Kimmelman, Burt 1947–

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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, 1973); married Diane Maureen Ellis Simmons (a professor and novelist), December 28, 1989; children: Jane Zvi. Ethnicity: "White/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: Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—Maplewood, NJ. 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 English, 1988–.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Society for Textual Scholarship, Early Book Society, PEN American Center, Medieval Academy of America, New Jersey College English Association.

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

WRITINGS:

Musaics (poetry), 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.

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

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

First Life (poetry), Jensen/Daniels (Jersey City, NJ), 2000.

The Pond at Cape May Point (poetry), with paintings by Fred Caruso, Marsh Hawk Press (East Rockaway, NY), 2002.

(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 (East Rockaway, NY), 2005.

(Editor, with Temple Cone and Randall Huff) The Facts on File Companion to American Poetry, Facts on File (New York, NY), 2007.

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

Contributor to books, including The Second Word Thursdays Anthology, Bright Hill Press (Treadwell, NY), 1999; The Medieval Book and the Magic of Reading, edited by Albrecht Classen, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1999; Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1999; The Body of This Life: Essays on the Work of William Bronk, edited by David Clippinger, Talisman House (Jersey City, NJ), 2000; and The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970–2000, Talisman House (Jersey City, NJ), 2002. Contributor of poetry, articles, and reviews to periodicals, including Sagetrieb: Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition, Journal of the Early Book, Terra Nova: Nature and Culture, Sycamore: Journal of American Culture, Journal of Imagism, Mosaic: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Bridges: Interdisciplinary Journal of Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science, Shofar, and Arkansas Quarterly. Some early poems appear under the pseudonym L.V. Mack.

SIDELIGHTS: Burt Kimmelman once told CA: "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. These days 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."