Matthew Zapruder Reflects on Baldwin and Merwin, Guiding Spirits

For the Library of America's "Influences" series, Matthew Zapruder contributes a column that reveals two important influences behind his latest collection of poetry, Father's Day. "I am embarrassed to say that before I taught Notes of a Native Son in a graduate seminar a few years ago, I had never read an entire book by James Baldwin," Zapruder begins. "To be immersed in the clarity of his thinking about race and many other matters crystalized so much of my vague thinking." Picking up from there: 

Many moments in these essays had a profound impact, but two in particular served as constant guides.

Writing about Richard Wright’s Native Son in “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin diagnoses our ability to invert what should be a catastrophic critique into self-praise:

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

That is basically a description of a good amount of our social discourse. This sentence served as a reminder to me, when writing about race and privilege and difference of all kinds, not to turn my own poems into those exact sorts of little medals to be pinned on my own chest.

And here is the final sentence of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” — “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and cannot be transcended.” We live in a time when those we agree with and those we oppose seem equally likely to treat a person’s “categorization” as the only thing that is truly real about them, and it was bracing to see that one of our greatest and most courageous writers opposed this type of thinking.

Continue at Library of America.