Titled “Gathering Sparks”, Paul Pines’s latest collection of poetry convinces me that he is one of the U.S.’s finest poets. Since most of you are aware that I shy away from reviewer hyperbole, my recommendation is one that you can bank on. Now in his mid-70s, Paul is arguably the last poet working in the grand tradition of the new American poetry that emerged in the late 1940s and that is sometimes referred to as the product of the beat generation. But the poetry renaissance that was taking place in New York and San Francisco, as well as at places like Black Mountain College, had deep roots in the American cultural traditions going back to Walt Whitman. This was a literature that was deeply spiritual without being religious in the conventional sense and that was a cry in the wilderness against Mammon. In many ways, the changes that have transformed this country as the benign result of the Cold War winding down are as much cultural as political. People like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (still alive and kicking), Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg were its prophets. When Percy Shelley, a political as well as a cultural radical, wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, he had such people in mind. In this review, I hope to acknowledge Paul Pines as the latest such legislator.

Although a poem might consist of about as many words as you will find in the page of a novel, its value is not based on quantity alone. There are poems that you will read a thousand times and that will keep coming back to because they are like epiphanies. You know how a novel ends but there is no ending to a poem. Reading a great poem is like looking at a Van Gogh painting. You will never get enough of it.

“Civilization” is one of those poems. I have read it 5 times already and will likely return to it another 50 times before the year is up:

Civilization

The naked mole-rats
at the Philadelphia zoo
run blindly through their tunnels
with no imperial ambition to dominate any other colony
of their hairless kind
though they have a queen and are very ugly
they delight in feats of engineering
and their underground design

Not long ago, I told my wife that although old age has its drawbacks, particularly dealing with the typical medical complications of aging such as glaucoma, there is one asset that makes it all worthwhile. A lifetime of political experience and reading gives me a perspective that would have been impossible when I was an impetuous 25-year old. In tribal societies, the village elder had the respect of everyone. He or she had insights that were key to the survival of the community. I doubt that anybody would consider me anything except an old fool but I am sure that some young radicals will give me credit for saving them the trouble I went through when I was young and foolish myself.

What about poets? Paul Pines’s poetry is suffused with a lifetime of experience that never would have been known to someone who learned their craft at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He grew up in Brooklyn near Ebbet’s Field and passed the early 1960s on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a Merchant Seaman, spending August 1965 to February 1966 in Vietnam.  In 1973, he opened the Tin Palace, a jazz club on the corner of 2nd Street and Bowery-which provided the setting for his novel, The Tin Angel.

Every single word of a Paul Pines poem has the authenticity of having been written by someone who has lived life to the fullest. Forsaking the false complexity of most academic poets, Paul’s language is conversational—like listening to an old friend. A poem on the “Death of Carlos Castaneda” begins:

Seated at the window of the Kiev
surrounded by NYU film students
post-modern kids with ontological tattoos
rite-of-passage piercings

I spot ghosts on 2nd Avenue
Adam Purple who peddled through the 60’s
still on his bicycle (no longer in purple)
a new girlfriend in the wake
of his white beard

Like the other unacknowledged legislators, Paul’s antennae are finely attuned to the madness of our epoch. Drawing upon erudition gained from a lifetime of reading religious and philosophical classics, he takes on a prophetic tone writing about the terrible waste of life and treasure in the Middle East in the opening stanzas of a poem titled “Redness Remembered”:

Cardinals in the back yard
bring their redness to bare limbs
in a time of war when we are bombing Ur
from which Abraham
rose with his household gods
and left the flaming ziggurats
temple whores
that terrible lust
for death and renewal
their redness
after a long winter in the north
we can hear their song
before sunrise
whistling fills our ears
while elsewhere
missiles explode over the Tigris

Much of “Gathering Sparks” has an autumnal quality as questions of aging and mortality loom large. To some extent, this is to be expected from an author who is facing major health issues currently. But there is nothing morbid about these poems. They are a celebration of a life well spent and a testament to the nourishing spirit of the written word, both to those who hear them and those who write them.

My advice is to buy the collection from the publisher. If there’s anything that can be viewed as the total antithesis to Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, it is the world of small presses that make the invaluable work of a Paul Pines possible.

