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Like many others, I am deeply saddened over the death of my dear friend Bob Hershon on March 20, 2021. Bob was smart, funny, and generous. He was also a wonderful poet. Bob was the co-founder of Hanging Loose magazine and press, and helped bring the work of hundreds of writers (including me) to light. He was beloved by many, and earned that love through his great generosity of spirit. Here is a poem by Bob's from last August. It may very well be one of his last poems, but like all his work it is characterized by his warmth, humor, wisdom, and literary genius. Thanks to all of his friends and fellow writers whose tributes to Bob appear below. (More texts, photos, etc. will be added as they arrive.)
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A wonderful, characteristic photograph of Bob Hershon, at a memorial reading I organized for Harvey Shapiro at Stony Brook Southampton in 2013. Now Bob is gone. He was a man filled with humor, warmth and life. He had been ill for some time, but it’s still hard to grasp. —Kathryn Levy
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My dear friend and Hanging Loose co-editor Bob Hershon’s passing has left a gaping hole in my heart. As John Yau recently wrote, he was a major American poet. The quickest of wits, he was an unapologetic city poet in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff and Harvey Shapiro. His knowledge of Brooklyn history, of baseball, popular music, movies and art was encyclopedic. If you ever shared the podium at a poetry reading with Him you made sure he went last lest you be upstaged before you ever got started. —Mark Pawlak
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Here is the New York Times obituary for Bob.
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Did You Know that Robert Hershon is a Major Poet? by John Yau
Click here to listen to
Bob reading at the DIA Art Foundation, November 10th, 2015
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Superbly Situated
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things
i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed
and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed
how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you
part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses
just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them
but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat
we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve
Robert Hershon, “Superbly Situated” from How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express.
Copyright © 1985 by Robert Hershon. Reprinted with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.
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Introducing Bob Hershon by Joanna Fuhrman
I wrote this to introduce Bob when he received his LiveMag lifetime achievement award.
My intro for the award: Robert Hershon's 15th collection, End of the Business Day, was published this year. His work has appeared in The Nation, APR, The Brooklyn Rail, the current issue of LIVE MAG and a million other journals! He has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. His awards include two NEA fellowships and three from New York Foundation of the Arts
I think we all know that Bob Hershon deserves a Goddamn pile of lifetime achievement awards, a sky-scraper full of awards, a mountain of awards.
He needs one for his wry poetry that captures the joy and pain of everyday life, loss, aging, friendship and marriage.
Another for his absurdist poetry that skewers literary fools and know-it-all know-nothings who fill up shopping mall bookstore readings and AWP soirees.
Another for more than fifty years of co-editing one of the best literary journals in the country (and wrangling the OTHER editors into some sort of order)
For publishing the work of high school students from all over the country and the world including some of my early poems.
As other presses embrace, the Ponzi scheme mode of publishing, Hanging Loose is unique in still not charging poets to submit poems, AND actually PAYING writers for their work
He-- of course --deserves another award for putting SO MANY beautiful books in the world (including work by so many of my favorite poets): Paul Violi, Jayne Cortez, his wife the lovely Donna Brook, Charles North, and Quote unquote “younger poets” like Tom Devany and Maggie Nelson
Another for being such a good friend to so many people for so many years. For writing poems to his friends so precise that we all feel like we are their friends too.
I’ve known Bob now for more than 30 years, and in this time his poetry has only gotten better: more honest, funnier and more absurd.
He’s the only poet I know to have a poem on the OP-Ed page of the NY Times AND the menu of a restaurant. I am hoping this publishing trend continues. I would like a Bob Hershon poem flashing underneath the tracks of the F train and in the information books at the hospital.
His work is what we need to make any kind of sense of this backwards world.
I’m looking forward to his 16th, 17th and 18th book.
AND his 50th, 51st and 80th lifetime achievement awards.
See also
Celebrating 50 Years of Hanging Loose Press In Conversation with Co-editor Robert Hershon
Interview by Joanna Fuhrman
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Bob Hershon, Dick Lourie, and Mark Pawlak. Photo by Gerald Fleming.
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Bob and Donna believed in me by Mandy Smoker Broaddus
Over twenty years ago Robert Hershon (and others at Hanging Loose Press - Dick, Mark, Donna...) changed my life forever by publishing my collection of poems. It felt like an incredible dream. Bob and Donna believed in me, guided me through a new world, boosted me up, and loved me. They became my forever Uncle and Auntie. I will miss him immensely. I will cherish the compliments, the constructive criticism, the witty email banter, coffee at the kitchen counter, after dinner drinks - but mostly I will remember your keen poetics, your bright eye and all the generosity. Thank you. Thank you so much. 💔
Mandy Smoker Broaddus, Bob Hershon, Donna Brook
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Robert Hershon R.I.P. by Michael Lally
Bob was six years older than me and felt like a big brother, a funny one (I had an ex-cop big brother named Robert who was twelve years older and a jokester as well). Hershon's quick wit, even when aimed at me, always made me laugh, which was an unexpected gift because my inability to be equally witty usually soured me on that kind of banter. But Bob Hershon's love for his fellow poets and friends, and most folks, radiated from his heart even when cracking wise.
