MCC Host to Seasoned Poet
Corina Lombardi - Editor-in-chief
Issue date: 4/29/09 Section: Administration and Faculty
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With MCC celebrating its annual Liberal Arts festival, poetry is on the forefront of Zimmerman's mind. He grew up in Buffalo, New York on the former Buffalo Creek Reservation. It is Tim Russert country, what the Mormons call the City of Bountiful, said Zimmerman. It remained bountiful until the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 and destroyed much of Buffalo's economy. Currently he resides in Somerset (Franklin Township), which is one of the top ten places to live in America.
Zimmerman attended a grammar school built on the site of a Seneca Indian meeting house and South Park high school. He then attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English, a master's degree in humanities and a doctor of philosophy degree in English. Zimmerman did his dissertation on the visionary poetics of William Blake and John Milton.
"I started writing poetry in high school as an antidote to the mostly deadly stuff well-meaning teachers forced us to read. Eloquence of all kinds has always perked my ear," said Zimmerman, "I loved to learn new words, to compete in spelling bees, to do crosswords, memorize poems and, eventually, respond to them with poems of my own."
Writing means permanence, despite present obscurity. It may prove a key for an undiscovered lock, an egg tooth for an unhatched eagle or a whisper restoring hearing to a long deaf ear, said Zimmerman.
"I try to write whenever I don't know which category the poem I begin will represent. If I can't surprise myself, I don't expect to interest others in ways I would want to interest them," said Zimmerman.
Zimmerman has published 12 books: "Mandala" (1964); "Déjà vu" (1967); "Royal Jelly" (1974); "Perspective" (1974); "See All The People" (1976); "At That" (1978); "Tattoos for Proteus" (1994); "Indian Rope Trick" (1994); 3 Poems (1994); "Blue Horitals" (1997); "Isotopes" (2001); and "Post-Avant" (2002), which won the Editor's Choice, 2000 Transcontinental Poetry Award. Along with these books, Zimmerman has published several poems, essays and writings on the Web.
Until he entered college, Zimmerman planned to become a psychiatrist, but the rapidly intuiting madness of that quest made him determined to become a poet and a teacher more than ever. After four years as a teaching assistant in graduate school he found himself overqualified for any of the jobs that were available at a time. About 13.5 percent of Buffalo was unemployed at the time, said Zimmerman.
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