About the Book
Poetry. For most of the 1970s, Paul Pines owned and operated the Tin Palace, a jazz club that hosted figures like Kurt Vonnegut and Martin Scorsese, and gave expression to the most notable jazz innovators of that time. The club was honored by the Tribeca Center for the Performing Arts as a lost jazz shrine, and featured in Perfect Sound Forever as a venue that ... paved the way for today's ... live music scene. The poems in this book rise from the improvisational impulse that produced not only Eddie Jefferson and Charlie Mingus, but painters Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers, and many of the poets drawn to the corner of 2nd Street and Bowery. Like the music he championed, Pines takes on the personal and universal themes of love and loss, the ironies of shifting alliances and archetypal forces, destiny, and the gods who honor those they destroy, in Parker-like solos that leap into the moment to create an arc that moves with undiminished urgency.
About the Author :
Paul Pines grew up in Brooklyn around the corner from Ebbet's Field and passed the early sixties on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a merchant seaman, spending 1965-66 in Vietnam, after which he drove a taxi and tended bar until he opened The Tin Palace in 1970, on the corner of 2nd Street & Bowery, the setting for his novel, The Tin Angel (Wm Morrow, 1983/ Author's Guild, 2008). Redemption (Editions du Rocher, 1997), a second novel, is set against the genocide of Guatemalan Mayans. My Brother's Madness (Curbstone, 2007) a memoir that explores the unfolding of two intertwined lives and the nature of delusion has recently enjoyed wide critical acclaim. Pines has also published seven volumes of poetry: Onion (Mulch, 1971), Hotel Madden Poems (Contact II, 1991, Pushcart nominee), Pines Songs (Ikon, 1993, Pushcart nominee), Breath (Ikon, 1996), ADRIFT ON BLINDING LIGHT (IKON 2003), TAXIDANCING (Ikon, 2007) and LAST CALL AT THE TIN PALACE (Marsh Hawk, 2009). Selections of his poetry have been set by composer Daniel Asia on his two CDs, Songs from the Page of Swords and Breath in a Ram's Horn, appear on the Summit label. Asia is currently composing music for a libretto by Pines based on The Tin Angel. Among his work as a translator he has contributed to Small Hours of the Night, Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, (Curbstone, 1996); Pyramids of Glass, (Corona 95); Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: New and Selected, (New Directions,1986). He is the editor of Dark Times Full of Light, the Juan Gelman tribute issue of The Cafe Riview (Summer, 2009). High praise for his work includes: The Tin Angel, Superb (The Washington Post), This swift tale of murder and revenge rattled along stylishly and fulfills all our expectations for high-grade suspense (The New York Times Book Review); My Brother's Madness, great writing, no doubt about it (NPR commentator Andre Codrescu), It is ultimately a story of our own humanity (Kirkus Review); Hotel Madden Poems, brilliant and compelling (American Book Review); Breath, instantaneous travel along our internal galaxies (American Book Review); and, Adrift on Blinding Light [that] navigates the conscious and subconscious worlds with fluid, imaginative, and fascinating energy (Multicultural Review). Pines has conducted workshops for the National Writers Voice program and lectured for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ossabaw Foundation, and Virginia Center, as well as a recipient of an Artists' Fellowship, N.Y.S. Foundation for the Arts, 1984 and a CAPS Fellow, Poetry, 1976. He is a member of PEN, BMI, C.G. Jung Foundation, and The Author's Guild. Paul Pines lives in Glens Falls, New York, where he practices as a psychotherapist and hosts the Lake George Jazz Weekend.
