MICHAEL
HELLER Engages
Gathering Sparks by Paul Pines
(Marsh
Hawk Press, New York, 2017)
INTRO FOR PAUL PINES’S GATHERING
SPARKS
(First presented as an Introduction at the Marsh Hawk Press
Book Launch, New York City, 2018)
Our
very dear friend, Paul Pines can’t be with us tonight, so we must be with him
in spirit and well-wishes. I’ve known
Paul since his days running the legendary Tin Palace, that amazing, exciting
creation of his where jazz musicians, artists, poets, writers, assorted
gadflies and intellectuals gathered to talk, drink and perform. So powerful and warming was the atmosphere,
that you could sit there among those throngs almost believing that the roof of Heaven
was the bar’s tin ceilings Paul had preserved.
Paul, as we know, is polymathic, poly-skilled, poly-everything: he’s
written novels such as The Tin Angel
and Redemption, memoirs such as the
deeply felt My Brother’s Madness, and
among his latest creations, uncategorizable works infused with essayistic
forays into life, poetry, psychology, religion and tradition such as his recent
Trolling With The Fisher King. Among these works, taking place beside and
alongside him, are many collaborations with musicians and composers and, as we
celebrate tonight, his many books of
poetry, including his latest, Gathering
Sparks—is it his thirteenth or fourteenth volume of poems?
As with all his works—sometimes
sharp to the point of poignancy in Gathering
Sparks—Paul’s poetry is a quest, spiritual, linguistic, psychological, a
constant effort of human repair and recovery.
His way, as he proclaims in Gathering
Sparks, is to find something which “allows him to feel/the world as
proximate/unbounded.” That unboundedness,
which one finds in the amplitude of Paul’s poetry, its range of reference,
its epical breadth of open sea, foreign
lands, international capitols, all coexisting with an equally powerful grainy
particularity of immediate presence and human contact, is, in my reading, also
an ethical quest for openness to experience and vulnerability. For him, he writes in Gathering Sparks:
perhaps the question becomes (deep breath) how
do we protect ourselves against the
struggle
to protect ourselves . . .
Throughout,
the bulwark of that struggle is Paul’s subtle humor and irony:
I
quote:
On
the terrace at Sutton’s
rabbi
Michael
who taught us
to calculate the real
age
of the Patriarchs
dividing Biblical years
by. . . three!
interrupts
our breakfast
with
the latest insight
for
his book
on
Genesis
that Abraham
moves from geographical
into ontological
space
Paul’s
poetry seems like the perfect vehicle to move us into that ontological
space. Abraham, sacrifice, wanderings in
various, sometimes lush, deserts, these are threads in all of Paul’s work. They are the marks of a singular poetic
intelligence, one that seeks to simultaneously heal and delight. So yes, let’s have our breakfasts and the
rest of our days “interrupted” by Paul’s poetry. His poems remind us that, as in his most powerful insights, here speaking
to a loved one, it is we too:
who gather and dissolve
in this mid-summer night
like hermits calculating
discrepancies
in the hierarchy of means
and meaning
to find our place
with avatars
in exotic robes
and symbols of their craft
in the unspoken word
that seals our
embrace
*****
Michael
Heller has published over twenty-five volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and
fiction. His most recent books are Dianoia, a new collection of
poems and Dans le signe, translations of his poetry in French. A
collection of essays on his work, The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller:
Nomad Memory, was published in 2015.
