Burmeister resides with his wife, Diana, at 8018 Lakepointe Drive, Plantation, Fla 33322. His e.mail address is burmeist@plhp002.comm.mot.com. A Florida native of Armenian (mother) and German (dad) descent, he was born 22 March 1961, in St. Petersburg. He works as an Electronics Engineer, having gotten his bachelor's and master's in that field at the University of Central Florida. His hobbies include reading folklore, following baseball, listening to jazz/blues music, raising plants, amateur astronomy, good wine and cigars, and collecting stamps.

He has several works in progress (as of late October 1997): poem/play (1 yr); first chapbook of poems; translations of a play by the (deceased) Ecuadorian poet Gonzalo Escudero and poems from Jorge Guillen's Cantico.

Among the contemporary poets important to Burmeister are John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, A. Child, Clark Coolidge, Henry Gould, Lyn Hejinian, Simic, J. Tate, Revell, Paz, Yau, L.Scalapino, B.Hillman, S.Howe, D.Ignatow, M.Strand, M.McClure, B.Guest, R.Bly . . .

Earlier poets important to him include Homer, Dante A., Milton, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Loy, Williams (WCW), Pound, Breton, Char, Zukofsky, Oppenheim.Celan, Loy, Joyce, T.Roethke, Carroll, Jorge Guillen, Lorca, Neruda, Gonzalo Escudero, Spicer, Duncan, Patchen, Antonio Machado, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Unamuno, Gustavo Adolpho Bequer, Beckett, D.Thomas, Muriel Rukuyser, Rilke, J.Taggart . . .

Among critics, he particularly values the work of Blanchot, Bernstein, Perloff, Sartre, Bachelard and Paz.

About his tastes in poetry he says, "I have a fairly open, generous approach to poetry, especially in what comes to me from the past. For poetry in the present, I look for the writing as thinking, metaphysical, meditative, stream of consciousness, chance, new surrealism, playfulness with language, nonsense, energetic lively language, reinvented language, and so on. I look for innovation, but not necessarily formal innovation. What I like most, I get from the avante-garde, but contentment with the avante-garde is an impossibility by definition. The avante-garde is not the beginning and the end of a particular kind of poetry, but rather only the beginning, and maybe not the best possible at that since a new dialogue has been begun with all of literature and history, the past as well as a future."

As for criticism, he says, "I don't consider myself a critic as such, although naturally, I recognize the importance of maintaining a critical ability since this has been and will continue to be an essential part of literature. For me, taste, appeal, enjoyment, and enthusiasm must be considered at the personal level as much as any aesthetic, but can never be forced upon another as aesthetic. I tend to believe that poetry is a lot like religion in that a kind of faith is necessary to hold the poem together. It seems to me that the poem is a delicate, but patient entity that outlives time-sensitive criticism (such as identity politics and other socio-political agendas in the guise of criticism). Good critical writing is that which goes before or after good writing: it informs, enlightens, and expands readership rather than merely decodes and justifies." "

Outside his field, Burmeister enjoys reading novels by James (The Wings of a Dove), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) Kafka (The Trial) Gunter Grass (Cat and Mouse, Tin Drum), Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain), the science fiction of G.Bear, Simak, Asimov, and D.Brin ("before he choked"), and Plays by Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's last tape), Gonzalo Escudero (Parallelogram), the short word plays of Gertrude Stein, and the plays of Sheakespeare. He collects books of black & white photography (Weston, Man Ray, Irina Ionesco) and films (Wells, The Marx Brothers, D.Lynch and more). He is also building a collection of original paintings by Latin American painters such as the contemporary Ecuadorian Arauz. He listens to John Cage, experimental jazz (A.Braxton and others) and acid jazz, and classical music.

About his interests in science and philosophy, he says, i "tend (right now anyway) to be partial toward the Spanish philo. Jose Ortega y Gassett, J.P.Sartre, Kierkegaard, Derrida, & Kant. For philosophy of science, I have tended toward Einstein, Newton, Asimov, and Faraday." Burmeister was educated in hard sciences up through elementary modern physics (theory of quantuum electrodynamics, statistical mechanics, etc.), in mathematics up through essential calculus, linear operator theory, diffential equations and boundary value problems (applied)."

In answer to the Comprepoetica survey question about the present world situation, he says, "I'm wondering for how long we can survive this ludicrous zero-sum game known as the 'Global economy.'"

For a sample of Bill Burmeister's poetry (with a brief commentary on it by Burmeister), click here.

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