Burt
Kimmelman
 |
 |
|||
Burt
Kimmelman
|
|
|
|||
". . . a rare evocation . . . the wonder of this world in
itself.” - Robert Creeley ♦ “. . .artful, fastidious,
learned . . . I am delighted by so much feeling for style.”- Alfred Kazin
♦ "The
sense of number in his writing . . . the
littlest
words& the small moments through which we live . . . are of a
piece. In this there is . . . a strict & powerful accounting, leaving me
–for one – filled with admiration & hooked on every word.” - Jerome
Rothenberg ♦
"The specificity of Burt Kimmelman's poems has, for more than thirty years, been
a singularly locating force. It situates us in space, in relation to the
luminosity of objects, art, and one another. That every shadow of wonder can
stand forth in the most familiar words is the gift this poet offers his readers
time and again." - Susan Howe ♦ “Few
contemporary poets so gracefully demonstrate classic notions of what the
practice of poetry must be: Kimmelman’s work is carefully wrought, with
concision, focus, and the rhythm of musical composition. . . . .” - Madeline
Tiger, Jacket ♦ ""This is a
carefully calibrated poetic vision filled with insights and worded with
casual, unassuming grace. . . . Kimmelman's poems attest to the simple
majesties of being, the massive implications of the everyday." - Eric Hoffman,
Rain
Taxi ♦ “In
Burt Kimmelman's poems . . . form calls deeply to form, as though the works . .
. lifted one to the very brim of language where one could speak . . . of a
life caught whole.” - Michael Heller ♦ “[In Kimmelman's work] the arts
restate the questions we have been asking and the ways they clean and stretch
our questions reward us more than answers would.” -William Bronk ♦ “Kimmelman is a poet who obviously admires the clarity of
classical Chinese poetry and strives for it in his tight syllabics and in his
shifting images of light and dark. In doing so, he finds what is luminously
transcendent in the routines of everyday life.” - Harvey Shapiro ♦ “As quiet an experience as anyone could wish for.” -
Cid Corman ♦
“[Kimmelman’s] poems
evince a quality infrequently encountered in contemporary American poetry:
modesty, an attentive and forthright modesty. . . . Modesty in an age of irony
is infrequent, rare . . . worth our own best attention. These poems are
'worth it'.” - John Taggart ♦ “Kimmelman's quiet poems contain
the luminescence of perception, its lure, its beauty, its Zen of breath,
tracing beauty in the pulse of the extant."-Star
Black ♦ “Burt Kimmelman’s
sense of the whole poem, or what Zukofsky famously calls the “rested totality,”
is as impressive as that of his precursors [Oppen, Bronk, Creeley et al.], and
in one respect, it exceeds them. He is a remarkably confident poet, though not
confident in his self, his ego, or even his craft, his way with words, though
he has every right to be. His confidence lies with the poem itself, that he
has found it (or that it has found him), and that he can proceed through the
poem, knowing that if he follows himself sincerely, the words will be there
for him.” - Norman Finkelstein, The Offending Adam