This is a belated review of books by two of my favorite poets, Paul Pines and Daniel Marlin. The fact that I have know them for fifty years does not in any way influence my high esteem for their work. Both are part of the living tradition of the poetry renaissance of the 1950s and early sixties, whose impact lasts with me all these decades. Although sometimes facilely described as the poetry of the “beat generation”, it was much deeper and much more universal. It incorporated spiritual and philosophical motifs going back thousands of years, if not to our earliest collective memories as members of our human tribe.

Paul’s “Reflections in a Smoking Mirror: poems of Mexico and Belize” is a powerful engagement with the culture of the indigenous peoples, the Aztecs in particular. Part one, titled “Configurations of Conquest”, is exactly what the title suggests: reflections on the Spanish colonization and genocide of the native peoples. In his own words:

Reflections in A Smoking Mirror is a crazy quilt of historical and personal material knit by themes unraveled over the last thirty years. I first went to Mexico in the 60s, before there was a paved road between Mexico City and Yucatan, and most of the archaeological sites referred to here were still covered by bush. I went again after returning from Vietnam when the remains of lost civilizations and the legacy of conquest drove me to search for what might be reflected in the Smoking Mirror, both as volcanic lake, and metaphor. During that time I’ve come to understand what I may have done beyond my intention, to let the ancestors speak in ways that have not always been apparent to me, except for the blood-smoke on these pages.

In 1959 Jack Kerouac wrote “Mexico City Blues”, an attempt to write poems in the same way a jazz musician improvises. Paul Pines’s poems bear up well in comparison to Kerouac’s, no surprise since he was deeply involved in the jazz scene in NYC in the 70s as owner of the Tin Palace, a groundbreaking venue for avant-garde musicians. Today he hosts the yearly Lake George jazz festival.

One of my favorite poems in the collection comes from part three, “The Belize News”. Titled “Rum Point Sutra”, it pays homage to the local scene and the late Paul Blackburn, one of the greatest poets of the 1950s renaissance. (My apologies to Paul for not getting the poem’s typography right since MS Word is hostile to those kinds of esthetic considerations, but the words should suffice.)

RUM POINT SUTRA

Another rainy day,
cobalt clouds along the peninsula
turn sand grey.
Bananas I bought
last week in Mango Creek
are turning too.
It will be
a challenge to eat them
before they go black.

Also I am out of propane
and must dispose of fruit
in the fridge
I brought back
from San Cristobal
two weeks ago.

No,
this is not a poem
about domesticity
unless that be the place
one contemplates

the implications
of what is
or will become
indigestible.

No!
this is
the song of an idiot
who can’t let go,
a lover with a stomach ache
waiting for a dial tone

No! no-
body on the other end
no reason to pretend the heart
is not a fruit
shriveled by
desire.

No!

this is about fire,
a Sutra
in which the senses
are sutured like old wounds.
No pain,
but a refrain
by Blackburn

(composed three months
before
he died)

contemplating his coffee cup, he wrote:

EMPTY AND ALIVE!

Reflections in a Smoking Mirror can be ordered from Dos Madres, the publisher.

Daniel Marlin is a Yiddishist, a socialist, an artist and a poet. What more can you ask for, nu?

In the introduction to “Amagasaki Sketchbook”, Daniel states:

From 1999 through 2009,1 spent roughly half of each year, late December through late June, living in Amagasaki City, between Osaka and Kobe, Japan. This collection includes some of the art I made on walks past fields in Mukonoso, Sonoda and Itami, and along the banks of the Mukogawa and Mogawa rivers. I painted the colors of the darkening western sky at dusk, sketched as I rode trains and lingered at Hankyu Umeda station, and at intersections nearby, where I was fascinated by the relentless, fluid landscape of crowds.

As an outsider, I used writing and art as quiet portals of entry into Japanese life. These disciplines helped me to overcome isolation, as did the friends I made, Japanese language study, involvement in the local anti-war movement and in Amnesty International, and a walking temple pilgrimage on Shikoku Island.

Trees and clouds were indifferent to my artistic attention, but at close quarters in train cars, I needed to be discreet, and thus discovered a method which permitted me to observe other passengers indirectly, without being noticed. Sitting at the end of the car, my pad and pencil hidden behind the backpack placed on my lap, I learned to sketch my fellow passengers’ reflected images in the glass of the adjoining door or opposite window. Or, I simply peered into the next car, whose riders never looked my way.

