Jack Zimmerman

Paul L. Merideth

The Upside of Giving Up

Jack Zimmerman had to dump his musical dreams to find his calling as a novelist.

By Deanna Isaacs
February 23, 2007

“PEOPLE HAVE HIGH expectations when they come here,” says Lyric Opera’s Jack Zimmerman. He should know: as subscriber relations manager, Zimmerman not only handles customer complaints but also performs the Lyric’s single most dreaded duty. When a diva catches cold, he’s the mope traipsing onstage alone at curtain time to make the announcement no one wants to hear, the mere sight of him eliciting groans from 3,600 people in unison. Zimmerman, who’s been at Lyric since ’99 and handled gripes at Ravinia for seven years prior to that, is the man people turn to when they want to know why they had to watch the entire first act on TV in the basement when they were barely late, or why something can’t be done about the rube in the next seat. He keeps every written complaint, filling several loose-leaf binders each season, and relishes the best. “Opera patrons participate,” he says. “They feel ownership in the product. They’re not usually abusive; often it’s just a matter of answering a question. But once in a while,” he admits, after a call “I have to go outside and walk around for a while.”

If Zimmerman is unusually patient, that might be because he knows a thing or two about unrealized expectations. Growing up in Marquette Park, he fell in love with music the way some kids fall in love with baseball, taking up piano as a sixth grader and devoting the better part of his adolescence to practice. He switched to trombone in high school and stuck with it through college, studying at the Chicago Conservatory under Ed Kleinhammer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and dreaming of playing with the CSO himself one day. After four years with a navy band during the Vietnam war, Zimmerman joined the Civic Orchestra, substituted at Lyric, and endured endless auditions, racking up rejections from the likes of the Boston and Indianapolis symphonies and the New York Philharmonic. On the cusp of 30, with a wife and the first of two sons, he gave up: sold the trombone, used the proceeds to waterproof his basement, and spent the next 15 years tuning and rebuilding pianos alone in a Villa Park storefront, “sitting in the shop all day, getting more and more depressed.”

Desperate for more human contact, Zimmerman joined the Elmhurst Lions Club in 1980, was assigned to write its newsletter, and took to it like it was a Bach fugue. Four years later he was hired to write a humor column for a suburban newspaper chain, Press Publications, which he continued to write twice a week for 23 years, retiring it just last month. In the late 80s, before moving on to Ravinia, he spent a few years at the music education magazine the Instrumentalist, where he “learned spelling and punctuation” and wound up as an editor. Five years ago he started writing a column for Chicago Journal and continues to appear in its pages once a month.

In his spare time Zimmerman worked on a novel set in 1959 on Chicago’s southwest side, inspired loosely by the indelible cast of characters he’d known as a kid: the hardware-store poet, the parlor pianist, the German papa laboring in his lonely shop, the man who stared down dogs, and the boy in love with music, making his way to a dream. He plugged away at it for 18 years, submitting it, collecting rejections, and revising. Last winter, after returning to the Lyric from a two-week leave prompted by a heart attack, he got the call he was no longer even waiting for. New Leaf Books, a tiny imprint in Villa Park, published Zimmerman’s Gods of the Andes last September. (It’s available through local bookstores and on Amazon.) Marrying life on one Chicago block to the fate of the White Sox, it’s an engaging read about pursuing dreams and knowing when to give them up. “That was a big part of my life with the trombone,” Zimmerman says. “For people of my generation, you’re taught that you can do whatever you want. Coming to grips with reality, saying ‘I want this, but I can’t do it’—that was a breakthrough. And a huge relief, to finally say, ‘I don’t have that much talent.” So where does that leave him? “I discovered writing through all this,” he says. “I think that’s what I was meant to do.”

Bad to Verse

The Poetry Foundation is smarting over “The Moneyed Muse,” a 6,000-word profile by Dana Goodyear in the February 19 issue of the New Yorker that raises questions about the foundation’s hegemony and use of its endowment, currently valued at nearly $200 million, to popularize poetry. Goodyear takes aim at president John Barr, describing a manifesto he wrote last fall on “American Poetry in the New Century” as unintentionally comic and quoting a passage from his poetry that—out of context—could be read as both racist and misogynistic.

“We feel like Dana’s characterization gives new meaning to the term ‘poetry slam,’” says Barr. “She identifies the foundation with low art, pop culture, and uses the term consumerization, a new one to me.” He says the article “makes very little of the work the foundation does for serious poetry and tries to place us on some other axis.” Noting that Goodyear even dredges up “Poetry in Porkopolis,” a tag east-coast newspapers applied to Poetry magazine nearly a century ago, he says the “whole thing is imbued with an attitude about Chicago that one has come to expect from New York and particularly the New Yorker.” Barr complains that Goodyear never mentions the young Chicago poets the foundation arranged for her to meet, ignores its financial support for a variety of local organizations like the Poetry Center of Chicago, and gives only one sentence to its half-million-dollar Poetry Out Loud program. She does, however, mention being trotted out to the “seven-million-dollar” mystery site the foundation is attempting to buy for its new headquarters. (Apart from saying the location is somewhere “in the Newberry neighborhood,” the offical word is mum.)

Meanwhile, the foundation’s mission to place poetry “before the largest possible audience” is chugging along, in part by gaining access to mass-media editorial content. Ted Kooser’s weekly column, syndicated without charge by the foundation, runs regularly in about 30 newspapers and sporadically in up to 100, reaching 2.5 million potential readers. The foundation is the major sponsor of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, has a podcast, and will soon be airing one-to-four-minute poetry spots between programs on PBS. And for the second year, the foundation is funding segments on PBS’s NewsHour: on Valentine’s Day, for example, viewers got a look at a spot on a married pair of poets writing in tandem against the clock. No harm in that, but this series is funded at $250,000 per year with the foundation collaborating—in regular conference calls with PBS—on possible topics and poets. The sponsorship is acknowledged in the broadcast credits, but since when is this the way news is gathered? Is what’s considered news today / Whatever dollars choose? / If poetry can pay and play / Does journalism lose? / Or do ends excuse the means this time / Just because the endings rhyme?

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