Jean Zimmerman

Category: Poetry

  • Starring Gertrude Stein

    “If you enjoy my work you understand it… if you don’t enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it? These were Gertrude Stein’s slightly sharp-elbowed words pronounced sixty-nine years ago to an interviewer at at New York’s Algonquin Hotel upon her arrival in America to record The Making of Americans and some of her…

  • An Evening of Stand-Up Tragedy

    The art of complaint never sounded so un-peevish. Almost noble, actually. We went to hear Tony Drazan perform his variety of standup, a part scripted, part improvised monologue, at Nuyorican Poets Café on East 3rd Street. Known for its poetry slams, the institution has been there since buying the rundown building for $10,000 multiple decades…

  • Squeezing the Juice From the Season

    There is nothing like a Saturday morning in November to make you stand up straight and take clear-eyed notice of the world. Of the crisp air and fresh colors, the sweetly rotten smell of leaves being pulverized underfoot. Both Gil and I could easily stay home and work all day, bent over our books, leaning…

  • Chocolate Poems

    “Where are the reptiles?” the adolescent boy asked the guard at the door of the convention center. “The what?” Both heads swivelled to look inside at the crowded arena. “The reptiles – are they here?” No. The reptile show was last weekend. Here at Chocolate Expo there were only the chocolate fiends. At two minutes…

  • Children’s Books That Make Us Us

    Most of the elegant exhibition vitrines at the New York Public Library’s show The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter stand at a height conducive to adult viewing. And wonderful as the show is, it’s really not a place for children – with the exception of a few nooks along the way offering copies…

  • Mums the Word

    The kiku were fragrant, lovely to look at, cool to the touch. I had been in a mood. My foot was slower to heal than I’d like. I had a cold. I didn’t feel like working. So I got myself to The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. It was offering its annual chrysanthemum…

  • What’s the Story Morning Glory?

    As some things in the garden wither, others go full tilt. A friend of mine came over with a shovel and a Beautyberry plant earlier in the summer. I didn’t know how Callicarpa Americana would take to the Cabin. Now its purple berries are practically fluorescent, a perfect complement to the orange leaves that have…

  • On Tiptoe

    It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes, quoth Robert Louis Stevenson. Well, it’s good to have ten working toes at any age, I would say, as someone who is coming down the home stretch from foot surgery with a big toe that is being extremely uncooperative. It’s stiff, sore, and doesn’t…

  • A Catskill Idyll

    I really ought to get out more. Even if out means going from a cabin to a cottage with an adjacent bungalow as I did this weekend. It was the gray, cool weather of late summer, more like fall. The Catskill Mountains. The cottage had a quaint disposition, the pet decorating project of antiquarian friends…

  • Art for Art’s Sake

    When was the last time you thought about Art Garfunkel? His angelic tenor, his sensitive beak, his fallouts/reunions with Paul Simon, his blond ‘fro? Probably, like me, not recently. Which is why I jumped at the chance to see him solo in a tiny venue in the middle of New Jersey, in a performance that…

  • Digging

    I made a list. The things I’d do if I were going out and about this weekend. The free-of-leg-cast things. There’s the NYC Unicycle Festival, which kicks off with a 13-mile single-wheeled parade across the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island and which includes a bout of unicycle sumo wrestling. Then, the art installlation by Olaf…

  • Portals Into Other Worlds

    I’m thinking about how you can visit other times and places on the web, peeking through portals the way you peer through a cutout in the plywood surrounding a construction site. Here are fifteen visits I’ve made lately that I’d recommend. It was a mistake for Rolling Stone to make a rock star out of…

  • A Crash, Then Silence

    Last fall I created a trail. It started at the curve of the Cabin’s driveway and led uphill to a ridge, winding and turning past trees along the way. A beautiful mat of bark I’d step across on my way up suggested the drama of a tree’s life cycle. It was as if the bare,…

  • By Heart

    Driving west on Route 6, towards the Catskills, a summer weekday morning, and that old Talking Heads song comes on the radio: I’m writing ’bout the Book I read I have to sing about the Book I read I’m embarassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart When I found out you…

  • The Incomplete Fetch

    Gil and I have a conversation about Oliver, who has the entrenched habit of greeting whomever arrives at our front door with a shoe in his mouth.   Gil: We used to have a purebred dog who looked like a movie star. Whenever we took her out, her adoring public would gather around to ooh and…