We have come to the end of this mighty and important cycle of publications, the entire body of "The Arcanes" (from 1972 to the present day) which also mark the sudden death of Jack Hirschman who unfortunately did not have time to see this last undertaking of realized.
The Arcanes represent, in Jack Hirschman’s vast poetic production, a fundamental and extraordinary element, the most advanced point of his questing.
This 4th volume comprises 260 long and orchestrated compositions, collected from these last years of a particular poetic inquiry, which grounded the political engagement and social themes, ever present in his poetry, with stormy leaps of mind, heart and soul, drawn from personal events and references.
The volume is presented in chronological development from 2019 to 2021, encompassing its entire output. Within that span of time having coined a new verb arcanize he created new Arcanes from longer poems published in the past or from unpublished notations that were looking for new form.
Since 2019, the year of the publication of the 3rd volume of The Arcanes, Jack Hirschman has not only continued “arcanizing” his poems from the past, but he has confronted, in poetic form, the rise of the fascism latent in American capitalism.
The Arcanes also features poems rooted in revolutionary communist visions and kabbalistic insights. In a language he calls punography, he composes Arcanes in a comic and liberating language, written in avalanches of puns to relieve the corporate techno-tragic suffering of our times.