A drawing of weary Japanese train passengers, filled with the humanity that pervades all of Dan’s work:

Despite Dan’s claim that trees and clouds were indifferent to his artistic attention, I suspect that their souls were more than pleased with his beautiful watercolor renditions.

And finally, here is one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Crow Log”, a most enchanting homage to one of nature’s least enchanting creatures:

CROW LOG

In the neat rows of a field of spinach and green onions, shiny silver DVDs and hand mirrors hang from stakes, their glare intended to repel foraging birds. Nearby, two rubber facsimiles of crows have been tied by their feet, limp heads inches above the soil. The message,”Woe to ye who trespass here!”

Working its way down an unplanted furrow nearby, a large crow takes awkward, plodding steps in soft dirt, stopping occasionally to inspect debris and peck a stray seed, then passes under its own lynched image without a glance or tremor.

With three barks,
barrel-deep like a seal’s,
crow lands
at the temple gate

Crow glides from an old tree, bearing a persimmon in its beak, lands on a dark, tin roof. Cocking its head with what seems both pride and confusion, it lays the bright orange fruit down, and begins poking it—as if expecting it to flee, or fight back.

Perched on the aluminum rail of the apartment house parking lot, crow is engaged in conversation, a low-key, hollow, two-note call. When I approach, it’s tone changes suddenly, to a single sharp “Crahh!”

Is it a look-out while its partner
nearby breaks into someone’s minivan?

Inquiries on purchasing “Amagasaki Sketchbook” should be directed to Daniel Marlin.

Other posts about the works of Paul Pines are at https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/last-call-at-the-tin-palace/ and https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/my-brothers-madness/.

And Daniel Marlin: https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/isaiah-at-the-wall/ and https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/heart-of-ardor/

In the course of looking up long-lost friends on Google a few years ago, I discovered that one of my closest from Bard College had developed schizophrenia. An article that originally appeared in the upstate New York Glens Falls Post-Star took my breath away:

Claude Pines spent his days in the mental hospital smoking cigarettes and staring at a clock, thinking about how life would be different when he got out.

How had he fallen this far?

He was a smart guy. He went to Columbia University. He had been a medical student at Einstein College of Medicine and even did a term in psychiatry. Now, he was one of them.

He had fallen into a different class of people. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression. The symptoms of his disorder could be treated with medication and therapy. The stigma of having such an illness, however, would not be as easy to get away from.

As much as I would have liked to contact Claude and be a friend to him once again, I simply lacked the will to follow through. Since my own brother had killed himself after a brief struggle with schizophrenia, the disease remained a source of some personal anguish. About a year ago, I discovered that Claude had died of leukemia at the age of 63. Compounding the original shock of learning about his battle with mental illness, the news of his passing left me at a loss for words. After a day or so I wrote a tribute to him on my blog.

Soon afterwards his brother Paul left a comment there:

Touching piece, Louis. Your observations are deceptively political in the fundamental meaning of that word as Aristotle meant it when he called man a “political animal.” By which I understand an animal connected to others of his kind by common interests and experiences that sometimes rises to the level of sympathy, the ability to feel with another. Your reflections on what mental illness can do, and does to many who a moment ago felt they had a unique destiny is in this sense profoundly political. In Claude’s case, his suffering was punctuated by laughter, and the wisdom that blossomed from his struggle with a mind that he found he could not trust. He learned, instead, to trust his heart.

Claude’s illness was a deep mystery to me. In the three or so years we were friends, I could not think of anybody saner, especially at a place like Bard College where emotional torment was the norm. Claude always seemed to know what he was about and never suffered the kinds of depression that afflicted the average student, at least on an outward basis. Apparently, the disease was always there but I could not recognize it.

When Paul wrote that note on my blog, he was in the final stages of a memoir about his brother and himself. Titled “My Brother’s Madness,” it recounts his dysfunctional family background and his struggle to provide emotional and material support to his younger brother. Despite the enormous frustrations he had to put up with in looking after Claude, Paul does everything possible to be a loving and dedicated brother. If this story was simply told as a straightforward narrative, it would be compelling enough on its own terms.

