Hirschman, Jack

Aur Sea with: Ephemera

Berkeley, CA: Tree Books, Texts and Documents, 1974. First Printing. Softcover. With postcard signed by Jack Hirschman to Thomas Rain Crowe, his apprentice, friend & the co-authorial Founder of the Second San Francisco Renaissance. “I first met Thomas Crowe (the later adopted continental-american name, literally taken from the name Dawson by which he was known to me for four years on the streets of North Beach, S.F. He asked after my work and I directed him to my most 'painterly' of books, Aur Sea. From there, Tom became, for three years, an important part of what was to become and to be known as the Beatitude cadre: traveling to the Folsom Prison Creative Writers Workshop together, the northcoastal headlands, and in and around the S. F. Bay Area on various literary jaunts and missions; he edited the very important 25th issue of Beatitude magazine--the international texts of which are a credit to both the streets of San Francisco and the motherland of revolution in general; and, perhaps most energetically, it was he who virtually single-handedly sustained the "menial" and organizational homework for the Beatitude-City Lights readings, various social and political rallies and readings such as the Proposition 15 benefit (the California referendum initiative concerning nuclear safeguards), and Beatitude books and magazines, and later the S.F. International Poetry Festival of which he was founder and director-coordinator in 1976. Collusions both personal and poetic drove him away from the street and to the land which his Carolina boyhood continually evoked, but his work for the Beatitude group and for the poetry and socio-political community in northern California certainly is not forgotten” (Jack Hirschman [1933-2021]). So reads the great Baby Beat/Second San Francisco Renaissance mentor, Jack Hirschman’s introduction to a different book — The Personified Street by Thomas Rain Crowe (b. 1949). As you, Dear Reader, may have guessed by now, IT IS THIS VERY COPY OF Aur Sea that Hirschman gave him that destiny-flecked moment in San Francisco. Considering how essential Crowe was to the entire project: his CEO-like awareness of the movement’s distributive-cultural networks — (e.g., factoring into his bookings knowledge of recurring events in the arts other than his). Sounds like basic counterprogramming awareness, right? Wrong: Crowe wasn’t worried about attrition; he was focused on expansion. A fate-sealing paradigmatic canyon lies between these poles: and Thomas Rain Crowe chose rightly. This, because “expansion” meant “linking groups,” and “linking groups” meant doing what sociologists call “field work.” This emotionally-attuned though robustly logical reading of the local mood (whether TRC & Co. were welcomed in Berkeley (by the Street Poets); in politically intense, though vibrant Oakland; in Marin Co., Bolinas, and climes like these further afield were “planks” in Crowe’s propellant organizational schema. This work starts here: with this quintessential, live-from-the-streets-of-SF -style exchange — without which, one wonders, if it ever would’ve happened at all. Inside Crowe’s copy of Aur Sea, we have found and have retained two pieces of wonderful ephemera: the first, a printed out copy of Jack’s introduction to TPS, in which the historical linkages twixt Aur Sea and TRC’s life-&-legacy are established, biographically; the second, a letterpress postcard featuring “Melody of Cyril and Method,” by the great Russian poet, Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010), translated by Hirschman as noted on verso. Hirschman’s inscription & accompanying signature thereon, in thin, blue pen ink, reads: “for Tom, / solidarations [sic] / toward / May; / [indiscernible Cyrillic] / Jack.” A truly exemplar marker of the international interest (and lived poetic linkages) of SF poets and their part-time work — (which was full-time, for Jack) of championing Global Modernisms is really on-view here. From the archive of Thomas Rain Crowe. For more information on the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (assembled & curated by Third Mind Books), see our book, Starting from San Francisco: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books (Item No. 3071) & the catalog for the Crowe archive (Item No. 1010), which contains several excerpts and quotations from the book as well as a full listing of the archive’s contents, which are now being offered for sale individually on the Third Mind Books site. Oblong, trade-format softcover in illustrated wrappers: presumed first edition, first printing, though not explicated as such on copyright page. All items in near fine condition with only generally mild-to-moderate rubbing, shelf-wear, & some light bumping to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine-edge; & also, some marginalia attributable to Crowe (mostly bracketing, asterisks, and sparsely recurrent throughout); lastly, there a few instances of tape being applied to strengthen a binding that didn’t seem to need it; otherwise, pristine. Near Fine. [Item #7574]

Price: $30.00