Anytime you can get the when-Brooklyn-met-poets writers Paul Pines, Daniel Shapiro, Gary Racz and their devoted following in a bookstore, you know the event has all the earmarks of an electrifying reading.
And that it was at the indie bookstore, Book Culture, formerly known as Labyrinth Books, 536 West 112th Street on April 4 when the Dos Madres Press poets highlighted programmatic poetry’s resuscitated popularity across the city as the venue was deluged with culture vultures.
Mr. Pines celebrated the joys of community in his poem ‘Synchronicity’ where he returns to the United States after serving in Viet Nam. The country seems unrecognizable, probably because so many don’t reserve judgement about things they know nothing about and young lives continue to be used as fodder for the vaunted Military Industrial Complex.
And so, Mr. Pines travels to Mérida, Mexico where he is embraced by the local population. The fretting and worrying are gone, and in the broadest sense of community, Mr. Pines reminds us that strangers can point us toward joy: “I befriended local Mayans, and felt at home for the first time since leaving South East Asia. They reminded me of Vietnamese, the way women laughed as they plaited each other’s hair. We cooked fish over an open fire. I sank into a belonging I hadn’t felt before, or since. I learned that here, as in Nam, what I’d thought of as ‘plaiting’ was a search for fleas—in Yucatec Mayan, pech.”
The salient words of Mr. Pines, a Brooklyn native, identify the opportunity to grow in the grace of others as he sees the likeness in them to faces of the past disarming anger and judgement, making us whole again.
Daniel Shapiro, editor of the of the world-renowned Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, a publication devoted to Latin America’s literary lions, read ‘Parachute Jump,’ a parachute-shaped poem capturing the alluring beauty of his mother and the physical complexities of Coney Island (see graphic).
Long Island University (Brooklyn Center) professor Gary Racz read from his translations in Still Life with Flies of one of the world’s most distinctive lyricists, the late Eduardo Chirinos.
Mr. Pines capped off the night by paying tribute to Juan Gelman and reading some of his translations of Mr. Gelman’s works. Mr. Gelman (1930-2014), an Argentine poet who challenged military leaders during his country’s “dirty war” of repression, lost his son and daughter-in-law when they were murdered after being abducted by death squads.
Last month marked the 41st anniversary of a military coup that led to a dictatorship in Argentina, which disappeared 30,000 people and stole 500 infants between 1976 and 1983. According to Mr. Pines, Mr. Gelman successfully recovered his missing granddaughter in 2000.
