Ol’ Red Jack Hirschman: He Weaponized Words
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” —Percy Bysshe Shelly
I.
Death comes in 3s they say. So maybe 6
months of San Francisco Poet Laureates
Ferlinghetti,
Mirikitani,
Hirschman
checking out counts as three???
I can’t quote Jack—except for, “Can’t speak
for all, that’s the whole first point—” Yet, I
can wax into the wee hours on his arms
Embracing me as enemy combatant vs capital
II.
The rat-ta-tat-tat-tat of his typewriter weaponized
words enforcing dialectical laws… "Any means necessary:”
paintings, poems, collages, translations in Haitian Creole,
Russian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, French, Greek, Italian,
Albanian for foreign fighters daring to don red badges of
Resistance…
The rat-ta-tat-tat-tat of his typewriter weaponized
words ricocheting off Wall Street and Washington
warlords. Words echoing in hearts and minds of
of auto and postal worker children—paychecks
away from zoo bellies, no soap-waterless weeks
accompanying cardboard mattresses and tents
Revolutionary Poets Brigade internationalist
commandant, North Beach head dug in at Café
Trieste, his guided missiles questioned lunacy.
Some even struck where little cable cars climb half
way to the stars, carrying confederate sympathizers
belching benzene, coughing COVID droplets on operators
Revolutionary Poets Brigade internationalist
commandant, North Beach head dug in at Café
Trieste; Fishbowl escapee drinking cigarettes/smoking
Jack Daniels, living hand-to-mouth on poet’s minus six
figure salary
No mas… Red Jack Hirschman—Presente!!
© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Former forklift driver/warehouse worker/janitor, Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at:
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-town-criers-big-tooth-fund
PayPal: paypal.me/towncrierRNT
Abayomi Azikiwe is editor of Pan African Newswire and an organizer for the Moratorium Now coalition in Detroit. He joins us to talk about the tax foreclosure crisis in that city. Thousands of Black…
$30 billion for police, racism and undocumented Black immigrants, tax foreclosure crisis in Detroit
The same people who wanted to defund policing voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. But Biden not only rejects cutting police budgets but announced a proposal to give police departments $30…
Having a new Black SCOTUS justice or bringing Barack Obama out of retirement for a photo opportunity won't raise Joe Biden's poll numbers or stave off defeat in the mid-term elections…
A declassified CIA document outlining their strategies for covert action in Angola in the 1970s offers lessons for the present.
