When I was a young girl, I came home from the set of the TV show “General Hospital,” where I worked as an actress, to find legendary San Francisco poet and activist Jack Hirschman sitting in my parents’ living room.I had been acting in television and film for a few years by then, and my father, actor Russ Tamblyn, would drive me to the set each day from our small apartment in Santa Monica. Jack had stopped by to visit us, as he often did when coming to town for a poetry reading or lecture. When I opened the front door and saw him sitting on our couch talking to my mom, an artist and schoolteacher, I yelled out his name with the kind of joy and reverence a child carries for her favorite teacher.
“Jacky!” I screamed, as he turned to me and flashed his famous toothless smile. He hollered back with the nickname “Tambo.” Then he patted the couch cushion beside him and said, “Sit. I have something special to show you.”
Jack was the editor of a periodical magazine of poetry that appeared in The Chronicle in the 1990s called Cups, and on this occasion, he had chosen to publish a poem I wrote when I was 12. The poem was titled “Kill Me So Much,” and it recalled a nascent, newfound anger toward the objectification and body-shaming that women in Hollywood face — something I was just beginning to experience.
The poem was very much an ode to Jack’s political voice as a poet, but it was also a foreshadowing of the feminist writer I would one day become — a writer who learned how to fight my own war by wielding my rage like a weapon on the page. And it was Jack Hirschman who taught me how.
When Jack showed me my words in print that day, it cemented a feeling of what would become the truth of my life, about the contrasting and complementing duality of my existence: I was not just an actress who was a writer, but a writer who happened to be an actress — and a woman who would and could succeed at doing both. Through my early writing about inequality and injustice in the entertainment industry, Jack saw in me a fury worth nurturing, and he did just that. It’s an experience that any artist, activist or writer who has ever known him would echo as truth.
Jack Hirschman, who died Sunday, Aug. 22, at age 87 at his home in North Beach, was revolutionary in every aspect of his existence, from the first day his heart beat until its last. Born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Jack would become the poet laureate of San Francisco in 2006, and the pulse from which the entire city could feel the coursing of its own livelihood. He was not just the creative backbone of the Bay Area, but its entire spine, holding up and connecting every artist who ever dared to speak truth to power.
Jack, who lived with his wife of 22 years, poet and artist Agneta “Aggie” Falk, was a prolific writer who published more than 100 books of poetry and essays all over the world. He spoke dozens of languages and translated from them the voices of the most marginalized — from the unhoused, to the disabled, to Black, brown, queer and feminist writers. His punk rock attitude toward institutionalism saw him rejected from the mainstream world of literary academia, but that was fine by Jack. He rejected them right back.
He was instrumental in the Beat poetry era of the 1950s and ’60s, but unlike many of his peers who built their names on that literary renaissance but whose politics softened or faded with age, Jack outgrew the sole title of Beat poet and became something much more. He wasn’t just part of a moment in our cultural history, he was a movement unto himself.
He was once famously fired as a professor from the UCLA for giving all his students A’s so they wouldn’t be drafted during the Vietnam War, and I know, to his dying day, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Over tenure, he chose the working class. Over retirement, he chose the resistance.
He was a man with integrity beyond reproach, who could not be bought by the corporate world or sold on a single lie. He carried in him the kind of gifted tenderness, perception and honesty that felt saved only for the natural world, and he was wholly dedicated to those who took their voices as seriously as he did.
Jack used to say, “You must be severe with your time,” and he did just that, dedicating his entire life’s time to the silenced, abused and ignored. He always made a seat for them at any table, invited or not. On any given day or night, you could find him at a poetry reading at City Lights Bookstore pulling up an empty chair for you, or sitting around a good bottle of vodka at a dive bar calling you in to hear an old Yiddish joke, or out in the streets of San Francisco, standing in solidarity alongside you, in celebration or in protest.
Jack was the people’s poet, and every person who loved him was a line he wrote made worthy of reading.
While Jack’s physical body may be gone now, his fight lives on through his tremendous body of work. It serves as a road map for each and every one of us who learned how to harness our outrage to effect change because of him. Now more than ever, there is so much to fight against and to fight for — from the climate crisis, to the botched ending of a senseless 20-year war in Afghanistan, to a pandemic that feels endless, to the very real threat of a right-wing Supreme Court poised to do away with generations of women’s rights and voting rights any day now.
Jack was more than just my writing mentor, he was my creative father, my friend, my inner riot’s inspiration. And while my grief over his sudden death is tenacious, it is no match for the outrage I feel toward systems of oppression and those who abuse their power in its name.
I know that if Jack could hear me say this now, he would laugh with appreciation in his deep, crackling voice that always sounded like a fire pit coming to life.
“Bravo,” he would say to me, just like he did all those years ago in my parents’ living room, when he showed me the power of my voice on the published page. “You are your strongest in your writing when you let your anger shine through,” he said. “Never stop shining, cara. Never stop.”