The Arcanes 2

The Arcanes 2

Jack Hirschman

Anno: 2017 ISBN: 978-88-86203-75-9 Pagine: 896 Collana: Other Americas Curatori: Sergio Iagulli 

Since 2006, when we joyously published Jack Hirschman’s The Arcanes he has been prolific in continuing to compose such poems, and so we’re ecstatic to publish The Arcanes (2006-2016), comprising 190 new Arcanes written for the most part in the past decade.In that same period, Hirschman has been the Poet Laureate of San Francisco (2006-2009), and read his works at international festivals in Italy, Haiti, Venezuela, France, Colombia, Iraq, Germany, Austria, China and Cuba, and each of those countries figures in at least one Arcane in this book - as do countries that he hasn’t read in, but has written about, ie., Afghanistan,Syria, Mexico, Palestine, Israel, Sweden and the United Kingdom.The Arcanes (2006-2016) also features, along with poems rooted in revolutionary communist visions combined with Jack’s often kabbalistic insights, some Arcanes composed with comic and liberating intent in a language he calls his “punography” written in avalanches of puns to relieve the techno-tragic suffering of humanity through the corporate fascism of our times.And there is also herein what he calls the “miracle” book, a series of 36 poems (for each section of the city of Hanoi), which he composed in 1970-71 responding to the American war in Vietnam, but which texts were lost in the mails in 1996. The day before his 79th birthday in 2012, his biographer, Alessandra Bava in Rome, wrote him that she had found the texts in an archive in a college in Philadelphia. Hirschman has reworked the texts, “arcanized” them, as he likes to say, and now, as“The Viet Arcane”, it has been bi-lingually published in Belgium in a French translation by Gilles B. Vachon, and it will appear in a bi-lingual Italian translation by Multimedia Edizioni’s own Raffaella Marzano in 2017.That Arcane, based on a Vietnamese vodou sect, Hirschman regards as the foundational work of all 315 Arcanes, and we are most happy to have been able to bring them to you, the readers and admirers of Jack Hirschman’s works.