In the late ’60s, while a dramatic cultural shift was taking place across the United States, New York City was the home of a thriving poetry scene. And perhaps no one remembers the era better than Nick Piombino, a poet, essayist, artist and psychotherapist who studied poetry with William S. Burroughs, Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer, performed with Patti Smith and was friends with Jackson Mac Low and Allen Ginsberg, with whom he spent an afternoon in jail as a result of a sit-in against the war in Vietnam. In the same year, 1967, he burned his draft card as a member of the Resistance group led by David Harris.
Born in New York City in 1942, Piombino studied English at the City College of New York before receiving a Masters degree in social work from Fordham University. In 1982, he completed his psychoanalytic training at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. Finding beauty in early works of psychoanalytic theory, Piombino incorporated aspects of psychoanalysis into his writing. Piombino’s first published poems appeared in 1965 in American Weave Literary Journal. Encouraged by Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer, Piombino gave his first poetry reading with Patti Smith at The Kitchen in 1973. He has had an ongoing private practice in psychoanalysis since 1985 at his office on West End Avenue.
