The Viet Arcane

The Viet Arcane is a poetic vision of the Viet Nam War written in the early 1970's. It was inspired by a book by René Depestre, A Rainbow for the Christian West, in which a series of poems enacts an invasion by the Vodou Loas - or Haitian gods and goddesses - into the southern and most reactionary part of the United States. Hirschman imagines a similar invasion manifested by Vietnamese Mediums who follow the Dao Mau (the Worship of the Mother) religion. He strives to remind us that the war in Vietnam, although now history, was the major catastrophe of its time and must not be forgotten by future generations. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jack Hirschman was born in 1933 in New York City and grew up in The Bronx. A copyboy with the Associated Press in New York, his first brush with fame came from a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to him, published after Hemingway's death as "A Letter to a Young Writer." He was a popular and innovative professor at UCLA in the 1970s, before he was fired for his anti-war activities. Hirschman is a member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA), a founding member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade and the World Poetry Movement, the fourth emeritus poet of the city of San Francisco, and poet in residence with the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.