Biography
PAUL PINES grew up in Brooklyn around the corner from Ebbet's Field and passed the early 60's on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a merchant seaman, spending 65-66 in Vietnam, after which he supported himself driving a taxi and tending bar until he opened his own jazz club, The Tin Palace in 1970 on the corner of 2nd Street and Bowery. A cultural watering hole for the better part of the 70's, it hosted figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Martin Scorsese, Charles Mingus, Eddie Jefferson, Joan Mitchell (the painter) and Larry Rivers. It also provided the setting for his first novel, The Tin Angel (Wm Morrow, 1983). During this period Pines lived and traveled in Central America where he became aware of the genocidal policy targeting the Guatemalan Mayans--the basis for his second novel, Redemption (Editions Rocher, 1997). His forthcoming memoir, My Brother's Madness, (Curbstone Press, 10/07) is based on his relationship to his brother who had a psychotic break in his late 40's and explores the unfolding of two intertwined lives and the nature of delusion. He has recently completed a libretto based on his novel The Tin Angel, music to be composed by Daniel Asia, who is currently setting poems by Pines in a symphony commissioned by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra scheduled to premier in 2008.
Pines has published six books of poetry: Onion, Hotel Madden Poems, Pines Songs, Breath, Adrift On Blinding Light and most recently, Taxidancing. Selections from the last two have been set to music by composer Daniel Asia and appear on his two CD's, Songs From The Page of Swords and Breath In A Ram's Horn, on the Summit Label. His poems have appeared in New Directions #37, First Intensity, Cafe Review, Pequod, Ironwood, IKON, Prarie Schooner, Mulch, Contact II. Tmafyhr Mountain Poetry, an online poetry site, has published four books of poems, Songs From The Page of Swords, New Orleans Variations, Voyage and Taxidancing. These can be accessed at: paulpines.com. Pines presently lives in Glens Falls, NY, with his wife, Carol and daughter, Charlotte, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at Adirondack Community College, practices as a psychotherapist at Glens Falls Hospital, and hosts the annual Lake George Jazz Weekend.
Previous books have won high praise from both critics and readers. The Washington Post called his novel, The Tin Angel, “Superb,” and Lawrence Joseph in The American Book Review pronounced his Hotel Madden Poems “brilliant and compelling...” The MultiCultural Review said of Adrift on Blinding Light: “This wonderfully unpredictable, intuitive book navigates the conscious and subconscious worlds with the fluid, imaginative, and fascinating energy--as poetry should do.”