In fact, his readings were known for the laughter his poems often generated, even sometimes when addressing serious subjects. Some thought of him as a stand-up comic as much as a poet. But he was one of our most wonderful poets and should have had the name recognition of our most famous ones. I think because his poetry was often humorous it sometimes wasn't taken as seriously as it should have been, and because he didn't fit into the categories that critics create for poetry movements and scenes.
In fact Robert Hershon was unique, as a poet, editor, publisher, co-founder and director of The Print Center (that made it possible for many small presses to publish), and husband, father, friend, and wit. His physical presence will be, and already is, deeply missed, but his printed and recorded presence will live on. Rest in poetry, Bob.
PS: here's the full text of the title poem from his 2019 collection
End of the Business Day:
I looked in every file and folder
under the fax and behind the
Xerox. I retraced my footsteps
and pawed through the waste
paper and finally
I found what I'd done with this poem
So I folded it in half and then in
quarters and then to the size of
a matchbook
and I put it in my breast
pocket and I gave it a pat
and I turned out the lights
and I locked the door
and I ran for my life
David Lehman, Bob Hershon, Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally
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Bob with his daughter Elizabeth
Bob Hershon and his sister Sue, ca. late 1940s.
Bob was my big brother who decided to teach me to read when I was 3 and gave me vocabulary tests every week. He loved being a big brother to “little sister Susie” and we went to the movies every Saturday as kids. He took me to my first ballet, my first opera, and my first off Broadway play.
He was always funny, and that got us through a rocky childhood. I became a.therapist, and he always wanted to write, and I loved his poetry. I don’t know if you ever saw his cartoons. I have many of them, and when he had a birthday I would give him one, as he never saved them but I did. They are very clever. We never fought, talked very often, and Donna and I were close friends, and close with Jed and Elizabeth. He was very modest and talented. He had an unbelievable memory for all kinds of things. He was one of a kind.
I miss him very much and hated that he suffered so in the last few months. I saw him 3 days before he died, and he held my hand. I bought him chocolate and a big jar of cashews, and he loved that. The nurse said it wasn’t good for him and we looked at her as if she was insane. Life wasn’t always easy for Bob but he was such a kind and loving guy and he knew how many friends were rooting for him. We were all so lucky he was in our lives. (Little sister Susie)
Bob Hershon and his son Jed
Bob Hershon as a young man
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Mourning the Loss of Bob Hershon by Thomas Devaney
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 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 Donna 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.
—Sherman Alexie
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Bob was my friend for more than 40 years, my publisher more than once, and a great sports fan, the Mets above all. One of the bricks at Citi Field bears his name (a gift from his family). He watched other sports, too, though not often the pickup basketball games at Murat Nemet-Nejat's annual summer poets parties—and even less me going one on one with Max Warsh, the son of Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh. Bob looks so happy (and young) here, as do Ed Friedman and Marc Nasdor. Me, I'm worrying about how to get past Max.
—Charles North
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Bob Hershon and Gerald Fleming
Bob Hershon was a stellar human being. The web of writers he brought together— some now gone from the earth and the many left who now mourn him—knew him not simply as "funny" nor classically Brooklyn-irascible, but profoundly caring and generous, deeply intelligent, steeped and conversant in both literature and art. That web of writers is wide both geographically and aesthetically: his tastes took in the whole spectrum of good literature without favoring gender or ethnicity, and both the magazine and the many Hanging Loose book titles attest to that.
I remember a Hanging Loose prose poem reading that Sharon Mesmer, Jack Anderson, and I did at the New York Public Library. Bob did the intro, and during that intro grouched about critics' obsession with defining the prose poem: "If it's good writing, who the hell cares?" That was Bob. (And it should be said that Hanging Loose, under Bob's, Dick's, and Mark's editorialship, was an early home for the prose poem—no raised eyebrows when a prose poem manuscript came over the transom.) It's people like Bob Hershon who keep our literature alive at its cellular level, and those of us who knew him, loved him, are aching.
—Gerald Fleming
Donna Brook and Bob Hershon. Photo by Gerald Fleming.
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Here is Bob reading at the Paul Violi Memorial at the Poetry Project in June 2011. I can imagine that, during a pause between poems, he's recounting a wryly touching and pertinent anecdote, which will shortly be hitting the audience in the way this photograph hit me. [Photo by David Kelley]
—Tony Towle
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Bob out on the town
Bob sent me these pics a few years ago. It was 2016, he was just turning 80 and a bunch of us were eating some great Italian food after a gathering at Poet's House to celebrate his birthday and the fact that some of us had just had books come out from HL Press... I think no one at the table was aware that anyone was taking pics--I certainly wasn't--so it's all very real. ---Patricia Traxler
Yes, I remember that book party. Bob: pleased that the book party went off smoothly, pleased to be in the company of close poet friends, wine, and food. What I remember so fondly from many such annual events is the late night drive back to Wyckoff Street, sitting at the kitchen counter with Bob, the great pleasure he took in tallying up the book sales, recounting who showed up, who said what, etc. Then a nightcap and to bed in the wee hours.
