Trolling With The Fisher King

As a fisherman/seaman touched by war zones and wastelands in Viet Nam and the Bowery, a poet/therapist who has worked with his own wounds, and those of others, author Paul Pines believes that the Fisher King’s wounding can be understood as a function that speaks to our post-internet condition on the border of survival and extinction. Bio: PAUL PINES opened The Tin Palace, his Bowery jazz club, in the ’70s. It became the setting for his novel The Tin Angel (Morrow, 1983). A second novel, Redemption, (Editions du Rocher, 1997), explores the Guatemalan Mayan genocide of the ’80s. My Brother’s Madness, (Curbstone Press, 2007) probes the nature of delusion. He has published 13 collections of poetry, most recently Divine Madness (Marsh Hawk, 2012), Fishing On The Pole Star (Dos Madres, 2014) Message From The Memoirist (Dos Madres, 2015) and Charlotte Songs (Marsh Hawk, 2016). He is the editor of Juan Gelman’s selected poems Dark Times/ Filled with Light (Open Letters Press, 2012) and has contributed translations to Small Hours of the Night, Selected Poems of Roque Dalton; and Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: New and Selected. Composer Daniel Asia’s settings of Pines’ poems appear on Songs from the Page of Swords, Breath in a Ram’s Horn and, Purer Than Purest Pure (BBC Singers) on the Summit label. Asia’s 5th Symphony, recorded by the Pilsen SO, features poems by Pines and Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. The Tin Angel Opera, was performed by the Center for Contemporary Opera in NYC. Pines has conducted workshops for the National Writers Voice and lectured for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ossabaw Foundation, and Virginia Center, as well as a recipient of an Artists' Fellowship, N.Y.S. Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Glens Falls, New York, where he is a psychotherapist in private practice and hosts the Lake George Jazz Weekend. paulpines.com