Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jack Hirschman’s "Burning of Los Angeles" is a feverish, apocalyptic vision of destruction, rendered with a chaotic energy that mirrors the wildfire it describes. The poem transforms the burning of the city into a surreal spectacle, an uncontainable force of nature and history, imbued with eroticism, violence, and mythic grandeur. The fire becomes a female entity, a seductive and terrifying goddess whose presence disrupts the boundaries between the natural and the man-made, the human and the animal, the living and the dead.

The poem begins with the scent of fire arriving before its sight—"Smelled her before the eyes saw her going east from the sea on Sunset". This establishes an immediate sensory intimacy, making the fire not just an event but a presence, something inhaled before it is understood. The fire is personified as "she," and from the start, she is elusive, already moving, already consuming. The smog, the "nagging motor grind of the winding road," and the lined-up cars suggest the oppressive modernity of Los Angeles—its relentless sprawl, its mechanized existence—set against the primal destruction that is coming.

As the fire spreads, the poem’s imagery becomes increasingly frenetic, visceral, and tragic. A deer and a palomino emerge from the canyons, already marked by the fire’s touch, the horse "died at the edge of the gutter." The descriptions of fleeing wildlife—"muskrats leaping from trees," "thumps of rabbits on stone"—reinforce the inescapability of destruction. But alongside the terror is a strange, unsettling beauty, a transformation that turns horror into spectacle. The fire "licking the tops of the trees," "chewing the hair offa them," suggests a ravenous sensuality, the fire as both predator and lover.

The city’s response—"screeches and whine of sirens," "ambulance spotlight out of the awe of my eye"—is feeble, panicked, almost ridiculous in contrast to the fire’s power. A "man against wall upon roof with piddling garden hose" is absurdly impotent. Hirschman renders the human resistance to fire as both heroic and foolish; there is no true defense against this force. Even as the fire devours everything, the city’s inhabitants try to contain her with brute force—"cops thick around the spouting engines clubbing her hard nails banging her ankles." The clash between order and chaos, law enforcement and wild destruction, becomes a kind of grotesque dance, the cops as desperate, animalistic as the fire itself.

The fire is not just a disaster—it is a reckoning, a spirit of pure upheaval that exposes the city’s decadence. The poem’s surrealist eruption—"cadillacs jaguars a chauffeur in profile," "Picasso ran right past Renoir," "dada with czars and jews both gritting with bitten cigar-ends angry cuts"—invokes a parade of art, wealth, and power, all caught in the flames. The city’s elite, its cultural artifacts, its illusions of permanence, are all reduced to fuel. The fire becomes an anti-capitalist force, a destroyer of excess, laying bare the city’s underbelly.

The poem takes on a hallucinatory eroticism as the fire directly addresses those trying to contain it. It "booms windily from inside a house," "spits billions of windowglass shells," "throws back her hair blasts their faces with blush." The fire is not just destruction; she is a femme fatale, taunting and seductive, daring the city to confront its own fragility. In this moment, she is neither villain nor victim but a kind of divine force, a mythic fury who refuses to be subdued.

In the final section, Hirschman’s speaker becomes fully enraptured by the fire. The city may be burning, but what emerges is not despair but transcendence: "I light I light up right then and there." The speaker does not flee but merges with the destruction, embracing it as a cosmic inevitability. The fire, like a grand matriarch of rebellion, becomes "the great again grandmother of every whore gig sweet you." This is not just the burning of Los Angeles; it is the eruption of history, a destruction that is both terrifying and liberating. The final leap—"a carpet of meat for my leap / And I leap"—suggests surrender, transformation, and an ecstatic obliteration of boundaries between self and catastrophe.

"Burning of Los Angeles" is a poem of apocalyptic beauty, where the fire is not merely an event but a living, breathing force, a goddess of destruction and rebirth. Hirschman’s language is wild, fragmented, and cinematic, mirroring the chaos of the fire itself. The poem does not mourn so much as it exults, making the fire not a tragedy but an inevitability, a primal reckoning. In the end, the fire is not something to be escaped; it is something to be leapt into, a consuming and purifying force that reduces everything to ash—so that something new might rise.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...