The first hot summer day of 2012. The dome of Pantheon at 11:30 was sparkling in the morning while I was heading for Rue de la Bucherie to meet Jack Hirschman.
Our correspondence began in 1999, we have both translated each other’s poetry; me, a sum of his non-leftist poems and he, an early collection of jazz poems of mine.
We walked around the Quartier Latin and after an hour or so we chose to have a drink at the cafe-bar La Rive Gauche. It was a beautiful encounter with bursts of laughter and jokes and an open, yet full of disagreements and objections, conversation. For me poetry is an absolute expression of humanism; originality of the spirit, for Hirschman poetry is a tool for social confrontation and ideological guidance.
A brass-band from Austria across the Fontaine Saint-Michel kept us silent for a few moments, while I believe we were both concentrated on the arguments that we had exchanged the previous minutes. The conversation started all over again with me supporting the idea that the poet is a loner; a man who stands alone before society; Hirschman supported the idea that a poet is a political activist.
The dissidence was a very real one.
Paris, June 2nd 2012
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| With Jack Hirschman at "Le Temps des Cerises"/Paris 4/06/2012 |