The Cranky Interview: Amy Schrader talks to Matthew Zapruder

Amy Schrader: I met Matthew Zapruder at the Ugly Duckling Presse reading at the Richard Hugo House in March, when he and several other New York-based poets came through Seattle. I had read his poetry collection, American Linden (winner of Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize) and had been recently emailing back and forth with him in preparation for our interview. In some ways, Matthew is what you’d expect a poet to be. Quiet and observant, he seemed to study the crowd, taking mental notes to be used later as grist for the poetic mill. I was surprised, however, by how physically present he was, adding to the room’s energy as much as he gleaned from it.

Let’s begin with some basic background information. You were born in Washington D.C. Did you grow up there? What was that experience like? One thing I’m always curious to know about other poets: when did you first know you wanted to write poetry?

Matthew Zapruder: I was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up mostly in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of D.C. I didn’t start writing poems until I was in my early 20’s, and not seriously until my first stint in graduate school (for Slavic Languages and Literatures, at University of California, Berkeley) in my mid-20’s. And I didn’t write anything remotely readable until some point when I was at the MFA program in creative writing at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which is where I went after I left the PhD program at Berkeley. Up until I started writing poems, if I thought of myself as an artist in any way it would have been as a musician. I’ve played guitar since I was very young and have always tried to write songs, with extremely limited success. I’ve found that a more satisfying musical activity for me is to play lead guitar for people who write songs that are actually good.

AS: You are currently the editor of Verse Press and teach at New School University. Teaching and editing are viewed as the two main “realistic” career options for working poets. How has your experience been with each of these?

MZ: I find teaching, and being in a classroom, to be very inspiring; to me, it’s endlessly fascinating to discuss poetry, both published and student work, with interested and committed poets of any level. And I find that when I teach, and I am regularly talking about poetry, I end up writing a lot. I suspect teaching for me as a poet is a lot like conditioning might be for an athlete, not that I would know much about the latter.

Starting Verse Press and being its editor wasn’t a “career option,” in the sense of it being a job, or at least one that helped pay the rent. It was something I and Brian Henry (the editor of Verse Magazine, who co-founded Verse Press with me), and then Lori Shine (current managing editor of Verse Press) did for no money, because it was something we thought would be exciting and worthwhile and would give us great satisfaction. About those things we were right, although I think if we had had any real idea of how much time and energy the whole thing would take we probably wouldn’t have done it.

Teaching isn’t a particularly remunerative activity either: in order to make even a decent living, you have to teach quite a lot, which can be as stressful as a regular job, if not more. As I said, I enjoy it a lot, which makes things easier for me. I know a lot of poets who work all kinds of jobs and still manage to write, although I do think it’s unusual to find a person who is strong and disciplined and committed enough to have a serious career (other than teaching poetry) as opposed to just a day job they don’t care about, and also be a serious writer. I have great admiration for people who can do that.

One thing I learned for myself, and try to communicate to poets who seem to be having a hard time with the whole idea of being a poet as opposed to a so-called productive member of society, is that like every job, being a poet has its very predictable occupational hazards. If you’re going to be a carpenter you will have to get up early and lug stuff around a lot and occasionally whack your thumb with a hammer; if you want to be an academic, you’ll have to deal with a lot of garbage to get tenure; and if you’re a poet, you’re going to feel like a loser staring at a piece of paper all day while everyone else is at their “real” jobs. Your parents are going to be worried, you’re going to have to move around a lot, and people are always going to be confessing to you that they don’t really understand anything you’ve just said. If you can’t handle those things—and there’s nothing wrong with wanting a more stable life, one that doesn’t require so much explanation to others and yourself—then you shouldn’t be a professional poet.

AS: There is a lot of buzz in the Seattle literary community over the new press being founded in conjunction with Verse Press. Are you going to be involved with Wave Books and, if so, what will be your focus?

MZ: Wow, to be the absent subject of such “buzz!” I’m the hive’s dream of future honey—or of the bear’s tender searching paw. I will in fact be very involved with Wave Books. Joshua Beckman and I will be the two editors of the press, and we will work together to continue doing what Verse Press has done, while also expanding the activities of the press to include translations, books by mid-career poets, reprints of work we admire that has become unavailable, and some special projects. We also hope to devote true resources to sending poets and their work all over the country, through author tours, educational activities, and other creative ways that will bring poetry that embodies our values as poets, and that we hope people will also enjoy and find genuinely meaningful, out into the world.