---Mark Pawlak
The restaurant where those photos were taken on May 20th, 2016, by the way, was Gigino's, on Greenwich Street south of Duane. Mark was right on the money in his description---Bob was extremely happy to be where he was with the people that were there, after another successful Hanging Loose celebration, and after a good dinner with good wine (and maybe one pre-dinner cocktail). ---Tony Towle
top: Bob, Patricia Traxler, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak, [?], Tony Towle, and [???].
bottom: Michael Lally, Bob, Patricia Traxler, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak
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Bob and Donna in Paris at an evening reading I'd arranged at a pal's apartment. Quite a few readers (including Kathryn Levy, who happened to be in town), and Bob was a big hit. (It took some convincing to get Donna to read, but read she did, and I think she was glad she did. Bob was especially happy about that.) ---Gerald Fleming
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Bob Hershon, Ivy Chen, Keri Smith, Wang Ping in NYC
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left photo: Jeanne Calvit, husband of Lisa Von Drasek, Sherman Alexie, Lisa Von Drasek, Wang Ping, Bob Hershon, Donna Brook
right photo: Wang Ping, Sherman Alexie, Bob Hershon
Bob and Donna visited Macalester College in 2015, with Sherman Alexie. The trio caused a sensation in the Twin Cities, with their poetry, stories, humor, and their bonds with each other. Sherman told many stories about how Bob discovered his poetry and has been publishing him ever since. I cooked a banquet for them at home. So many people came, and I had to borrow chairs from friends. One of the chairs was faulty, unfortunately. Bob sat on it, and it collapsed under him. I was terrified, but he got up and continued with the feast, with a joke that made everyone laugh. He was tough and funny. Hanging Loose Press published my first translation: New Generation: Poetry from China Today, with Dick Lourie, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman among the co-translators. It paved my path as a poet and translator for the future. Bob and Donna also hosted a baby shower for my firstborn child at their home. I still hold onto that stroller. Bob's last wish was a Chinese dinner. I am sharing a photo of us feasting on Chinese food at Hong Kong Noodles in Minneapolis. Hope he sees this and smiles from his new place. Bob has made many children of poets and writers. I'm one of them.
---Wang Ping
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Dick, Ron, Emmett, Bob
Bob wrote a poem about Hanging Loose editors. That’s the one that, in the last few weeks, has really got to me.
We’ve been doing the same thing for fifty-five years: submissions to the magazine are screened, sent around, and voted on—mostly by mail, since we’ve never actually had all the editors living in one place. Then we meet together about three times a year. We spend a weekend sitting around a table, usually in Bob’s living room, to make final decisions. On warm, sunny days there’s a table in the back yard.
Nothing gets in the magazine until it’s been read aloud—we have to hear it. In the middle of the table there’s a pile of manuscripts. Depending on how long it’s been between meetings, there might be 40 or 50, or only 20 or 30. Ron Schreiber always took on himself the job of doling them out by turns. We never knew if Ron had some devious sorting plan of his own. That would have been in character.
Bob reads someone’s poem to us—his voice: I know it so well—first polishing his glasses with that characteristic gesture I also know so well. He’s right across the table from me. Then we vote (previous votes are disregarded; to make the cut it has to be heard). Because we are kind people, a tie vote always goes to the “yesses.” Ron’s on my right; he’s next; we always read clockwise. (Don’t ask.)
Then me, then Emmett Jarrett on my left; after he has retired into the clergy, Mark Pawlak is on my left; he’s been there forty years. After Ron died, we each had to choose our own manuscripts to read from the pile, and we didn’t need to think about tie votes any more.
Now Mark’s across the table and Bob is on my right, watchful so I don’t steal the pen he’s doodling with. We’re familiar, so joyfully and achingly familiar, with one another’s voices, and with each individual style of reading aloud. Because this is what we do. For a half-century.
Here is Bob’s poem.
The Editors Editing
Nomi our neighbor
Asks Donna what are those
Guys doing out back
Sitting around the table
Table full of papers
And one guy goes blah blah blah blah
And the others all shake their heads
And go ahum ahum ahum
Then the oak leaves fall
Then the white garden furniture
Covered with gray city snow
Bluejay walks across the table
And down somebody's leg
Blah blah blah blah
Reflecting on it the week after Bob died, I realized why I was so moved by these fourteen lines. Of course, I thought, it’s a poem about eternal friendship.
---Dick Lourie
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I found another photo of Bob I took the last time I stayed with him, in 2019. I love that photo. He was sitting under his favorite painting, happy, content, at ease...full of dreams. ---Wang Ping
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