Harriet Zinnes (April 18, 1919 – November 30, 2019)[4] was an American poet, fiction writer, translator, art critic, literary scholar and professor.
[2] Growing up in the early 20th century, Zinnes's poetic and critical output, as with her peers', was concerned with the complex transition between aesthetic and social tensions associated with high modernism and postmodern literature and art.
[9] Her father, a Russian immigrant from a long line of musicians, played a significant role in Zinnes's youth, as he was the one that moved the family from Massachusetts to 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.
[14] 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.
[12] Other influences include the erotic writing of Anaïs Nin, the stream-of-consciousness long poems of the Beat Generation, and the conceptual techniques of artists such as Robert Smithson and Marcel Duchamp, who brought non-aesthetic objects into the aesthetic sphere (see Entropisms).
[14] In 1988, Schocken Books published Blood and Feathers, Zinnes's translation of selected poems by mid-century French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert.
They don't possess the majestic sweep of his poems at middle age (in terms of line length, overall volume, the philosophical punch in the solar plexus).
For me the comparison here is with someone like Harriet Zinnes; her late poems — their ethereal, sprightly, fleetingly brilliant statements seeming to have come from beyond the veil — are exciting in their exquisite lightness yet fascination that doesn't dissipate.
They strike me as drawing upon the same wellspring of insight, finally, and as possessing an eerie gracefulness — less on display in her work of middle age, obfuscated there by something grander in presentation.