The
question is: how to pull together a unified point of view
concerning the latest book of poetry by Paul Pines - a
volume that consists of two sections of distinctly different
tone and focus- and, at the same time, to pay due attention
to the relationship between individual fragments and the
whole?
Perhaps the answer is in a short passage by the author
in his poem "The Whirlwind: After Sonny Rollins."
In the poem, Pines defines the verb “to render,//that
is, to interpret/and tear apart//simultaneously.”
It is this oppositional strategy, as applied by the
author, that binds two disparate sections of Taxidancing:
Poems - Paul Pines’s sixth book of poetry.
In “After Hours,” the first section of
"Taxidancing: Poems the author reflects on the
“taxidancing” period of his life when he
lived on the Lower East Side of New York City, supporting
himself as a taxi driver, bar keeper, and jazz club
owner (and about which he has written a well-received
novel, The Tin Angel).
The poems in this section have a visually jumpy appearance
on the page, their rhythms are hopped up, and the vignettes
they describe are full of the names of poets, jazzmen,
acquaintances, neighborhood joints and local color.
They succeed in evoking the New York scene of the 1970s
without sentimentality, but with a familiarity that
embraces the reader.
“Adios Pablo,” for instance, begins: “Once
he told me//I’m trying to enter/my 44th year/with
a little dignity//tipping his Stetson/with his thumb/and
sat//(you know/the way he used/to…)” Pines
tells his stories a la Frank O’Hara, straight
and spare. His attitude is amused and amusing, detached
and, at the same time, tender with human compassion.
By contrast, the second section of Taxidancing, called
"Bits And Pieces," seems at first discontinuous
with the first. “Bits and Pieces” delves
into fragments of religious, artistic, and political
philosophy, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Native American,
animistic, and particularly Buddhist, where Pines seems
most comfortably to find a home.
His spiritual exploration leads him to the eventual
conclusion that everything includes everything else,
any one passion or desire opens into all aliveness (“every
passion/leads us/from a known thing/back/into a deep/unknown”),
and all fragments imply a whole, “(even in the
uncertainty/that moves us forward/into uncertainty).”
The collage artwork of his second-time collaborator
Wayne Atherton (a visual artist and senior editor of
The Café Review) reflect the complex unity of
the book. Wayne Atherton’s collages for Taxidancing
complement the poems in a contrapuntal rhythm; one of
them is even called “Juxtaposition.”
The charming cover collage of yellow cabs, Pines’s
expired taxi driver’s license (stepped on by a
man’s foot), black and white background photos
of a period car and what looks like a New York streetscape
is the only one that directly refers to the poet or
the overt subjects of the poems.
Otherwise the collages are more or less wry psychological
commentaries, enjoying common elements like black and
white images, film strips, bands of plastic mesh, hands,
figures, masks, bits of fabric and shards of landscape
that seem to become increasingly disturbing as the book
progresses.
The first collage, an amusing image of the Mona Lisa,
follows the poem “After Hours,” which begins
“I love/to be dissolute with you”. The final
image, called “Baggage,” includes a packaged
condom being sealed by a hand, a drug foil, a child
with a fractured mask sitting on the lap of a grieving
mother, and another woman’s face obscured by a
cutout of male arms holding up a piece of satin in front
of her face. It follows a poem called “Anima,”
in which “no boundary exists/between mind and
space,” and is followed in turn by “Hoops,”
a poem about Black Elk’s vision of a “center/where
time and eternity/meet/and overflow”.
So it seems that while Atherton’s collages grow
more disruptive, Pines’s poems seem to move in
the opposite direction, towards resolution and serenity.
Pines writes, “[I] thought it was the details/I
wanted to preserve/mistook events/in themselves/as precious//when
it was really/what escaped/me/as I went.” (“Kicking
Up Dust”).
Recapturing the lost may once have seemed his primary
artistic mission -- perhaps still the mission of the
first half of Taxidancing -- but Pines’s ideas
seem to change as the book proceeds. Sorrow “is
also/the source of desire,” he says in the poem
“Homenaje al Neruda”. In accepting this
reality, Pines absorbs his, and humanity’s, unspecified
losses and grows into something greater. He grows “tired
of myself in time” (“Pin-headed Angel Dance”)
and moves towards eternity, from the madness of existential
struggle to the “darkness of a dream” in
which “each of us [is] a center.”
The last poem, “Way of the Warrior,” sums
up nicely the arc of Pines’s spiritual taxi ride.
It reads in its entirety:
I planted my madness
in the world
watched it grow
and fade
like a wildflower
on a hillside
Taxidancing: Poems was produced in cooperation with
Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, tmpoetry.com, 2005.
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