But as a highly respected novelist and poet, Paul elevates the memoir into the ranks of fine literature. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, it is marked by the author’s courageous effort to be honest with himself and the reader. Most of all, it is carried along by his unique voice, a mixture of Jewish hipster and spiritual voyager.

Growing up a few blocks from Ebbets Field, Paul Pines was a true child of the 1950s, which was much more about looking tough than sensitive. This was especially true when you had to fend off rival gangs of Irish or Italian youths. As a perpetual truant and an unsuccessful car thief, Paul fit right into the neighborhood as this encounter with his high school principal would indicate:

We sit in straight back chairs. Bullethead [a nickname for the principal] tells us that he has been a cop and a trolley-car conductor and understands boys in motorcycle boots with ducks-ass hair welded in place by Dixie Peach. There are quite a few of us walking up Flatbush to Church Avenue every morning to the walled fortress spanning several blocks. Erasmus boils over with students in two overlapping sessions, out of which a small stream of elite students are siphoned off from the raging river of Irish Lords, Pig Town Tigers, Gremlins, and Chaplains into the top tier. I fall into the lower one, a Blackboard Jungle minus Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Three days a week I take in the triple-feature cowboy movies at the Majestic Theater on Fulton Street instead of going to school.

Paul thought of himself as a budding gangster, fed by fantasies inspired by the pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins. After his father sent him off to Cherry Lawn, a progressive private school in Connecticut, he still saw himself as a rebel without a cause, but one with roots in Lord Byron as well as the mean streets of Brooklyn. After reading Freud, he discovers that being able to use his mind fills him with elation. “I am a wet chick burst from its shell.”

After graduating from Cherry Lawn, he attended Boston University but spent more time hanging out at Harvard University, where the top minds of the 1950s where holding forth, including Eric Fromm. He began writing poetry and befriended a budding novelist named Russell Banks, who would go on to write “Continental Drift,” a powerful tale about the fateful encounter between an out-of-work boiler repairman from New England and a Haitian boat person.

As was the case for many young people in the late 1950s, the beat generation was a deep influence on Paul. After “devouring” Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind,” Paul dropped out of Boston University and headed off to San Francisco. Unfortunately, most of the famous poets he wanted to look up were no longer on the scene. He does drop off a collection of poems with Ferlinghetti at the famous City Lights bookstore, only to get the following feedback: “Keep writing. You have not found your voice.” One might hope that Paul would send off a copy of “My Brother’s Madness” to Ferlinghetti (still alive at 88), since he has clearly found his voice and then some.

Eventually Paul wound up at Bard College, which in 1961 was suspended between two bohemias in time. The beat generation was pretty much over, even though its writers were still making headlines. Most had been college students during WWII and the more successful had settled into writing careers. We also predated the 1960s counterculture, which would be fed by the Vietnam War radicalization and psychedelic drugs.

Paul’s brother Claude showed up at Bard the following year, a refugee from Antioch College, a place that he found pretentious. Claude was two years younger than Paul and much less prone to wanderlust. Not long after meeting him, we became the best of friends. Even though Claude was only 2 years my senior, he seemed much more mature and self-assured. I had skipped my senior year of high school and came to Bard in a state of adolescent turmoil. With his tweed jacket and pressed chinos, Claude came across as a psychiatrist in the making and always had patience for my Sturm und Drang. Indeed, he planned to go to medical school and become a shrink, inspired by a desire to help people as well as by ambitions to enjoy the good life. His father, who had died two years earlier, was a successful surgeon and Claude hoped to follow in his footsteps. After spending two years at Bard, Claude transferred to Columbia general studies since it had a better track record for placing graduates in medical school.

After I graduated Bard and moved to New York in 1965, my contacts with Claude fell off. I was preoccupied with staying out of the army and he was up to his eyeballs in school work. I later discovered from another Bard graduate that he had gone off to medical school in Belgium and had even learned French in order to keep up with classes. Soon afterwards, I got involved with Trotskyist politics and lost touch with everybody I knew at Bard, including Claude.

