At Best American Poetry: Erin Belieu Interviews Matthew Zapruder

Wow: Erin Belieu interviewed Matthew Zapruder for the Best American Poetry blog! Belieu and Zapruder met on the infamous Wave Poetry Bus Tour of 2006. She recounts a memory from the tour in which Zapruder encouraged her to buy a rare print, "Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land,” "a highly detailed cartoon of an adorable germ creature being tortured by a gang of tiny space trolls." "Which is to say Matthew has a genius for transmitting his deep enthusiasms and passions, both in his poems and in person."

Belieu has some good questions, including one you don't often see asked of male poets about to have children: "Are you concerned parenthood is going to make you write 'terrible father' poems? Or are dude poets safe in that regard?" Says Zapruder:

MZ: ...You know, in fact I am a bit worried about that. Not because of poems by others I have seen, but because I have a tendency to write out of my own experience, and to find the language within it that seems most potentially electric and luminous and to follow it wherever it goes. That's how I write, and it requires a delicate balance of attention to feelings and weird objectivity toward those feelings, if that makes any sense. Sometimes though I have found that the stronger and more immediate the feelings surrounding the experience (particularly with death), the more difficult it is to have the necessary distance to follow what Stafford called "the golden thread."

In other words I agree with Keats when he wrote that in a great poet a sense of beauty obliterates all consideration. And I get the feeling that having a kid is an intense dose of consideration, and mattering. Which is good. I'm sure there will be nothing I will care more about than the baby and his mother and our little family. So I wonder what that will do to the objectivity of my relation to language in balance with said feelings. I want my experience, however personal, to be representative through the mechanism of our collective consciousness (i.e. language) to as many people as possible. To my mind that happens for poets through the pursuit of "beauty," though of course that term means something very different to each poet.

On the other hand, as I think Montaigne wrote (not that I've read any Montaigne), most of my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. So odds are I'm as usual worrying about the wrong thing.

They also talk negative capability and kids; and the world of terrible readers:

MZ: ...To tell the truth, I think it's natural to have an internal resistance to reading poetry aloud. I think it's a big risk. At first, when I started reading, I was worried about what people thought of me. Now I'm worried about something else. I want something from a reading, a kind of experience, it is probably completely unreasonable, but I want to feel a sort of collective attention, not to me (and in fact when I am reading well the attention really is mostly away from me) but to possibility and to language and to lucid dreaming. And if I am reading and I don't feel that in the room, I have a deep sense of failure. That's a personal thing, it's not really oh they did or didn't like me, but more, I have organized my life around creating this kind of feeling not just in myself, but in others, and if it doesn't work, often for reasons beyond my or anyone else's control, then I get very sad, almost completely depressed.

You are right, a lot of poets are terrible readers. Often they just go on too long, and choose the wrong poems to read. Almost any reading is ok if it's not too long, at least it's interesting. In your example in the question that is a 27 minute reading, which to my mind is pretty long even if there's just one reader. I want there to be a collectively accepted sign to make when someone has gone on too long. Something that starts out gentle, so if someone has just lost track of time they can get a warning and can gracefully call it to a close. Maybe we can work that out at a future AWP. Here's what I suggest: time your reading, and then multiply it times the number of people you are reading with. If the number you get is something horrifying like 190 minutes then you should rethink your set.

Beautifully, he later adds: "A reading really isn't about the writer. It seems like it is, for a lot of social reasons, but in the end I just don't think that's what makes a really great reading. It is, in a way, about giving up one's own dignity, becoming somehow transparent to the language and ideas." Read the full interview at Best American Poetry.