Harriet Zinnes

In 1988, Schocken Books published Blood and Feathers, Zinnes's translation of selected poems by mid-century French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. The book received a second printing in 1993, when it was republished by Moyer Bell.

Zinnes, who had done important work as a translator, professor, editor and art critic, was fundamentally a poet and fiction writer. She authored 11 books of poetry and 2 collections of short stories. 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.

Zinnes taught at a variety of schools including Rutgers University, University of Geneva, and Queens College of the City University of New York. It was at Queens College where she would spend most of her career, teaching there between 1949 and 1953, returning in 1962, and eventually attaining the rank of full professor. Except for a brief stint as Visiting Professor in Geneva from 1969 to 1971, she continued teaching at Queens until she retired in 1989, finishing her career as Professor Emerita.

Zinnes went on to complete her master's degree at Brooklyn College (now Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) in 1944, and her Ph.D., in 1953 at New York University. Her dissertation was on Alexander Pope's long poem Dunciad (1743), which became a major formal influence on Zinnes's own poetic output, even as a force to work against. As Eric Williamson puts it, “Whereas Pope's work is limited by the notion of form in the Neoclassical tradition, Zinnes's work is free of form and limited only by the imagination.”

On September 24, 1943, Zinnes married Irving I. Zinnes, a physicist working on his PhD at NYU at the time, and later a professor of physics at Fordham University. The metaphysical currents of her writing, tied to different notions of science and philosophy, demonstrate the ways in which non-aesthetic resources came to inform her writing. Borrowing language and concepts from physics, she was able to create a broader, experimental relationship between disciplines.

Along with being a professor, Zinnes's career is also marked by her work as an editor. From 1942 to 1943 Zinnes worked as an editor of Raritan Arsenal Publications Division, and an associate editor at Harper's Bazaar Magazine from 1944 to 1946. Zinnes was also a contributing editor at Denver Quarterly and Hollins Critic.

She received her bachelor's degree at Hunter College (now Hunter College of the City University of New York) in 1939. While she studied at Hunter College, Zinnes became more involved in the New York art scene. At Hunter, she noticed a lack of intellectual rigor throughout the literature department. Because of this, she was drawn to the philosophy department: “I found philosophy more challenging than literature classes that were geared not even to the New Criticism. The professors were still teaching literature as if it were merely a manifestation of history.”

Harriet Zinnes (April 18, 1919 – November 30, 2019) was an American poet, fiction writer, translator, art critic, literary scholar and professor. She is associated with poets such as Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg, and the writer Anaïs Nin.