In late August 1987, Paul persuaded Claude to check himself into the psychiatric ward of New York Hospital in White Plains after a year of mounting crisis that had reached the breaking point. Claude could not hold down a steady lab technician job (the medical profession had proved too stressful) and was sure that people were watching him and saying disparaging things about him behind his back, the classic symptoms of paranoia. In a few brief sentences, Paul provides more insight into mental hospitals than a hundred pages of Foucault:

Dr. P apologizes for not being able to spend more time with me this afternoon, but will be sure to see me when I come again. Claude, he reflects, is a particularly interesting case, judging by what little information he has: “Not an acute psychosis but one resulting from prolonged morbidity, developing for a long time into a florid delusional system. He states this with the satisfaction of an angler who has just boated a prize marlin. We will discuss my brother’s situation next time, after he has observed Claude more closely. Dr. P. pumps my hand, then disappears.

I pace the dilapidated corridor, stopping to copy numbers from two public pay phones in the hall. Posted between them is a “Patient’s Bill of Rights,” and the number of a lawyer specializing in patient advocacy. Besides it, on the wall, are names and numbers scribbled by a dozen anonymous hands like the enigmatic graffiti of a lost civilization.

Eventually Claude wound up in Glens Fall, New York in the Adirondacks where Paul had become an adjunct professor at the local community college and married a local woman, an accomplished opera singer. They were raising a baby girl who was the apple of their eye. For most men in their fifties, this would represent a satisfying climax of a life filled with ups and downs.

But this idyllic scene was disrupted by Claude’s appearance. Claude lurched from one mental or physical crisis to another. Like many schizophrenics, he dosed himself with cigarettes and alcohol which at least had the merit of not inducing the shakes, as his prescribed anti-psychotic medications did. Despite his disability, Claude was in many ways as clear in his perceptions as he was when I knew him at Bard. After he takes a job checking groceries, he complains to Paul about the humiliation but is not sure what he can do: “I feel like a medieval philosopher defining God in the negative. I say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to bag groceries, mop floors, or be a janitor.’ I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I can do.”

Eventually Claude discovers that he can speak effectively to mental health professionals at conferences around the country. With his unique combination of medical school training and mental illness, he becomes an advocate for more sensitive treatment, especially on using psychotropic drugs. Despite their often terrible side-effects, they at least would deliver him and fellow sufferers from the perpetual fear that torments them. At the end of one lecture, Claude recalls a David Frost interview with futurist Isaac Asimov: “Frost asked what he thought would be the greatest breakthrough of the coming century. Asimov answered: understanding of the human brain. Strides over the next fifty years will make the answers of today seem primitive.” Paul writes that “the intensity and duration of the applause” for his brother blows him away

As grim as all this sounds, I can report that “My Brother’s Illness” is also a triumph of the human spirit. Even if Claude Pines had been a total stranger, I would have found this memoir gripping for in the final analysis his brother has turned their lives into literature as this finely honed excerpt would demonstrate. It is an account of a dinner with their mother, who–like Claude–was a source of pain and pleasure throughout their life:

Claude’s letter reminds me of a dinner I had with Charlotte at the Copley Plaza during my freshman year at Boston University. It was the only time she visited me there and it came at a point when I felt miserable in my situation. I spoke openly about my impatience with the academic drudgery and social isolation, and my plans to move to San Francisco to live among the Beats. When I finished, she gazed across the linen tablecloth and told me that she loved me. At first I thought this a touching affirmation. She went on from there to confess that it had taken every ounce of her will power not to actually seduce me.

My heart stuck in my throat. Confused by my own responses to my early images of her posing like Venus fresh from the bath, I felt a wave of guilt and desire. We finished the meal in silence. In front of the elevator, she held the back of my head tenderly. I kissed her cheek and left.

Claude’s letter brings the evening back. I replay the conversation at the Copley, then decide against writing Claude about it. It will only muddy the water. But as I consider Charlotte’s revelation, her words that evening are more redolent of the confessional than seduction; I hear in them the unaddressed longing I had glimpsed as a child under the piano when she played her violin. What could I say to make it clear to my brother what he has never seen for himself? The woman he had encountered at the hotel in Geneva and I at the Copley in Boston had surfaced briefly from a hidden depth. It had been Thai’s speaking.

Interview with Paul Pines on NPR’s Leonard Lopate show.

Order book here

Paul Pines website