AS: Do you have a take on the Seattle literary community?

MZ: I don’t know very much about the Pacific Northwest literary community, other than that there are some extremely strong cultural institutions and committed individuals who make poetry alive and possible in that part of the country. I hope that people in Seattle realize how lucky they are to have both the Richard Hugo House and John and Christine at Open Books, working hard to bring different kinds of poetry to the attention of readers. Open Books, especially, is the kind of place that can make all the difference for an entire city’s experience with poetry. It’s such a great bookstore, with terrific readings, and most importantly, owners who know a lot about poetry. The only problem with Open Books is that I end up spending a small fortune every time I go in there.

AS: Yes, me too. Your first book is American Linden. The title poem is one of my favorites in the collection. I’m curious about the use of the 2nd person “you” in the poem—with a hint of self-reference—for example, in the lines: “I know you are tired of imagination./ All that clumsily grasping the sunlight./ Aren’t you tired of bodies too?” Many poems in the book seem to be concerned with the tension between imagination and the physical body. Do you see your role as a poet as involving this sort of struggle? How does the poet negotiate the mind/body border?

MZ: I didn’t realize this until long after I wrote the poem, but I think that what happens is that the poem is speaking to the writer, i.e. me. The voice in the poem is a disembodied thing—not exactly a ghost, but something like it—that is observing and commenting on the writer, looking at him working through the window. I had absolutely no intention of doing something so self-referential while I was writing this poem, and in fact it took a long time to realize why it felt so coherent and focused to me, even though I wouldn’t have been able to say for years after I had written the poem exactly who was speaking, or why it was in the first person. Now it seems very clear to me, whereas it wasn’t at all when I wrote it, or for a long time after. Mostly I was very moved by the landscape of Western Massachusetts that surrounded me. I wrote probably hundreds of poems with this landscape, and only a few survived.

The tension between imagination and the physical body, the mind/body border: that’s not something I can immediately feel as an actual distinction for myself, though I’m sure you’re right that this does emerge in the poems. When I wrote those lines you quote, I think I was just mostly thinking, I’m so tired of always having to imagine everything, of trying to be a poet. Why am I doing this? And I’m tired of bodies, both my own and those of others, how they are always breaking down and requiring such constant care and attracting each other and causing such trouble. And probably realizing I don’t have any more of a choice about being a poet than I do about having a body: the alternative is unacceptable. It also occurs to me now that the word “bodies” has a celestial connotation that seems to relate to the way that we orbit and crash into and speed away from each other so much more often than we find a gravitational balance.

AS: For example, consider the borderline described in “The Artist Must Incline His Head Just So”: “The world is good for my pleasure and consumption./ I admire it totally, it stands/ like a mountain inside and outside me./ Some art may be good, some dishonest.” Is this idea one facet of your, say, Ars Poetica?

MZ: I see those lines now as being primarily a denial of, or an attempt to break down, the ordinary borders between things. While I was writing this book I fell in love with the early 20th century artistic school Der Blaue Rieter (The Blue Rider), which included Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabrielle Munter, Alexie Yavlensky, and other painters who were fascinated with the border between abstraction and representation. They painted in bold colors, and to me their work often has the feel almost of those construction paper collages kids do, making recognizable shapes out of big blocks of color, although with much more precision, confusion and disruption. I loved the way that recognizable shapes would emerge out of what seemed to me to be primarily emotional, almost musical, explosions of line and color. Later on I came to see that there were many different artists who had been pushing against that border for a long time—I’m thinking now of later Cézannes, and even much much earlier El Greco—but at the time to see paintings by Kandinsky, Marc, Robert Delaunay, and others felt like a hopeful expression of the possibility for art to be primal, revolutionary and emotional, as well as representative and responsible to life as it is recognized by most people on an everyday level. A bridge between the imagination and the “everyday world.” To have it both ways—which seems like a profound statement of faith in the imagination—how it belongs everywhere.

AS: Many of the poems in the book seem concerned with language, music, singing—forms of poetry. In “Coda,” “a bird betrays the hidden city,” while “the fists which are now/ pounding on our door/ are also a kind of music.” This suggests that poetry reaches us from many different places: some beautiful, some dangerous, some violent. How does poetry help us navigate these regions?

