You've Got It All Wrong: Matthew Zapruder on Teaching Poetry

At PBS NewsHour, Elizabeth Flock reveals to readers an important detail about Matthew Zapruder, a little-known secret which he divulges to the readers of his new book, Why Poetry. Zapruder, the author of previous ruminations including Come On All You Ghosts explains, "I don’t really understand poetry." "The book is part personal, part explanatory and part polemic," Flock writes, "saying: Here’s my experience with poetry, here’s how it works, and here’s why we desperately need it." Let's pick up with the story there:

“It’s an intuitive, associative understanding that you can get from poems, which can really open a person up and make them aware of other human beings, of themselves, and of the natural world,” said Zapruder, who has published four collections of poetry and edited the poetry page of the New York Times Magazine. “It does that in a way that can’t be done by any other form of writing.”

But this intuitive, associative power, he says, can be lost on people because of the way poetry is taught. He argues that we are too often asked to find the “hidden meanings” in poems, as if a poem is a riddle — telling you something simple, but in the most complicated way possible, as if the poet is being deliberately opaque. Good poetry actually does the opposite, says Zapruder; “it’s something elusive and complex, said in the simplest way possible.” (Though writing about the complexities of life is not always very simple.)

Onward at NewsHour.