Johnson Controls Part-Time Faculty Award, MSOE

Rosebud literary magazine Poetry Prize, 2019

Rosebud Literary Magazine Poetry Prize

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission : Member

Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Science and Letters : Member

Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (WFOP) : Member

On the Comma's Cutting Edge

Since 2001 Nothing About 'Us' Has Changed

Prufrock’s Progress: 1915-42

Smoking Out the Word: The Liberation Songs of Bob Marley

Judging from the skyrocketing number of poetry enthusiasts who read, write, and participate in poetry events nowadays, it looks like Walt Whitman was right: we Americans are celebrating ourselves and singing ourselves with a degree of enthusiasm and relevance unmatched in recent literary history. And if the art of poetry is thriving from coast to coast, nowhere is it more vibrantly alive than right here in Wisconsin—the domain that we, the Hartford Avenue Poets, call home. The Hartford Avenue Poets are eleven practitioners of poetry who convene monthly to share and critique new work. Some of us are survivors from the group’s earliest days back in 1999; others have joined more recently. Our venue is a classroom building on Hartford Avenue in Milwaukee, on the edge of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. Each of us currently lives in or near Milwaukee, but we come from small towns, family farms, urban centers, the suburbs. Our approaches to poetry are as varied as our backgrounds, ranging from close observations of nature to matters of politics and protest; from our impressions of the local to our notions of the world at large; from expressing ourselves by way of the traditional lyric to the linguistically experimental lipogram. Never in its long history, in fact, has this group been more richly endowed with energy, ingenuity, and sheer competence. We hope that readers will find this out for themselves as they read the poems that follow. Marilyn L. Taylor Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2009-2010

Hartford Avenue Poets: Masquerades &amp; Misdemeanors

Each of the persona poems in this collection is written in the voice of a historical figure, contemporary cultural icon, or well-known literary character. The poems are written in the lipogram form, a constraint in which certain letters of the alphabet are deliberately omitted from the work. In Impersonations, Zimmermann has limited himself to the letters contained in the name of each persona; for instance, the poem “Sigmund Freud” uses only the letters s, i, g, m, u, n, d, f, r, and e. Zimmermann has worked wonders with these severe limitations, producing poems that are lyrical, witty, and smart.

Impersonations

MSOE students are bright, creative, hard-working and fun to be around. Ours is a close-knit community of about 3,000 students, faculty and staff—large enough for big opportunities and small enough for personal attention. Located in a vibrant downtown neighborhood in Milwaukee, MSOE offers students an engaging learning and living environment. The university is fully committed to every student who is willing to be challenged and work hard to become a better person as a successful MSOE graduate

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Today, MSOE offers 17 bachelor’s degrees and 11 master’s degrees. The students who attend MSOE come from all parts of the United States and dozens of other countries. More than 20,000 alumni live and work throughout the United States and abroad, and nearly 2,000 of them own their own businesses or are officers of companies. 

Milwaukee School of Engineering

Mark Zimmerman is an instructor in the Humanities, Social Science and Communication Department at MSOE. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has additional teaching experience at Regent College in Poland, Reitaku University in Japan, Ibaraki University in Japan, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has industry experience serving as a copy editor for the Open Society Institute in Budapest, the Cream City Review and the North American Cartographic Information Society. He teaches freshman studies courses at MSOE.

Mark Zimmermann

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