Hal Sirowitz, a onetime poet laureate of Queens who mined his suffocating relationship with his overprotective mother to create mordant reminiscences that were both highly personal and universal, and that made him a standout at New York City poetry slams, died on Oct. 17 in Philadelphia. He was 76.
His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his wife, Minter Krotzer, who said the cause was complication of Parkinson’s disease, which was first diagnosed in 1997.
By day, Mr. Sirowitz was a special-education teacher at a public elementary school in Queens. By night, he performed at venues like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan’s East Village, an epicenter of New York’s spoken-word movement in the 1990s. He also appeared on MTV and on the PBS series “The United States of Poetry.” Garrison Keillor often read Mr. Sirowitz’s poems on his NPR show, “The Writer’s Almanac.”
He was poet laureate of Queens in the early 2000s, a title bestowed by the borough president.
Along the way, he published five books of poetry: “Mother Said” (1996); “My Therapist Said” (1998); “Father Said” (2000); “Before, During, and After” (2003); and “Stray Cat Blues” (2012).”
With his “sardonic, sad, self-deprecating humor,” Bruce Weber wrote in a 1996 profile in The New York Times, “Mr. Sirowitz has a style, on the page, that recalls the twisty, ‘bad for the Jews’ self-mirroring of the young Philip Roth, and in performance it makes him seem like a Catskills’ Charlie Brown.”
With a sensibility that ranged from the modernist poet William Carlos Williams to the borscht circuit comedian Henny Youngman, Mr. Sirowitz often milked his difficult childhood for both lyricism and laughs. As his longtime friend Bob Holman, who is also a poet, said in an interview, “He was a poet of the particular.”
However personal his work, audiences could relate. “The highest compliment I get,” Mr. Sirowitz told The Times, “is when people say to me, ‘We must’ve had the same mother.’”
Harold Sirowitz was born on March 6, 1949, in Manhattan, the second of three children of Milton and Estelle (Vogel) Sirowitz. His father was a children’s clothing manufacturer, and his mother, who grew up in the Bronx, stayed at home to raise Hal and his two sisters. He grew up on Long Island, in East Meadow and Long Beach, and settled in Flushing, Queens, as an adult.
Growing up as a shy child with a stutter, he spent all too much time at home under the thumb of his worrier mother, who smothered him with guilt, as he recounted in his 1996 poem “Crumbs”:
Don’t eat any more food in your room,
Mother said. You’ll get more bugs.
They depend on people like you.
Otherwise, they would starve.
But who do you want to make happy,
your mother or a bunch of ants?
“I used to think, ‘Why me?” he asked in The Times. “Why do I have to be the one with a crazy mother?’”
His poem “Deformed Finger,” also from 1996, likewise starts with an admonishment from his mother — “Don’t stick your finger in the ketchup bottle” — then spirals into ever-darker regions, as she warns him about what his father will do when he discovers “a dirty fingernail squirming in the ketchup that he’s going to use on his hamburger.”
She goes on:
He’ll yank it out so hard
that for the rest of your life you won’t
be able to wear a ring on that finger.
And if you ever get a girlfriend, and
you hold hands, she’s bound to ask you
why one of your fingers is deformed
and you’ll be obligated to tell her how
you didn’t listen to your mother.
“My poems are about my parents trying to protect me from the future,” Mr. Sirowitz once said in an interview with the Schuylkill Valley Journal in Philadelphia. “But with not the best results.”
His poems were translated into several languages, and he gained particular attention in Norway, where a group of budding filmmakers made a short animated film based on one of his works.
Encouraged by his parents in his academic pursuits, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from New York University in 1972. Although he was accepted into doctoral programs at Columbia University, Brown University and other top institutions, he chose a career in the public school system.
He did not start writing poetry until he was 30, following the advice of others: Write what you know.
“I became a performance poet even though I was a stutterer and had other speech issues that I had to overcome,” Mr. Sirowitz told the Schuylkill Valley Journal “I use silence — those pauses — as an advantage. I draw out the humor in my poems.”
He never worried that his focus on his family’s quirks was too narrow. In interviews, he would cite James Joyce, who famously opined, “In the particular is contained the universal.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Sirowitz is survived by his sister Lauren Saltzman.
While no one was off limits to his wry introspection — including his father, psychotherapists and old girlfriends — his mother was the subject to which he kept returning.
She never knew. She died in 1992 — before he shared his poems with the world.
Audio Credits: “Chopped-Off Arm” and “So-So Relationship,” from “Poet to Poet (With Robert Dunn)”; “A Dog’s Heart,” “Deformed Finger,” and “Emergency Situation,” via Hello Recording Club.
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