Kimmelman, Burt 1947- (L.V. Mack)

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Kimmelman, Burt 1947- (L.V. Mack)

Personal

Born May 6, 1947, in Brooklyn, NY; son of David Brown (a physician) and Sylvia (a teacher) Kimmelman; married LaVonne Mack, June 6, 1970 (divorced, 1974); married Diane Maureen Ellis Simmons (a professor and novelist), December 28, 1989; children: Jane. Ethnicity: "Jewish." Education: State University of New York College at Cortland, B.A., 1983; Hunter College of the City University of New York, M.A., 1987; Graduate School of the City University of New York, Ph.D., 1991. Politics: "Independent."

Addresses

Office—Department of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, professor of humanities, 1988—. Poetry New York (journal), senior editor and publisher, 1988-2001.

Member

Modern Language Association of America, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Society for Textual Scholarship.

Awards, Honors

Mary Fay Poetry Award, 1982; fellow-in-residence, Cummington Community of the Arts, 1988; finalist, Rainer Maria Rilke National Poetry Competition, 1984.

Writings

Musaics (poems), Spuyten Duyvil Books (New York, NY), 1992.

The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1996.

(With others) Environmental Protection: Solving Environmental Problems from Social Science and Humanities Perspectives (textbook), Kendall/Hunt (Dubuque, IA), 1997.

The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, NJ), 1998.

First Life (poems), Jensen Daniels, 2000.

The Pond at Cape May Point, paintings by Fred Caruso, Marsh Hawk Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Author of foreword) Steven Carter, Bearing Across: Studies in Science and Literature, 2nd edition, International Scholasr Publications (Washington, DC), 2002.

(Author of introduction) Martha King, Imperfect Fit, Marsh Hawk Press (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor and contributor) The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, Facts on File (New York, NY), 2005.

Somehow (poetry), Marsh Hawk Press (New York, NY), 2005.

There Are Words (poetry), Dos Madres Press (Loveland, OH), 2007.

Contributor to books, including: Joseph Conte, editor, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 165: American Poets since World War II, Fourth Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996; Michael Heller, editor, Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation (Orono, ME), 1993; Albrecht Classen, editor, The Medieval Book and the Magic of Reading, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1999; Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, editors, Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1999; David Clippinger, editor, The Body of This Life: Essays on the Work of William Bronk, Talisman House (Jersey City, NJ), 2000; John M. Hill and Deborah Sinnreich-Levi, editors, Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony; Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000; The World in Time and Space: Toward a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000, Talisman House, 2002; and Chaucer Encyclopedia. Work represented in anthologies, including American Poetry Anthology, American Poetry Association (Santa Cruz, CA), 1987; and The Second Word Thursdays Anthology, Bright Hill Press (Treadwell, NY), 1999. Contributor of poems, articles, and reviews to periodicals, including Sagetrieb, Journal of the Early Book, Terra Nova, Sycamore, Mudfish, Trumpeter, Re Visions, Newark Review, Apostrophe, Pequod, Journal of Imagism, and Arkansas Quarterly. Some writings appear under pseudonym L.V. Mack.

Sidelights

The senior editor and publisher of the journal Poetry New York from 1988 to 2001, Burt Kimmelman is professor of humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark. In addition to his work as a poet, he is also the author of several scholarly and reference works, and edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry. Praising the anthology, which includes 500 entries covering the styles, schools, and other topics related to twentieth-century poetics, Booklist contributor Diana Kirby cited Kimmelmann's "eclectic approach" and recommended the work as a "valuable companion to standard reference sources."

Kimmelman once commented: "I write poetry out of a deep need. When I am writing I am communing with both my self and the world in a fundamental way unattainable otherwise. All writing is greatly pleasurable to me, but poetry most of all. My poetry has primarily been influenced by poets in the imagist/objectivist tradition. When I was younger I used to work a lot on paper with a pencil. Nowadays I wait until the poem is a kind of complete statement, then I begin to put words on paper. I work on paper for a number of drafts, after which I continue to work on the computer.

"Nowadays I am involved in writing syllabic poetry that concentrates on nouns and verbs and their interplay. The play of language per se is most important to me."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 2005, Diana Kirby, review of The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, p. 1700.

Choice, December, 1998, review of The "Winter Mind:" William Bronk and American Letters, p. 687; July-August, 2005, N. Knipe, review of The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, p. 1958.

Library Journal, March 1, 2005, review of The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, p. 114.

School Library Journal, Julie Web, review of The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, p. 76.