by Beverly Aarons

Piero Heliczer, Beat poet, experimental filmmaker, and publisher, was a central figure in the 1960s and ʼ70s underground art scene. He published dozens of poems, produced at least 24 films, and participated in Andy Warhol’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative. But in the early 1990s, while reading his poetry at a venue on the famous St. Marks Place, Piero was something much smaller and ordinary: a drunk, disheveled, absentee father under the critical gaze of his 19-year-old daughter, Thérèse Heliczer.