Poet Laureate: San Francisco (2009)

Page 16 American Book Review The Beat poems in this book pay homage to Jack Kerouac, Wallace Berman, and Bob Kaufman B O O K R E V I E W S Poet Laureate: San Francisco Rob Johnson All That’s Left Jack Hirschman City Lights Foundation Books http://www.citylights.com 86 pages; paper, $10.95 San Francisco poetry has for fifty years been dogged by its Beat legacy. It’s easy to forget that before Allen Ginsberg howled there and Jack Kerouac bummed his way there that Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder and other important poets were already there and had been for a while. They were so pissed off at the Beat incursion that, at the height of San Francisco’s “Poetry Renaissance” in 1956, they refused to be photographed with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso for a Mademoiselle magazine spread. They had real differences with the Beats. As a group, for example, the San Franciscans were much more political than the early Beats. Rexroth was an anarchist, and Snyder was a Wobbly. Ginsberg, of course, became a political poet but somewhat later, and you really don’t want to know Kerouac’s politics (like his friend, William S. Burroughs, he was pretty much a Goldwater Republican with a strong anti-communist bent; at any rate, he never wrote what I would call a “political” poem). Corso, was so appalled by the overwhelming pressure to write political poetry in the 1960s that he stopped writing poetry altogether. Instead, he put his energies into being a drug addict: better a drug addict than a political poet, he believed. San Francisco poetry is still of two minds. There’s that impulse towards anarchy and revolution , but there’s also the continued Beat influence that won’t be brought down to the level of simple politics. In Jack Hirschman’s All That’s Left, a book that commemorates his appointment as San Francisco “Poet Laureate,” we see a personification of these two sides of San Francisco poetry—the impulse to change the world through social protest poetry, and the Beat impulse to view the world more personally and also on a spiritual plane. The Beat poems in the book pay homage to Jack Kerouac, Wallace Berman, and Bob Kaufman. The one on Kerouac is fine indeed, and in the following lines, echoes what Norman Mailer said upon first reading Kerouac’s On the Road (1957): “I was thinking, Oh shit, this guy’s done it. He was there, living it, and I was just an intellectual, writing about it.” Hirshman writes, When I was student young one day the Kerouac way suddenly was felt far and near like an eruption of the American moment I’d only been hanging around or talking about or studying about but not living in…. There’s also a lovely homage to a recently deceased street poet named Suzy that’s witty and supple and personal and very beatific: Poetry’s so sad about not being able to be written by her, it’s gone to a corner and won’t come out until she speaks again. Hirschman’s known, however, as a “political” poet, even though I think his real gift is for the kind of verse quoted above. His political poetry, by contrast , brings to mind Marcel Proust’s observation, “A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.” In “This House of Hunger,” he trades his poetic muse in for stale and sophomoric protest rhetoric: “Fat Exxon and Bechtel / have billions of bux in them. / What pretty profits to set / before King Death!” “The Kick Arcane” shows the seventy-two-year-old poet and veteran of many civil-rights crusades being cursed by a black woman on a bus and then kicked out the door onto the streets. Now, this might have made a fine subject for a darkly ironic and comic poem, but instead the poet drags out the tired saw that our differences have less to do with skin color than with “class” differences. The aging radical Allen Ginsberg wrote a similar poem about being mugged and losing...