Furnace in the Shadows: Selected Poems

Attempting to write a reasonably short review of a book of poetry numbering 465 total printed pages is akin to condensing a grand forest of many types of trees into a single bonsai.  Paul Pines, who left us on June 27, 2018 at the age of 77 after a lengthy battle with lung cancer, could have been considered something of a renaissance man.  Though first and foremost a poet, he also wrote novels, memoir, and various essays.  He was a psychotherapist in private practice, owned and operated a legendary Lower East Side NYC jazz club in the early 1970s, and hosted the Lake George Jazz Festival since 1986.

A Furnace in the Shadows, divided into Books One through Four, is comprised of poem selections from eighteen books of poetry written between the years 1971 through 2017.  Accompanying the poems, and scattered throughout, are some 56 reproductions of various illustrative artworks.  The evolution of Pines’ development as a poet draws upon myriad influences, from Carl Jung to Charles Olson to Paul Blackburn to all of recorded World Mythology to quantum physics.  Poets Armand Schwerner, Ed Dorn, and Jack Spicer taught Pines about seriality, a form consistent with the idea of poetry as an ongoing conversation.  From poet Robert Kelly he learned deep image.  It should be noted that Pines gave special care and attention to stanza formation and line breaks, many of his poems weaving sinuously back and forth across and down the page.

From the poem “A Dream about My Father”: “I am a sluggard and a thief/I cannot love and cannot wait/I am Picus pasting indecipherable wisdom/in a public place/My head is a graveyard of forgotten names” and, from Hotel Madden Poems:“Mingus/at the Five Spot/playing for all/he can eat//Blackburn/by the coalstove/in McSorley’s/scoring pages with/his nerves…//there was/a time when poets/and jazzmen/built lines/like cities to live in.”

Paul Pines was clearly a deeply feeling and committed family man. From the poem “I Miss the Weeping”: “What is a memory/that anticipates/itself//a recollection/that becomes the ground/on which/the present/plays/but a breathless/middle aged man/chasing/his four year old/daughter//through/perforations/in the universe.”  Pines always wrote about what he knew: family, friends, a myriad of places as he traveled abroad extensively, baseball, jazz, and visual art.  He was simply an exemplary scholar with a vast capacity for memory retention, what I would call a “cerebral titan” but with a heart that certainly equaled his mind, as evidenced by his obvious love of humanity—however tragically flawed we may be—that can be found all through his amazing body of work.

Among the many accomplished and respected poets with whom Paul Pines was acquainted was Joel Oppenheimer.  In workshops, classes, and readings, Oppenheimer defined poems as “an answer to a question I didn’t know I asked myself.”  As if in reply to Oppenheimer, in the fourteen page poem, “The Serpent in the Bird,” from his book of poems Divine Madness:“thus the voices of the gods make us/ciphers for what cannot/be deciphered// who is to say why/we turn toward or away from what/we love most//as if in answer/to an unspoken/question.”

Full disclosure: this reviewer collaborated with Paul Pines, in the service of a collagist who contributed both cover and inside art, on six printed books during the twenty-plus years of our

friendship, a friendship mostly through written correspondence as he lived in upstate NY and I in Maine.  Over these same many years, Paul has been a frequent contributor and twice guest editor

of The Café Review. I like to tell the story of how I was in attendance at the 1994 Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival.  Allen Ginsberg was up on stage chanting a poem with a repetition of lines that these ears heard as, “Paul Pines!  Paul Pines!  Paul Pines!” In actuality, Ginsberg was chanting, “Tall Pines!  Tall Pines!  Tall Pines!”  In any event, I went on to research information about Paul Pines, made contact with him, and the rest is serendipitous history.

Wayne Atherton