Marsh Hawk Press Blog

"Poets cannot really 'leave things unspoken,' but they can learn what will suffice. Like Morandi, Kimmelman lays out the terms of his work with a deliberate bareness, trusting to a power of suggestion (not produced by symbolism, but more simply, by syntax measured against syllable count) that will sustain and complete the poem. The phrase 'a made world' takes us back to William Bronk, perhaps the greatest of Kimmelman’s immediate precursors. For Bronk, as for Morandi, and as for Kimmelman, the work of art is always 'a made world,' a binding of desire and a stubborn, necessary turning of the artist’s materials back upon themselves to achieve an otherwise impossible sufficiency. It is the artist’s way of testing reality, of seeing what is and what is to come."

In 1970, Brooklyn native, ex-merchant seaman and Vietnam War veteran Paul Pines opened a small jazz club called the Tin Palace in Manhattan in 1970. The bar soon became a popular watering hole for artists, writers and musicians, a popularity that continued for the remainder of the decade. Kurt Vonnegut and Martin Scorsese drank there, and many notable jazz performers from the period graced its stage.

The poems in Last Call at the Tin Palace, Pines’ seventh collection of poems, evince an improvisational spirit similar to the jazz performers and artists who frequented the Tin Palace (Charles Mingus and Larry Rivers among them). The collection’s title poem is the central poem and in its opening lines Pines provides his reader with an inspirationally defiant declaration: “Granada falling / at my feet / a Mayan princeling / in the service of his conquerors / or the buried time / between time / before I was young / when I saw / my life to come / what it held in store / and decided I would live.”

Pines’ poems accrue details slowly, at times almost imperceptibly. Yet this casual accumulation of dazzling edges most often combines into radiant diamonds of image, music and tone: “My Egyptian sister, / / as the sun rises on azaleas / I pray the seas part for you gently / / before they close again / in that swift abolishing wave” (“Egyptian Sister”); “the earth / as a floating / eyeball / / a quicksilver tear / in its atmospheric gaze” (“Implicate Order”). “Madman Cocaine,” Pines intones in the poem “Meditation,” “stitch up my mind / with the tears / in things that never speak / / make my heart / a place / where all my friends / with swollen feet are dancing / without shoes / / Tathagata / / when I find my grief / let it burn like fire / inside crystal / / when I find my tongue/ let it swim like a fish / through downy hairs at the nape of her neck.” (Tathāgata is the name Buddha used when referring to himself.)