Message from the Memoirist Poems by Paul Pines

Paul Pines

Message from the Memoirist

Poems by Paul Pines

Art by Marc Shanker

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

editor@dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-939929-28-0

135 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Tick Tock Tick Tock. Hickory, Dickory, Dock…. The various concepts of scientific time tell us almost nothing with their deconstructing conundrums. Nursey Rhymes do conjure up a sense of play and curiosity but then abandon us to the immediate. Only when time intersects with the eternal or the pinned-down specific does meaning appear, gleaned from the residue of the fiery crossover or the accelerated collision. Paul Pines, in his wonderfully illustrated poetry collection entitled Message From the Memoirist, uncovers precious pieces of memory from the dreamscape of mind and transmutes these quark-like particles into summonses that evoke the true nature of fundamental things. The spectacle or rather spectral results can be unsettling. Or exhilarating. Even funny.

In tracing his expansive memories back to the “time before thought” Pines, presumably dressed in a cowl and carrying a torch, leads us through a primordial darkness. Shades appear and vanish from our reach. A cock crows and dawn’s light drenches with creation all who have passed over the River Lethe again.

Early in the collection, in his piece entitled Toward the Creation of a Perfect Science, Pines considers the importance of memory to the present, as well as the positive attributes and the capacity for natural healing that society also assigns to forgetfulness. The poet puts it this way,

One forgets and then

When one remembers

It seems so important

Not to forget again

I want to say that

Forgetting is a merciful act

But when what is called

Feels essential to being

Who one is in the present

I am not sure

We all live through what

we see and don’t see

When older people lose a lot of weight, one of two things could be happening. Pines dwells on the positive in his poetic meditation entitled Yesterday’s Conversation. As time speeds up and the present merges into memory and archetypal moments the poet’s response becomes more and more physical. I sympathize. We’ve done this before. We can beat this. Consider these lines,

              I see myself shrinking

              Not like an old man

but slipping back into the young one

who ran through Coles Woods

the day after his wedding

and think,

                  “You may be in denial,

                  but look at you go!”

I will once again lift weights

put on a glove to field grounders

observe overweight guys

on the basketball court at the Y

and scream,

                  “I can run rings around these suckers!

In the end

I want to laugh all the way

to where ever it is

we’re going    

A Message from the Memoirist, Pines’ title poem, begins as a narrative with the poet’s persona reviewing the efficaciousness of a soon-to-be-given lecture on memoir writing in the early morning hours. Evolving into natural imagery until a central, a core template seems to emerge.  The piece introduces a subconscious nesting of fractals. Here is the conclusion that doubles as a beginning,

                        … what’s re/membered

                        is made whole

patterns from which

all patterns

are born

                        the field

                        in which we

                        are embedded

                        embedded

                        in us

the Genius

who begins to whisper in our ear as soon as our lips

touch Lethe

                        and we drop

                        screaming

                        into the

                        world

If we are not looking in the right direction our creative function from the “fields before thought” might enter our souls in such a way that the end result resembles possession, demonic or otherwise. One recognizes this possession immediately because of its referential patterns. The patterns complement what we already know. In his poem entitled The Field Theory According to Mel Blank Pines alerts us to the deep comedy hidden our origins. He uses Mel Blank, the legendary voice of cartoon characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig.  The poet spins possession into a telling vignette at the end of the piece’s first section. Mel Blank’s son recalls,

a moment after

an auto accident

and two weeks

in a hospital bed

he remained

unresponsive

until a neurologist

asked him, How

you feeling Bugs?

and Mel answered

 What’s up Doc?

Ties between the world of forms and human kind are many. Symbolism plays its part. Pathos too. Toward the end of the book Pines places a prose poem entitled Remembering the Memoirist. He raises a lantern on the psychology of time and emotions embedded in that concept. The poet relates a narrative fragment that illuminates the beginnings of a creative life,

…Fifty years ago,

grieving my father’s death, I listened for messages to quiet

the explosive anger and desperation of a boy who found

himself homeless. In a tenement on 9^th St. & Ave. B on a

winter’s day sans heat or hot water, maybe a few chicken-

hearts in the fridge, I sat with a Ouija board on my knees.

The furnace in the tenement basement, like the one in my

heart, no longer burned. The hood of my sweatshirt cover-

ing my head, I cried out to whatever voice might rise from

the cave within. Scared of what the future held, I framed

the question: What will become of me?

Many years ago Wolfgang Pauli, the famous physicist and pioneer of Quantum Theory had a vision of The World Clock, a contraption of wheels and pendulums supported by a large black bird and emitting pulses. The experience gave Pauli a deeper understanding of his scientific work and a psychological feeling of well-being. 

Pines references this World Clock in his poetics and Marc Shanker interprets it in his accompanying illustrations. As the reader pages through Pines’ provocative collection, led by his young persona in a hooded sweatshirt (no cowl this time) illuminating the awful truth, it strikes one that these pieces and their intersecting memories make up a clock not unlike Pauli’s. Pines’ poem Epitaph for Icarus III has this passage,

a dust mote

his presence

fills the space

between

sleeping

and waking

spirals

through Time-

out-of-mind

to land softly

re/minds me

to listen for

what follows

Remember to take the time (steal it if necessary), let this book unfold, and soak in the compelling and quantum landscapes of master poet Paul Pines.