The Discovery of Paul Zimmer’s Great Importance 

Scott Silsbe

About fifteen years ago, I was an 18-year-old college freshman in an Intro to Literature class— crammed along with twenty or so others in a small, stuffy classroom in Kalamazoo, Michigan—and the world as I knew it was just about to change.  Like most other 18-year-olds, I didn’t know much about the world around me, but I knew that I wanted to try to become a musician or a poet.  I also knew that I wasn’t particularly good at either making music or writing poems.

One day the instructor of the Intro to Lit class brought a guest in, a local poet named John Rybicki, to read his poems to us and to talk with us about poetry.  To say that Rybicki was passionate about poetry does not quite capture things.  I can’t be sure that this really happened, but in my memory, I see Rybicki taking hold of a wall-mounted coat-rack, climbing the wall with his feet, and screaming “I want poems that do THIS!”  And I remember Rybicki talking about poems catching the page on fire, burning the fingers of the reader.  I was amused.  And then I was inspired.  I’d never heard people talk about poetry this way before.  I wanted to hear more. 

At the end of the class, Rybicki wrote his name and number on the chalkboard, saying he taught small poetry workshops out of his house.  With financial help from my folks, I enrolled the following fall in Rybicki’s workshop and I started what would turn into an apprenticeship of sorts.  One of the keys to becoming a great writer, according to Rybicki, was to, as he put it, “read ravenously.”  And at workshops, he would pass around stacks and stacks of photocopied hand-outs of work by what he called “the greats.”  Occasionally, “READ RAVENOUSLY” would be scrawled in the margins or across the back of the hand-outs.  And a number of times, John would give us a little aside or introduction to a piece as he passed it out.  One day, John gave us a poem called “Zimmer Drunk and Alone, Dreaming of Old Football Games” and he insisted on reading it aloud to us before we left workshop that night.  The poem by Paul Zimmer goes like this:

                        Zimmer Drunk and Alone, Dreaming of Old Football Games   

                        I threw the inside of my gizzard out, splashing
                        Down the steps of that dark football stadium
                        Where I had gone to celebrate the ancient games.
                        But I had been gut-blocked and cut down by
                        A two-ton guard in one quarter of my fifth.
                        Fireflies broke and smeared before my eyes,
                        And the half-moon spiraled on my corneas.
                        Between spasms the crickets beat halftime to
                        My tympanum, and stars twirled like fire batons
                        Inside the darkness.  The small roll at my gut’s end,
                        Rising like a cheer, curled up intestine to the stomach,
                        Quaking to my gullet, and out my tongue again.
                        Out came old victories, defeats and scoreless ties,
                        Out came all the quarters of my fifth, 
                        Until exhausted, my wind gone and my teeth sour,
                        I climbed the high fence out of that dark stadium,
                        Still smarting from the booing and hard scrimmage.
                        I zigzagged down the street, stiff-arming buildings,
                        And giving flashy hip fakes to the lamp posts.
                        I cut for home, a veteran broken field drunkard,
                        With my bottle tucked up high away from fumbles.

“Who is this Zimmer?”  Rybicki asked us, incredulous, after he finished reading the poem to us, “And he’s got a whole mess of these ‘Zimmer poems.’  He must be some kind of madman to write a poem that good.”

I’ve developed a somewhat nasty habit of harassing writers whose work I really like—I’ve written them letters, called into radio stations where they were DJ-ing, I’ve even knocked on one’s door without calling or writing first to say I was stopping by.  There must be a part of me that fears these writers don’t know how much they mean to some of us.  And by us, I’m thinking of me and my writerly friends, but I also mean all people who are fans of writers like Philip Levine, Ben Hamper, and Jack Gilbert.

