Harriet Zinnes

Harriet Zinnes (April 18, 1919 – November 30, 2019) was an American poet, fiction writer, translator, art critic, literary scholar and professor. She is associated with poets such as Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg, and the writer Anaïs Nin. her translations of Jacques Prévert, her art criticism, her marriage to a physicist, and her interest in painting and conceptual art.

Life and education

Zinnes was born Victoria Harriet Fich in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, to Assir N. Fich and Sara (Goldberg) Fich. Zinnes recounts growing up in Massachusetts, and then in New York City. As told to Contemporary Authors, Harriet lived “in Norwood, a small town, until the depression and until my restless father (a practicing pharmacist but a former singer at the Metropolitan Opera and a law student) thought New York City would provide more financial and professional possibilities. He was wrong. ... Tranquility to me after this move was rare. My classmates scoffed at my accent and my shy town ways.”

Her early traumas and responsibilities, as well as her father's unhappiness, became a central theme in Zinnes's early poetic writing. She associates this unorthodox childhood with her writing practice: “I withdrew,” Zinnes told Contemporary Authors. “I had been writing since I was six years old – everyone always called me a poet: teasingly, affectionately, and perhaps in that American way, a bit scoffingly at one who seemed not to be able to cope with the practical. Things were still difficult when I reached college age. In Massachusetts I would have gone to Latin High, and then to Radcliffe, perhaps. Instead, living in New York, I went to Washington Irving High School (then a fine academic school), and found my way as a writer. I became editor of the school paper – and wrote poem after poem.”

Zinnes taught at a variety of schools including Rutgers University, University of Geneva, and Queens College of the City University of New York. It was at Queens College where she would spend most of her career, teaching there between 1949 and 1953, returning in 1962, and eventually attaining the rank of full professor. Except for a brief stint as visiting professor in Geneva from 1969 to 1971,

Along with being a professor, Zinnes's career is also marked by her work as an editor. From 1942 to 1943 Zinnes worked as an editor of Raritan Arsenal Publications Division, and an associate editor at Harper's Bazaar Magazine from 1944 to 1946. Her writing, informed by many disparate traditions and styles, demonstrates the various currents and trends of the American literary tradition in the 20th century, from the “found poem” à la William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp, to the ekphrastic verse, to the “proprioceptive” “composition by field” championed by Charles Olson in his essay “Projective Verse”, to the more cerebral poetics trends of the 1960s.

Zinnes said that her major early influences were Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the French poets Stephane Mallarme, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, and Paul-Toissaint-Jules Valery, which can be seen in two of her early publications (An Eye For An Eye and I Wanted to See Something Flying).

Zinnes was also a member of the International Association of Art Critics and a formidable art critic herself. She used her critical visual acumen to inform both her poetry and her work as a literary scholar. In a compendium on the poet Ezra Pound's relationship to the arts (see her edited collection of Pound's art writing, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts), she writes that “Pound's art criticism … is … not just occasionally significant in itself but is also of special interest as the continuation by an American writer of a tradition [of poetry].”

In addition to her several books of poetry, Zinnes was published in numerous journals and periodicals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Manhattan Review, and NY Arts.

Critical reception

Burt Kimmelman, in his article "The Dead and the Living: Hugh Seidman's Late Poems", wrote: American Book Review noted: "Zinnes expects the reader to know modern art and much literature. She makes use of simple language ....Her wit demands a highly intellectual reader; memories do not degenerate into nostalgia but convert experience into sharply expressed realities the reader may share..."

Selected works Books An Eye for an I (Folder Editions, 1966) I Wanted to See Something Flying (Folder Editions, 1976) Entroprisms (Gallimaufry, 1978) Lover (Coffee House Press, 1988) Blood & Feathers (Schocken, 1988, Reprinted: Asphodel/Moyer Bell, 1993) My, Haven't the Flowers Been? (Magic Circle Press, 1995) The Radiant Absurdity of Desire (Avisson Press, 1998) Drawing on the Wall (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002) Whither Nonstopping (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005) Light Light or the Curvature of the Earth (Marsh Hawk Press, 2009) Weather Is Whether (Marsh Hawk Press, 2012) New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2014)

Chapbooks Waiting and Other Poems (Goosetree Press, 1964) Book of Ten (Bellevue Press, 1981) Book of Twenty (Ancient Mariners Press, 1992) Plunge (Wild Honey Press, 2001) Listening to The Rain (Wild Honey Press, 2002) I Am Not a River (Moyer Bell, 2006)

Anthologies, translations, and criticism Ravishing Disunities (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) Blood & Feathers (Schocken, 1988. Reprinted: Asphodel / Moyer Bell, 1993) Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (New Directions, 1980) Add I Shudder at Your Touch (Roc, 1991, reprinted 1992)