ITHACA, N.Y.—After growing up in Philadelphia and completing college, Ithaca poet, editor and publisher Jack Hopper was subject to be drafted into the United States military.
Providentially, a classmate from college was his Classification and Assignment officer: “Where do you want to go?” As a college history major, Jack chose Japan, but was advised against it. Instead, he was assigned to the U.S. NATO headquarters in Orleans, 60 miles from Paris. He served as a passport courier, traveling every Friday to the U.S. Embassy in Paris to deliver passports and visas for processing.
“Every Friday gave me the whole weekend in Paris—a wonderful assignment,” he said.
At the conclusion of his military obligation, Hopper returned briefly to the U.S., but soon realized he had to return to Europe. With a one-way ticket back to Paris, $85 in his pocket, and generous help from friends, he landed various jobs—translating medical texts (with humorous results), teaching English, dubbing films, writing radio plays, and writing a weekly literary column in Combat, the underground newspaper Camus had founded during WW2, while savoring France and Europe.
“My ‘residential hotel’ was $1.00 a day,” he said. “I had a tiny room, but it was home, and cheap. In order to teach English, I had to pretend I was Canadian. The French preferred ‘Canadian English’” to ‘American English,’ so I made like a Canadian, and it worked.”
Serving as the foreign correspondent for the jazz magazine Metronome provided Jack with a Press Pass.
“I could come and go in clubs and movie houses. I got to know James Jones, a big fan of Django Reinhardt. William Burroughs, James Baldwin, and the composer Howard Swanson became friends. I also interviewed Romano Mussolini, the duce’s youngest son and a jazz pianist, and later interviewed Jean Cocteau for Downbeat Magazine.” Jack also sold two radio plays to Dutch radio AVRO. “And they paid!”
After two years of “rich adventures and sometimes loneliness” Hopper said he grew homesick, missing his family in Philadelphia. After reuniting with family in 1961, Jack joined three other friends and went on the road to San Francisco. His first poetry collection, Miscellany, appeared in 1962.
Back in Manhattan, Jack moved to the Lower East Side, a rent-cheap area that in the early ’60s was filled with immigrants and a growing number of writers and artists—“An amazing place to live for aspiring artists…Poets like Jack Gilbert and Allen Ginsberg, and a young singer named Janis Joplin were in the neighborhood.”
After meeting his future wife, Wendy Berzine, Jack knew he must soon find a steady job. Considering what line of work would allow him time to write, he turned to a former college friend, Gabe Hornstein, who was beginning to reprint and publish books for college and university libraries. AMS Press was much like a university press without the academic umbrella. Approaching Gabe, Jack confided “I’m getting married and I need a job.” To his surprise, the publisher seized the moment with an instant offer: “I’ll give you your reception and you start work on Monday.”
Jack’s worked as editor-in-chief of AMS for more than 50 years. He also worked on the side as a “book doctor” for literary agents, editing authors like Yiyun Li and others who were just beginning their careers. He and Wendy had married in 1966 and adopted two sons. His interest in drama continued with a play mounted at La Mama Experimental Theater, and he performed in Tom Sankey’s pioneering folk rock musical The Golden Screw, which won an Obie Award in 1967. It was a lively time that included a second poetry collection in 1994.
Over their years together Jack and Wendy would visit friends in Ithaca. A year after Wendy died in 2004, Jack sold their Westchester home and headed for Ithaca. A longtime friend and writer—Fred Wilcox, who had settled in Ithaca—hosted Jack for a month, before he found his downtown home.
Since arriving in Ithaca, Hopper has twice been recognized as Tompkins County’s Poet Laureate (2015 and 2016), and his poetry collections have been well received, with Doubles in 2012 and Rafting the Medusa in 2016.
These days, continuing to do freelance editing with academic publishers like Penn State University Press, Jack can devote some time each day to his own poetry.
“An idea comes from something, somewhere in my past, maybe something I hear or read,” he said. “Over time it grows in my memory until it becomes irresistible and must be expressed […] That is the door to the lyric or narrative poem.”