Mourning the loss of Bob Hershon.
His life-long work at Hanging Loose Press is beyond measure.
Bob’s poems, with their "downhome speech," lead with the heart.
The one where he puts his hand back to reach-out for his son's hand as they're crossing the street always hits me. The son much older now, Bob writes:
Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge.
My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?
What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand.
Bob was one of the great walkers in the city. Cut out of that same generous grain celebrated by Alfred Kazin and Walt Whitman, where he says: "Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else."
The streets of the city are before us: Bob's gait remains distinctive. His stride is deliberate with a range of tempos. His sense of being is transmitted in the stride of his line breaks and lines.
Notice the poem “Pace.” Yes, we never know which direction he might go, or the pace the poem may take to get there. But, in its own workaday way of that form, it’s also a concrete poem. Bob writes:
on skinny old
Lexington Avenue
I speed up
to pass this man
so I can
slow down
I take
great pleasure in the exact size
of my steps
The poems are living maps: all the worlds in all of the names, all the places, which continue to live in Bob's honest and vivid words.
Somewhere, I believe, Sherman Alexie credits Bob and Donna Brook with saving his life. They published Sherman's first book with Hanging Loose Press. Later, even though his big publishers wanted him to publish all of his books with them, Sherman stuck with Hanging Loose for his poetry collections. His tribute to Bob helps to tell the larger story: "Bob's Coney Island" –
Let's begin with this: America.
I want it all back
now, acre by acre, tonight. I want
some Indian to finally learn
to dance the Ghost Dance right
so that all of the salmon and buffalo return
and the white men are sent back home
to wake up in their favorite European cities.
I am not cruel.
Still, I hesitate
when Bob walks us around his Coney Island:
the Cyclone still running
the skeleton of the Thunderbolt
the Freak Show just a wall of photographs
the Parachute Drop
which has not been used in 30 years
but still looks like we could
tie a few ropes to the top (Why the hell not?) and drop
quickly down, spinning, unravelling
watching Bob's Coney Island rise
from the ashes of the sad, old carnival
that has taken its place now, this carnival
that is so sad because, like Diane says
all carnivals are sad.
We drop to the ground, our knees buckle slightly
at impact. We turn to look at each other
with the kind of love and wonder
that only fear and the release of fear can create.
We climb to the top and parachute down
again and again, because there is an ocean
a few feet away, because Manhattan is just a moment
down the horizon, because there was a 13-year-old boy
who believed that Coney Island belonged to him
though we know that all we see
doesn't really belong to anyone
but I'll let Bob have a conditional lease
because I know finally
somebody will take care of this place
even if just in memory.
___
Thomas Devaney wrote and co-director the film Bicentennial City and is the author of Getting to Philadelphia, Hanging Loose Press and You Are the Battery, Black Square Editions. His work is featured in Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches at Haverford College.
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