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles--and then Chicago as well--reading his poems to great response. In fact it was the first time since the end of WW2 that a genuine revolutionary workingclass Italian poet had read his work in the U.S.
Anna Lombardo is another poet actively involved in contemporary political struggles (she organized poets in the Venice area around the campaign to have Sylvia Baraldini transferred from the American to the Italian prisons system). Anna writes with a lyripolitical bite and power and has published in some American journals and I am in the process of translating a collection of her poems.
Another strong voice is that of Sandro Sardella, a poet-painter from Varese, whose book Coloredpaperbits I translated and which was published in California three years ago. Sandro is an important experimentalist, both in poetic and graphic forms, and is gaining wider recognition with each season.
In Sardinia, the island of Gramschi, poets abound as well as on the mainland. A poet who originally came from the island and now lives in Bologna, is Alberto Masala, one of the finest of contemporary Italian poets. He is strongly internationalist and anarchist, drawing from such influences as Artaud in France and Julian Beck of the American Living Theater.
On the island itself are poets such as worker-situationist Michele Lichieri, a powerful voice against the current technological uprooting of spiritual and genuine revolutionary values; Mariella Setzu, whose lyrical works include one of the finest poems interfacing Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, has moreover visited and read her work in San Francisco; the younger but also very active voice of Alberto Lecca, who mixes visionary social critique with a lyricism forged from jazz, of which he is something of an expert; and last, but hardly least of the Sardo poets, there's Franco Carlini whose works of Sardinian village life strike a deep chord embodying that island's great poetic tradition. I've just published a selection of Franco's poems, translating from from the italian translations he himself made from the original Sardo language in which he wrote them--settings of peasants in urbanized situations but with peasant memories, poems of great insight and tender humor that mark him as a poet close to the folk tradition but at the same time one who is completely contemporary in his mode of composition. That book of eleven of his poems has just appeared from CC Marimbo Press in Berkeley.
Finally I must mention another Italian poet recently discovered: Andrea Zuccolo, of the same Friuli country as Pasolini. Andrea has written a terrific social satire in poetic form, a Chorale for Geese and a Solo Voice, that will soon be published by CC Marimbo as well.
About the cultural and political situations, well, of course Italy is less fearful about putting together a poetry and a communism. There is much more fear and backwardness in the U.S. but then we have never really had a vibrantly all-embracing class-conscious tradition in this country. That is the word: Backwardness, that describes the difference. Italy, though a country that is about the size of California and Oregon (if that) is more culturally aware and politically conscious--as a people--than the U.S. And though many of the awful migrations of U.S. capitalism have been taken up by Italians (there are more than 30 McDonalds in Rome alone) it is going to take a long time before the American brand of Empire is going to chill and paralyze the warmth and natural affection of the great people of Italy.
MN: Thank you very much. I hope to see you soon again in Italy.
Jack Hirschman lives in San Francisco and is an associate editor of this journal. He has recently published his translations of the poetry of Martin Heidegger (Deliriodendrom Press). A collection of his lyricalpoems are forthcoming from City Lights Books.
Marco Nieli is a poet of Naples, Italy, and the author of a book on the poetry of Robert Duncan. In Naples his is a teacher of East European Gypsy
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immigrants.