Interviewed by Eric Zassenhaus
I grew up in the Mission, and South of Market, but I didn’t hang out there. I hung out in North Beach. We used to cut school and come into North Beach. It used to rain a lot in San Francisco—at least I remember it being very rainy in the early 1970s [...]

Jack Hirschman is a poet, painter, and activist with dozens of books of poetry under his belt and many hundreds of translations. His most recent book, Front Lines, was published by City Lights in 2002. In January 2006, Hirschman became San Francisco’s fourth Poet Laureate.
Do you think you came to poetry through politics, or the [...]

It was a crisp, clear summer day in the old North Beach Italian part of town. I was taking a brisk stroll up Grant Avenue when I decided to make my way inside the Coffee Gallery, once the kingpin gathering place of the Beat generation. It was like taking a trip back into the past, [...]