Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jack Hirschman’s "Correspondence of Americans" is an ambitious, densely layered meditation on friendship, movement, memory, and national identity. Structured as a lyrical correspondence, it conveys a sense of dislocation and longing, capturing both personal and historical tensions. Hirschman, often associated with political radicalism and Beat poetics, infuses the poem with a wandering, reflective energy, evoking the restless movement of American life while simultaneously examining the burden of its past. Addressed to “Jim” (likely a personal or symbolic figure), the poem oscillates between nostalgia and critique, weaving in and out of personal recollection, historical consciousness, and the mythic dimensions of American experience.

The opening stanza conjures up the "free-wheeling interborough rides"—a reference to the subway systems of New York, where minds are "lit up through the tunnels." This cityscape becomes the foundation for a broader meditation on movement, both physical and mental. The language swirls between the concrete and the abstract, recalling moments of camaraderie, humor, and verbal playfulness in the "descending sift of puns." The mention of "Kid Mulligan" suggests a figure shaped by both street culture and literary history, evoking James Joyce’s Mulligan from Ulysses. As the speaker leaves behind the past ("I left it, boy, and you"), there is an invocation of westward expansion—*"westwardly ho"—*a motif deeply ingrained in the American mythos. This move westward is not one of triumph but one of "limping toward their sabbatical ends," a vision of exhaustion rather than conquest.

The second section takes on a more intimate tone, referencing a "bride" and invoking a sense of distance and transformation. Hirschman plays with temporal and spatial disjunctions—"Where you are tomorrow already is,"—suggesting both inevitability and the way America’s westward expansion is tied to cycles of repetition and forgetting. The imagery shifts between grand historical movements and personal landscapes—"the negroes minstrelling waters behind" gives way to the speaker "forefathered into stone." America, as a land and an idea, becomes simultaneously solidified and mutable, bound to its past yet ever-changing.

The third section turns toward existential contemplation. The speaker recalls a time when he and Jim shared a "sculptural profile," their companionship elevated as a kind of monument. Yet now, "nothing is before me, and behind, the tense of fossilized hoofprints." The past is a ruin, and the speaker himself is caught in a state of poetic fragmentation. He describes himself as moving "as the metric in a poem whose theme is ruin," a striking self-awareness of how poetry itself becomes both a record and a form of decay. This ruinous condition extends to history—"fractured by handling, cracked by time and weather,"—suggesting that both personal and national pasts are subject to entropy, reduced to objects of scholarly dissection.

In the fourth section, Hirschman invokes the earthquake—a literal shaking of the foundation, but also a metaphor for upheaval and rebirth. "The last cable car" stops not just to end but "to start up and clattering down." This moment signals a transition, a brief pause before history continues its relentless motion. The Barbary Coast, once San Francisco’s notorious red-light district, emerges as a symbol of regeneration, where even in destruction, new growth occurs. This tension between chaos and creation, ruin and possibility, is at the heart of Hirschman’s vision of America. "The same face, Love, ever changing and anew," underscores the way the American identity is constantly in flux—always the same, yet always reshaping itself.

The final section delivers a culmination of the poem’s themes: "Our images, Jim, have come to the ice left in once drunkenly lifted cups." This is an image of dissolution, of past revelries now reduced to their remnants. The idea of "leaning"—both physically and metaphorically—becomes a crucial motif. "Lean against me with your irreligious brogue and I will lean the shoulder of a Jew." Here, Hirschman invokes ethnic and cultural identities, positioning America as a land of disparate but interconnected voices. The closing lines reject grandiosity and myth—"the stoned fictions of ourselves as gods"—in favor of a more grounded reality. The final declaration—"Bound, for all space, nowhere, clods."—suggests both liberation and futility. The vastness of America, its possibilities, and its failures are all encapsulated in this idea of movement without destination.

"Correspondence of Americans" is a profound engagement with the American experience—its transience, its contradictions, and its history of displacement. Hirschman navigates between personal memory and collective identity, invoking the rhythms of migration, friendship, and loss. The poem’s fluidity, shifting between past and present, self and nation, echoes the itinerant nature of American life itself. It is both a love letter and an elegy, an expression of longing for an America that is always just beyond reach.

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