Squibs 453-454: For Robert Hershon [by Alan Ziegler]

453: I was required to observe Bob Hershon teaching junior high school students for a Teachers & Writers program I was running. It felt strange, since Bob was one of my heroes as a poet and editor. We hatched a scheme. Before class started, I sat at a desk in the back of the room. Bob walked in and started his spiel, doing a double and triple take in my direction. He started and stopped a couple more times. “Alan, what are you doing here?”

         “I’m observing you. It’s in your contract.”

         “But you’re supposed to be here next week.”

         “Come on, Bob, you don’t want to do this in front of the students, Just carry on.”

         “No, let’s do this.”

         “Bob, you know perfectly well that the only time you are fully prepared for class is when you know I’m coming. I want to see how you really teach.”

         “You’re right, Alan, let’s not do this in front of the kids.”

         Bob stormed out and I followed. In the hallway we threw books against lockers, argued, and finished with two resounding claps. We mussed up our hair, untucked our shirts, and returned to the classroom, where I took my seat and Bob resumed as if nothing happened. The assignment: “Report objectively what you just saw.”

         One student concluded with, “Then he went into the hallway with a man who also claimed to be a poet and there was lots of noise.”

 

454: I have celebrated this poem with dozens of my classes:

 Poster
         by Robert Hershon

            in 1961 my apartment at north beach
            had split-rattan blinds and kandinsky
            posters scotch-taped to the walls
            and a table made from a door
            and a brick-and-boards bookcase
            and a mattress on the floor and almost everything was painted
            flat black except for the little yellow
            desk I bought from good will
            and I wrote my first poems sitting there
            watching cars wiggle down lombard street
            with dick partee lying on the couch
            behind me reading the chronicle
            and rehearsing on his invisible alto
            hey man, am i bothering you
            no dick, that’s okay, it’s 1983 now
            play some more

         “Poster” is a hundred-word textbook on how details can convey location and character, and how punctuation-free enjambment can induce the reader to “wiggle down” the page like rafting on a gentle rapid then cascade 22-years in 10 words with two commas to break the fall. What grabs me most about this poem is how it captures time. For many years I would say something like this to my students:

         “In 1983 in Brooklyn, a well-known poet named Bob Hershon wrote himself back to 1961, when he was starting out as a poet 3,000 miles away (where Dick Partee continues to play a real alto in North Beach jazz clubs). Through poetry, we just joined Bob simultaneously in his 1961 and 1983 pasts. Bob, it’s 2002 now, write some more."

         Bob wrote many more. In the Fall of 2007, I told Bob how much I loved the poem and asked for any information so I could show off to my class. He responded:

        "I'm delighted to know that you use that poem. Your timing is uncanny: It was fifty years ago today that I moved to San Francisco. Some background? I had a little cold water flat on Telegraph Hill (still cheap in those days, $75 a month, but before your students get too envious, tell them I had also been making $75 a week as a newspaper reporter) and I had just recently started writing what sort of looked like poems to me.  Dick Partee was a sax and flute player who had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was staying with me. He'd lie around on the couch, a few feet from where I was trying to write, reading the Chronicle and humming sax parts.  He stayed quite a while, but he moved on after I got involved with the woman he'd just broken up with. Ah, what was her name? Dick is still in SF and we're still in touch. Sadly, dental problems forced him to give up his horn some years ago. How's that?  And how are you?  Weller than well, I hope.”

         Dick Partee died on May 10, 2009. We lost Bob Hershon on March 20. I’m admiring a Kandinsky poster scotch-taped to a wall, listening to what I imagine--because I could find no recordings--Dick Partee sounded like in his prime, and joining in a massive public hug for Bob Hershon. 

Comments

[Denise Duhamel]

RIP (Rest in Poetry) Bob. This is an amazing remembrance.

[Patricia Traxler]

Love this. Thank you.

[Jacqueline Lapidus]

Before I knew you, Bob, but the future's all there in the seeds: teaching poetry to high-schoolers, living carefully on a budget when a week's salary paid a month's rent, getting in and out of messy relationships with friends and lovers, listening to music, feeling free. The really painful things came later. Rise in protest, Bob. You were a mensch.

[David Lehman]

Beautiful, Alan. Merci bien!