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.
Author Hometown: GLENS FALLS, NY USA
About the author: Paul Pines grew up in Brooklyn around the corner from Ebbet's Field and passed the early 60s on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a Merchant Seaman, spending 65-66 in Vietnam, after which he drove a taxi and tended bar until he opened his jazz club The Tin Palace in 1973, the setting for his novel The Tin Angel (Morrow, 1983). Redemption (Editions du Rocher, 1997), a second novel, is set against the genocide of Guatemalan Mayans. His memoir, My Brother's Madness, (Curbstone Press, 2007) explores the unfolding of intertwined lives and the nature of delusion. Pines has published eight books of poetry: Onion, Hotel Madden Poems, Pines Songs, ADRIFT ON BLINDING LIGHT, TAXIDANCING, LAST CALL AT THE TIN PALACE and REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR. Poems set to music by composer Daniel Asia appear on the Summit label. As a translator he has contributed to Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton (Curbstone Books, 1996); Pyramids of Glass: Short Fiction from Modern Mexico (Corona Publishing, 1995) and Nicanor Parra's Antipoems: New and Selected (New Directions, 1986). He is the editor of Dark Times/Full of Light, the Juan Gelman tribute issue of The Café Review (Summer, 2009). Pines lives in Glens Falls, New York, where he practices as a psychotherapist and hosts the Lake George Jazz Weekend.
Reviews:
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2009winter/pines.shtml
