Paul Zimmer (poet)


Paul Zimmer is an American poet, and editor.

Life

He flunked out of college, and worked in a steel mill.
From 1954 to 1955 Zimmer served in the United States Army as a journalist. The Ribs of Death, his first book, was published in 1968.
He received a Bachelor of Arts and Science degree from Kent State University in 1968.
He has directed the university presses at Georgia, Iowa, and Pittsburgh, and helped found the Pitt Poetry Series.
His papers are held at Kent State.

Awards

It is not often that a “new and selected” documents the progressions, departures, and returns of a writer’s consciousness as lucidly and profoundly as Paul Zimmer’s Crossing to Sunlight Revisited. Zimmer’s newer poems are at the start of the book; they chronicle his ascension into, what seems to be, comfortable old age. Note that “old” is not my word here; in fact, in his preface, Zimmer informs us that he is “no longer an aging poet or an older poet.” He says, “I am an old poet.”