Poet, Kabbalist, Mystic, Lionel Ziprin and photographer, folk historian, Clayton Paterson, Small Press Book fair, New York City, snapped by Allen, December 2, 1990. We’ve made several posts about Lionel this week on our website allenginsberg.org Shimmy on over if you want more on this completely fascinating character. But in brief: Poet, artist, Kabbalist, descendent of mystics and, some say, mystic himself, Lionel Ziprin has spent a lifetime in the artistic ferment and social upheavals of the Lower East Side. His life straddles the LES of Henry Roth (Call It Sleep) and Michael Gold (Jews Without Money), as well as the East Village of Thelonious Monk and Allen Ginsberg. Ziprin penned comic books after the war, lectured on the Zohar in the sixties to Bruce Connor and Ira Cohen, composed a thousand-page epic poem entitled Sentencial Metaphrastic, (‘I reduced it to 785 pages. I call it the longest and most boring poem since Milton’s Paradise Lost’). He nurtured the work of his friend Harry Smith, who recorded the liturgical music of Ziprin’s grandfather, the eminent Orthodox rabbi and Kabbala scholar Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, at his yeshiva, the legendary Home of the Sages of Israel, on the Lower East Side, in the early fifties. - David Katz / Jewish Quarterly 2006.. #lionelziprin #claytonpaterson #harrysmith #theloniousmonk #lowereastside #LES #bruceconnor #allenginsberg #newyorkcity #kabbalist #mystics #henryroth #iracohen #zohar (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGVoZO3BaUp/?igshid=1s1850386pk14
