Superb landscapes full of horrible glory

[Ya Sam]

"Regarded among West Coast poets and in leftist circles abroad as a seminal 
figure in contemporary letters, Hirschman is virtually unknown to the 
public, though he's San Francisco's current poet laureate.

A die-hard Stalinist Communist, he is also a virtuoso kabbalah scholar who, 
as a Yiddish-inflected Jew and artist, would probably have been executed -- 
alongside such figures as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam -- in the Soviet 
Union about which he so fervently rhapsodizes.

A poet who scorns the academy and advocates "the street," Hirschman speaks 
and translates in no less than 11 languages, holds advance degrees and once 
taught literature at UCLA, where the Doors' Jim Morrison was among his 
students (Hirschman was fired from the post for anti-war activities)." ...

" In fact, "The Arcanes" is in every way as unlikely and historically 
significant a literary production as, say, the appearance of Walt Whitman's 
"Leaves of Grass" or James Joyce's "Ulysses." Had this been another, more 
literate age, "The Arcanes" might very well be as universally acclaimed. 
For, like Whitman's and Joyce's masterpieces, it traces the progress of an 
individual consciousness through landscapes teeming with the horrible glory 
of modern life. And like "Ulysses," it is a poetic evocation of a voice so 
authoritatively essential that the brilliance and beauty of these poems 
might shake the world, if only someone were listening.

But "The Arcanes" is 1,000 pages long, and no one reads poetry anymore. As 
it's nearly impossible to discern within the whole of the volume an especial 
pattern, I'll discuss, as illustrative of the whole, an excerpt from "The 
Cagliostro Arcane," a poem that seems to contain in microcosm the entire 
book and to summarize Hirschman and all his contradictions:

In this street of old thongs and worm-eaten carrettas

I find my figuredda

as two kids carry a ladder across the cobblestone

and the curve di Mola whet the moments of workers

till they can sit with amaro and playing cards

in the fish-mongery air

I find my figuredda

a box in a wall I can sink my beak into

a trinosophia for my claws

I have become votive with responsibility

and indifference

a cuntareddu of politics and religion

a bald eagle jaded with hegemony

on the shoulder of the Count

I need this shingled little grotto

with its black and white Star of David

supporting small crosses

with its


IEVI
ADONAY above, and its


VOI CHE SIETTE

AFFLITTI

VENITE A ME

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/12/RVGP4M40D11.DTL&feed=rss.books

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