Someone told me that the scientist Oppenheimer, feeling guilty after the second world war because of his work on the atom bomb and being shunned by the scientific community thereafter devoted the latter part of his energy to creating the Exploratorium Science Centre here in San Francisco. Thus he went, so to speak, from blowing up our world to blowing our minds.
The Exploratorium doesn’t begin with a H, and nor does the Palace of Fine Arts which seems to occupy the other half of the building which houses the Exploratorium. But Hirschman does and he chose the Palace of Fine Arts to be the main venue of the Poetry Festival alluded to earlier under the letter K.
Jack Hirschman is the fourth poet laureate of San Francisco having accepted the post in 2006. He is 75 years old and is famous both as a poet and an activist though when I first saw him has shambling gait and slurred speech misled me into mistaking him for one of the homeless. His most recent volume of work, the Arcanes is an immense tome comprising over a hundred long poems. On the stage of the Palace of Fine Arts he read some of this work and his eloquence and outrage were clear.
As Poet Laureate he decided that one of the things he needed to do was organise an international poetry festival and at the end of July over a long weekend about twenty poets, representing almost as many different nations came together to make that happen. The focus of the festival were two consecutive free events at the Palace, but these were complimented by a series of smaller events in branch libraries around the city and readings in the cafes and bars of North Beach.
Two invited poets were unable to attend, as they were unable to secure entry visa from the United States government, one from Iran and one from Venezuela. Any political coincidence is probably highly intentional.
The Palace of Fine Arts has a beautiful stage in a large auditorium that was about half full each night. The poets read in their native language, English translation was shown simultaneously on a screen behind them. It was possible to loose yourself in the meaning of the words, the sound of the voices and sometimes both. Some were funny, some achingly beautiful, some distressingly tragic or violent, some over-intellectual using words for words sake, others were precise and clear. There was an ex-factory worker from Italy, an exiled English speaking Nigerian who wrote in Swedish, an American hip-hop and tap dancing rap poet from Oakland and a Syrian desert Princess who turned out to be the mysterious lady in red (see K).
Here is some of what I heard that evening.
“Day and night part at the top of a huge tree/ the sun climbs over the wall like an old man…here in this place of nowhere, forever…sometimes you speak with eyes lit by the fine gold dust that you beat and bang…abstractions of shit….if a woman leaps naked from the shadows towards a man’s heart…….to say love is the sweetest thing can only be said by someone who doesn’t know tiramisu.”
And a Syrian Desert Princess’s poem in full; “My happiness and I\ await\ the flutter of your steps.”
In one of the local newspapers a journalist commented that people used to come to live in San Francisco for the poetry.
This time poetry came to the city for San Francisco.
For Jack Hirschman.
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