ROQUE DALTON ~

 

Like You

Like you I

love love, life, the sweet smell

of things, the sky-blue

landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up

and I laugh through eyes

that have become the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don't end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love,

little things,

landscape and read,

the poetry of everyone.

El Salvador Will Be

El Salvador will be a pretty

and (without exaggeration) serious country

when working class and peasantry

fertilize and comb and talc it

cure the historical hangover

clean it up reconstruct it

and get it going.

The problem is that today El Salvador

has a thousand rough edges and hundred thousand pitfalls

about five hundred thousand calluses and some blisters

cancers rashes dandruff filthiness

ulcers fractures fevers bad odors.

You have to round it off with a little machete

sandpaper lathe turpentine penicillin

sitz-baths kisses and gunpowder.

translated by Jack Hirschman

_________________

Roque Dalton

Clandestine Poems

introduction by Margaret Randall

Solidarity Publications, 1984

JACK HIRSCHMAN ~

 

August 2021 MERCHANDISE  |  PUBLICATIONS  |  EVENTS Photo of Jack Hirschman by Dennis Letbetter. Jack Hirschman 1933 - 2021 Our friend, poet Jack Hirschman, passed away on August 22nd at age 87. His presence in North Beach will be missed, especially here at City Lights, where he was a frequent visitor. Jack touched the lives of so many, especially young poets. He was a fixture in the poetry scene right up until his passing, reading at virtual events, relentlessly writing and translating. We are the proud publisher of his poetry books Lyripol (1976, now out of print), Front Lines (2002), and All That's Left (2008), his translations of Antonin Artaud, Artaud Anthology, (1965) and In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (2010), which he edited, as well. On our blog we’ve posted a poem by Diane di Prima, written on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2013. We think it's the perfect tribute to the poet's poet. We send our love to Jack's wife Agneta Falk, to his family, and to all who will miss our comrade. Read Diane di Prima's Poem to Jack >>

RE-READING FERRUCCIO BRUGNARO ~

 

We Don't Want Bosses, Period

We don't want bosses of any kind,

                                 period.

They've already splashed around

                       in our blood,

already feasted plenty

                              on our lives.

Stop asking us so many questions.

Look at our injuries

             the damage done to peasants

                                    and miners.

We've gotta yank this plant out of the world

                           once and for always.

Don't ask anything else of us. We've really

                                  made up our guts.

We don't want bosses

because they're

                           the same as ever;

because they want the land

                    all for themselves,

because they never stop

                   robbing, trampling

and killing, killing

day and night under every kind of sky.

_________________________

translated by Jack Hirschman from the Italian

Ferruccio Brugnaro

FIST OF SUN

Curbstone Press, 1998

Ferruccio Brugnaro worked for 30 years —

most of his adult life — in an industrial park of

chemical factories in the Porto Marghera district of Venice.

Well known as a worker-poet he shared his poems for years,

printed in mimeo format, to workers at the factory and in many

schools he visited. Poet & translator Jack Hirschman chose for this

collection from three previous books by Brugnaro: We Must Want To,

 The Silence Doesn't Rule and The Clear Stars of These Nights.

Born in Mestre Italy in 1936, Ferruccio Brugnaro has retired from

the factory shift and now devotes his full-time to writing.

[ BA ]

HEARTBREAK ~

PATH ~

Go to your broken heart.

If you think you don't have one, get one.

To get one, be sincere.

Learn sincerity of intent by letting

life enter, because you're helpless, really,

to do otherwise.

Even as you try escaping, let it take you

and tear you open

like a letter sent

like a sentence inside

you've waited for all your life

though you've committed nothing.

Let it send you up.

Let it break you, heart.

Broken-heartedness is the beginning

of all real reception.

The ear of humility hears beyond the gates.

See the gates opening.

Feel your hands going akimbo on your hips,

your mouth opening like a womb

giving birth to your voice for the first time.

Go singing whirling into the glory

of being ecstatically simple.

Write the poem.


(2033)


_________________________________

JACK HIRSCHMAN
Volevo Che Voi Lo Sapeste
(Multimedia Edizioni)





photograph:
jack hirschman &
lawrence ferlinghetti

pier paolo pasolini

LINES OF A TESTAMENT



One needs to be very strong
to love solitude; one needs to have good legs
and an unusual resistance; one shouldn't risk
catching a cold, or flu or a sore throat; you mustn't
be afraid of robbers and killers; if one has to walk
through an afternoon or even all night long
one needs to know how to do it without even thinking.
There's no chance for one to sit, particularly
in winter; with a wind that blows over the wet grass
and with big, wet, muddy stones between garbage,
there's really no relief—no doubt about it—
beyond that of having a whole day and night ahead of one
without duties or limits of whatever kind.
Sex is a pretext. Because the encounters are many
—in winter too, on streets abandoned to the wind,
among the litter strewn against the distant buildings—
they're many—but they're only moments of loneliness;
the warmer and more alive the gentle body is
that anoints with sperm and moves on,
the colder and more mortal the beloved desert is around one;
and that's what fills one with joy,
like a miraculous wind, not the innocent smile
or the gloomy insolence of the one who goes away;
he carries with him a youth that's enormously young
and in this he's inhuman
because he leaves no traces, or rather he leaves
a single trace that's always
the same one in every season.
A young man in his first loves
is nothing else but the fecundity of the world.
It's the world that arrives with him: he appears and disappears
like changing form. All things remain intact
and you could walk half the city and not find him again.
The act's done, its repetition's a ritual. So
loneliness is even greater if a whole crowd
waits its turn: the number of disappearances in fact grows—
going away is fleeing—and
what follows looms over the present
like a duty, a sacrifice to offer to death's desire.
In getting older, however, weariness begins to be felt,
particularly in the moment just after dinnertime,
when for you nothing's changed; then, for a hair's breath,
you don't cry out or weep;
and that would be enormous if it weren't just the weariness
and maybe a bit of hunger. Enormous because
it'd mean that your desire for solitude
couldn't ever be satisfied, and so isn't what's
awaiting you, if not considered solitude,
real solitude, what you can't accept?
There's no dinner or lunch or satisfaction
in the world that's worth an endless stroll
through poor streets where one needs to be
wretched and strong, brothers of dogs.


1971. Translated by Jack Hirschman 


 _____________________________ 


from In Danger
A Pasolini Anthology
edited, with an introduction
by Jack Hirschman
(City Lights Books 2110) 

Pasolini murdered



The Lost Pasolini Interview

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

THE WORKER'S COUGH



I hear the worker coughing down below;
his cough comes up through the ground-floor grating
giving onto my garden, so that it avoids resonating among the plants
touched by the sun on this last morning of good weather. He,
the worker, down below, intent at his job, coughs now and then
pretty sure no one's hearing it. It's a seasonal sickness
but his cough's not a good one; it's worse than a flu.
He endures the illness, takes care of it, I imagine, like we
did when we were kids. Life for him remains decidedly uncomfortable;
no rest awaits him at home after work,
exactly like it is with us poor or almost poor guys.
See, life seemed to us to consist entirely of that poverty
in which one doesn't even have the right —naturally —
to the quiet use of a john or the solitude of a bed;
and when illness comes it's received heroically:
a worker's always 18, even if he has kids
bigger than him, ones new to those heroism's.
In short, in those wracking coughs
the tragic meaning of this beautiful October sun is revealed.


1969. Translated by Jack Hirschman 


 _____________________________ 


from In Danger
A Pasolini Anthology\edited, with an introduction
by Jack Hirschman
(City Lights Books 2110)

Pier Paolo Pasolini