Not that long ago, I was thinking about Paul Zimmer.  I was walking from the bookshop on Craig Street to The Cathedral of Learning and I was noticing as I walked how the names and dates carved in stone along the path seemed to be going backwards in time as I approached The Cathedral.  I started to imagine all of the people through the years who had walked this same path from Craig Street to The Cathedral.  I tried to think specifically of all of the individual people I could name who must have walked it at least once.  I started listing people…John Schulman, Ed Ochester, Gerald Stern, Phil Smith, Fred Hetzel…and yes, Paul Zimmer.

Zimmer spent about eleven years in Pittsburgh.  In addition to being a great poet, Zimmer was also a great editor of poetry and was General Editor of the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series from 1967 to 1978.  In those years he published (by my count) over 80 books of poems, a good number of which significantly influenced the literary landscape of American poetry.  A handful of titles: Wrecking Crew by Larry Levis, In the Dead of the Night by Norman Dubie, Groceries by Herbert Scott, and Windows & Stones by Tomas Tranströmer (trans. May Swenson).

I stopped just outside The Cathedral and started wondering, “Where is Zimmer these days?  Is he still writing poems?  Does he still know the names of the streets in Oakland?”  Technology being what it is, I didn’t have to work very hard to figure out where Zimmer was living and find his phone number so I could harass him via the telephone.  It was only a few days later that I worked up the courage and called a farm in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin.

In my attempt to track down Zimmer, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a new Zimmer book had been published just last year—a small press I hadn’t heard of before, Settlement House, had put out The Importance of Being Zimmer.  It took a little doing, but a couple months ago, I got my hands on a copy of The Importance… and I’ve been carrying it around with me ever since.

The Importance… begins with a preface by Zimmer in which he explains the origins of his Zimmer poems.  “My first poems were tentative, comprised mostly of poems about people I had made up, assigning them names like Lester, Eli, Mordecai, Wanda, Phineas, Gus, Rollo.”  Zimmer’s editor at October House Press confronted Zimmer about all of these characters, claiming that as he read through the manuscript, he perpetually asked himself who the poet was and where he was in all of these poems. “David Way commented…‘Who are you—who is the poet?’ ‘Zimmer,’ I said.  ‘Exactly,’ he said—and so it went.”

Zimmer began to put himself into his poems.  But in a very unique way.  In his second book of poems, The Republic of Many Voices, the fifth and final section is called “Zimmer” and all eighteen poems in that section have the author’s last name in the title (fifteen begin with “Zimmer”).  These are the poet’s first successful poems.  And they were only the beginning of the Zimmer poems.

About seven years after the publication of The Republic…, Zimmer published an entire book dedicated to Zimmer poems.  This, as Zimmer puts it in the preface of The Importance…, “went out of print in short order.”  And Zimmer continued to write Zimmer poems so that, again from the preface, “Now, as I begin to survey my lifelong writings, I find that, amongst many others, I published more than 130 Zimmer poems over the years.”  The Importance… then is a sort of The Zimmer Poems Redux, a second take at collecting the best of the poet’s Zimmer poems—many old and some new.  What Zimmer himself calls “a pretty good book.”

One lazy Sunday, I decided to give The Importance… a straight-through read.  Early on in my reading, it occurred to me that these poems were begging to be read aloud.  At the risk of having my girlfriend think my nutty, I sat and read the book aloud to myself.  It was nice having all these Zimmer poems bouncing off the walls. 

The “Zimmer” trope—or “creative tic” as Zimmer calls it—works on the reader in a couple of different ways.  For one, it makes the reader feel as if Zimmer is critiquing or poking fun at himself.  This allows for Zimmer’s great sense of humor to come through in the poems but it also puts the reader at ease that the poet is not taking himself too seriously—and let’s be honest, we’ve all witnessed poets taking themselves too seriously.  What I really like about the use of Zimmer in these poems is how the character of Zimmer morphs from poem to poem.  There are some poems written in the first-person where “Zimmer” is used only in the title to address the poem’s subject matter.  Here’s a nice example:

                        Zimmer Envying Elephants

                        I have a wide, friendly face
                        Like theirs, yet I can’t hang
                        My nose like a fractured arm
                        Nor flap my dishpan ears.
                        I can’t curl my canine teeth,
                        Swing my tail like a filthy tassel,
                        Nor make thunder without lightning

                        But I’d like to thud amply around
                        For a hundred years or more,
                        Stuffing an occasional tree top
                        Into my mouth, screwing hugely for
                        Hours at a time, gaining weight,
                        And slowly growing a few hairs.

