Poet, Musician, & Senior GSP Technical Advisor
ABOUT
Steven L. Hirsch was born in New York City in 1960. Raised in the NY area, he graduated high school from the Storm King School in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, in 1977 and earned his B.A. from Bard College in Drama/Dance in 1985. Steve also earned an A.A. certificate degree in Theatre from Naropa University in 1982 where he was a student of both poetry as well as performance arts inspired by Buddhist practices. He was an apprentice to Allen Ginsberg in 1979-1980 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and he studied Vajrayana Buddhism with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as well as many other visiting lamas and spiritual teachers.
In 1983, after his junior year at Bard, Steve’s father Louis died. He left school to manage his family business of manufacturing bridal veils and accessories in New York’s garment center. Concurrently, Steve founded the literary magazine Heaven Bone in 1985 to showcase surreal, experimental, and spiritual poetry as well as art, photography, fiction and essays. Along with five poetry chapbooks, an anthology of anti-Iraq War poetry and a collection of fiction, he published twelve issues of the magazine, with the final issue having been released in 2000. Steve finished his B.A. degree credits at the New School for Social Research in NYC while running the family business. Leaving the business to his mom in 1990, Steve entered the computer consulting world and mastered the technologies for digital publishing and marketing workflow management. He is a certified expert in Adobe Workfront and has provided his creative and technical expertise to dozens of Fortune 500 companies for more than three decades.
In recent years he has been riding his Harley all over the Northeast, studying Buddhism and writing, and playing Latin and African hand drums as a founding member of the drum circle “Spirithawk.” Steve has had poems appear in Hunger, Napalm Health Spa Report, Pudding, Big Scream, Hazmat Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, and Etcetera among others.
Steve has performed his poetry at numerous venues including the Core Gallery in New Paltz; the Catskill Mt. Foundation in Hunter, NY; Monkey Joe’s Cafe in Kingston, NY; the Dactyl Foundation Gallery, NYC; The Bowery Poetry Club, NYC; A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC; The Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY., and Penny Lane, Boulder, CO.
Steve resides on Woodcock Mountain in the Hudson Valley region of NY State with his wife Karen, daughter Jesse Mai Lotus, and three cats.Regarding his Ramapo 500 Affirmations, from Flower Thief Press in 1998, Mikhail Horowitz wrote: “Ride what’s left of Whitman’s and Kerouac’s road with this big-eared, heart-steering, motor-mouthing, sutra-blowing poet, who won’t surrender a single joy in all the beaten miles of be-all and end-all. Stephen-Paul Martin wrote: “Hirsch evokes the complex velocities that shape a human identity. His poems convincingly ask us to think about the possibility of spiritual intelligence in a dangerous and absurd world.” Jack Foley wrote: “Hirsch and chopper travel this fast-fading twentieth century. Hirsch’s poems move but speed is not their only quality. Just as the sound of a motorcycle is utterly unique, immediately recognizable, so the music of this poetry is like nothing else. The poems are meditative and haunting. What is meaning when ‘meaning and love were cheapened by unhappy teachers with no patience and no skill with their own minds?’ The answer is in this book. Daiva-Prakriti: ’Light of the Logos.’”
NEW BOOK: Available on Amazon
Some advance praise for Demon Commuter:
Poet Steve Hirsch demonstrates in this fine collection that he is dialed into the Yin Yang and is rocksolid in his perceptive faculties. DEMON COMMUTER gives us finely tuned poems, paeans of praise and terse phillipics that halt and haunt the reader, alter the consciousness, long after reading. Hirsch asks the big questions, and he asks them memorably: How do you stay alive when each heartbreak saps your life away? How do you keep the story straight when half the world is crooked? No mere collection of rant or woke rap, these poems hit their mark time again with rapier-like exactitude, draw blood, and bound irrepressibly along to their next target, often reaching incantatory power as they go. DEMON COMMUTER transforms astute reportage into a rare and penetrating running commentary. This is fine poetry, poetry. that weaves spun magic with poise and aplomb. Hirsch gives the current and the topical the quasi-mythical aura it deserves.
— George Wallace, writer in residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace
Steve Hirsch’s readers expect a lot: great poems of corralled consciousness barely contained in words stretched to the breaking point. Hirsch captures the unique moment, but his imagistic precision mingles intimately with the recognition of the socio-political-historical dimension of the scenes of his life, and with a view longer yet, his lines are lit with glints of what does not change, the illumination which is for him less a conviction than a habit of vision, nothing more than the way things look.
In its most literal reading the title refers to Hirsch’s (and many other workers’) daily routine, the commute to earn a living, the mental “drivenness” imposed by the reality principle. Taking a step back, Hirsch makes it clear that his own sometimes ill-fitting vocation is embedded in an inescapable system that privileges greed and aggression, giving the demonic the face of war and exploitation. Yet in his final vision, everything is transformed, redeemed even, and “demon” can regain a numinous glow. But even once the demon of the title has appeared in beneficent form as the sort of interior muse of which Socrates spoke, now and then he seems more closely to resemble S. Clay Wilson’s Checkered Demon in his frantic, barely controllable impulsive energy.
— William Seaton, author of Spoor of Desire and Planetary Motions
In “a world networked by things yet bereft of insight,” Demon Commuter’s achievement is in its volatile and contradictory enmeshment. At once a political and social commentary that harkens back to his lineage studies with Allen Ginsberg, Steve Hirsch’s poetry speaks with “a prescient vertigo” to these times. I’m struck by this collection’s descriptive and theatrical power, staged from deep within the infotech gig economy where workers are laid low like swine and maligned bosses flourish. While others might see this work as one of pervasive Kaliyuga darkness and despair, I wholeheartedly agree with the author that “This poetry is a rescue from the death of all dreams.”
— Jim Cohn, author of Treasures for Heaven
The violence of these poems is a mode of anguish. We are at the crossroads, the place where the only possible action may (or may not) occur, “our faces marked by sleep and by the surface of dream rivers that sparkle with purpose”; “the day,” the narrator says, “is a drug that causes amnesia / and night disguises dreams we can’t maintain or remember.” One imagines these poems being written as the poet moves, still half-drugged with sleep. from home to office, then from office to home. “Crushed leaves trail demarks another year in mulch strata.” The purity of the attack extracts its necessary payment, yet he goes on with an amazing narrative that asserts the speaker’s place amid and apart from the horrors he documents with such eloquence. It is all a nightmare, to be sure, but it is a nightmare in which language moves straight out of Ginsberg City into the astonishing Trumpery of our time. If “Howl” was the cry of bohemian youth, this book is the cry of corporate middle age, but in both cases we get “the full hit of the ‘truth,’” “the death inside of all”:
Their voices won’t leave me alone
but I am too far gone; way way beyond…
With grand eloquence and linguistic brio, Demon Commuter tells us all to awaken: “Home is always over there.”
— Jack Foley, host and executive producer of “Cover to Cover with Jack Foley.”
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