                        Once in a while I’d charge a power pole
                        Or smash a wall down just to keep
                        Everybody loose and at a distance.

On the rear cover of Zimmer’s book Family Reunion: Selected and New Poems (which was published by Pitt Press after Zimmer’s departure for the University of Georgia Press) there is a blurb by poet Gerald Stern in which Stern says of Zimmer, “I know of no poet whose poems are more loving, more wise, more beautiful.”  I find that to be a pretty accurate statement.  Throughout The Importance…, it feels as if Zimmer is celebrating life and the beauty of the finer things life has to offer us—art, food, sports, music.  I didn’t necessarily notice this before my straight-through read of The Importance…, but Zimmer is a master of writing poems about jazz.  Maybe it’s just because I recently have become of big fan of hard bop jazz, but I found myself delighted by Zimmer’s jazz poems in this collection, poems like “Zimmer’s Last Gig” and “Duke Ellington Dream.”

It’s a little too lengthy to quote in its entirety here, but in addition to being a great jazz poem, “Duke Ellington Dream” also works as an example of Zimmer’s use of third-person in his Zimmer poems.  The poem begins with the line “Of course Zimmer was late for the gig.”  Zimmer imagines himself playing tenor sax in a combo-group with Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart, and others.  In his dream, Zimmer slays on sax, so much so that by the end of the poem, Ellington is collaring him before he can leave: “‘Zimmer,’ he said, ‘You most astonishing ofay! / You have shat upon my charts, / But I love you madly.”  When Zimmer pulls out the third-person like this, I am reminded of John Berryman’s dream songs—the character of Zimmer becomes larger than life like Berryman’s Henry.  And we observe Zimmer from a distance as opposed to hearing his interior monologue.

Let me sneak one last Zimmer poem in here—a shorty that makes good use of the second-person:

                        Zimmer Warns Himself Against Old Age

                        Well, Zimmer, old reeking cricket,
                        There you go sliding your galoshes
                        Along the cement as dismal and
                        Hard as your petrified bowels,
                        Your hands like frayed moths
                        Raising a yellow snot rag
                        To your swampy nostrils.
                        With your eyes unplugged now
                        Behind fly-specked spectacles,
                        Knees squawking, elbows flaring,
                        Joints burning, penis trickling,
                        Feet dead, and teeth long gone,
                        You pay now with mumbling for
                        All the money you never saved,
                        And all the poems you ever wrote.

As I mentioned before, the use of the second-person in the Zimmer poems allows the poet to poke fun at himself, and it feels as if he’s encouraging the reader to snicker along with him.  And it works well having a poem in the second-person like this next to the many first-person Zimmers and the few third-person Zimmers—a sort of middle-man between the confessional “I” and the distanced Zimmer observing Zimmer.

I had to call Soldiers Grove twice.  The first time I called a woman, Zimmer’s wife I presumed, answered.  I asked, “Is Mr. Zimmer there?” and she said, “Ah, no Paul’s just gone down to the barn.  He should be back in about an hour.  Would you like me to make sure he’s here in an hour and you can call back?”  I thanked her and said that that would be great.  When I called back an hour later, Zimmer answered.  Then I got tongue-tied.  All of a sudden I forgot why I was calling.  It took a minute, but I regained my wits and asked about The Importance of Being Zimmer.  I thanked him for his work and told him how much I liked his “Zimmer Drunk and Alone…” poem.  And I asked him if he would be alright with me calling back with some questions if I were to write something about him.  He said, “That would be fine.”  I still owe him a phone call. 

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit.  He now lives in Pittsburgh where he sells books, plays in bands, watches local sports, and edits The New Yinzer.