MZ: I don’t know. I guess I would say that the danger isn’t going to be an inability to navigate those regions, but a failure to recognize that they exist. A good poem thrusts one into the world of imagination despite oneself: it uses language, which is our most basic method of interaction with each other and the world, to carry us, often against our own will, into a strange, unfamiliar, dangerous place. What we do once we get there isn’t up to the poet, or poem, I don’t think. It makes me think of the Pavement song from Brighten the Corners, “Transport is Arranged,” in which occur the immortal lines, “One of us is a cigar stand/ and one of us is a blue incandescent guillotine.” Transport is arranged, but once on the ride, you’re on your own.

AS: Along musical lines, I’m curious also about your band, The Figments. Does playing in a band influence your poetry in any way? Do you see music/poetry as different sides of the same coin?

MZ: For me, playing music (mostly guitar for other people’s songs) is a very different experience from writing a poem. For one thing, I’m working in collaboration with someone else, so I’m deferential to their vision, which I find to be a great relief. The Figments continue to play gigs and record, but the most recent thing I did was to play lead guitar on half of a new record by Mark Mulcahy, who I think is one of the great American songwriters of our generation. He used to be in a band called Miracle Legion, but I think his work has deepened enormously over the course of three solo records. I do whatever he tells me to do. If he wants to sing a melody for me to play, I do so; if he wants me to come up with something, I keep trying different things until he hears something he likes.
Expressing myself emotionally through musical language is of course inherently wordless; nevertheless, I try to use the same standards of emotional honesty and truth that I do in my poems. Playing music, I see myself as contributing around the edges to someone else’s work, which is so different from writing a poem. But I guess I would say music and poetry are in my experience different sides of the same coin, though the coin seems like it would have more than two sides: so maybe it’s more like a translucent faceted multihedron.

AS: The title of your book is intriguing because of the use of the word “American.” Linden trees are found in both Europe and the United States. I’m imagining that the distinction you make with the word “American” is more than just identifying a particular species of this tree. Were you concerned with the concept of “America” when writing this book? How do you see the idea of “American” as a factor in your aesthetic, not just politically, but in a broader sense?

MZ: I was not concerned with the idea of being American in a conscious way when I wrote the book; if anything, because I came from a background of studying Russian literature, I was more influenced by a Central and Eastern European sensibility. I mentioned Der Blaue Reiter earlier, which I think is the world I was in, along with poets like Zbigniew Herbert, Yannis Ritsos, Tomaz Salamun, Constantine Cavafy, plus the translations from Romanian of the poet Eugen Jebeleanu that I was doing during my time at U Mass. At the same time I was living in what could be considered a (if not the) cradle of American cultural life and poetry. I spent a lot of time reading Dickinson when I was there, and I think the landscape of Western Massachusetts, its old American (if “old American” isn’t an inherent oxymoron) feeling crept into me and my work in a very deep way.

So once I was done, I found the term “American Linden” to be somehow representative of the intersection of European and American sensibilities I was feeling in my poems. Linden seemed like a European sounding kind of tree to me. In fact, it turns out that it’s Slovenia’s national tree, and that all presidential candidates in Slovenia have to go to a particular linden tree and ritually walk around it when they declare their candidacies (which seems like a good system).

So I liked the contradictory nature of that tree name. European and American together, plus the sound of it, plus the fact that it’s a very common tree in Massachusetts, plus it seems like a very bold assertion for the book—that it was somehow making a statement of what it meant to be American.

Whew. That sounds like a lot of ideas, very conceptual. In no way did I articulate those ideas to myself at the time. I liked the tree, the sound of its name, and had an instinct it was the right thing to call the book. I also remember now that I had a girlfriend who used to wear extract of linden as a perfume. Calling the book anything else always seemed wrong, and this was the only title that didn’t make me cringe when I said it.

One other thing I will say is that in my new book, The Pajamaist, there is a lot more of a conscious effort to deal with my feelings about being American in these strange times. Of course everything is different now than it was when I was writing the first book, or at least more overt. The overwhelming feeling of the times I think is a sense of helplessness. The 2000 presidential election, September 11th, the war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the lies about the weapons of mass destruction, about social security, about taxes, the systematic disinformation, all of these things are so horrible, and yet they hardly affect most of us at all, or at least not in ways that we can immediately perceive.

I hate the sentimentality and self-absorption of poets and artists who talk about how difficult it is to live “in a time of war” or “under this administration.” For me, and I think for almost everyone I know, the true difficulty is to connect one’s own personal life to things that can clearly be seen in an intellectual way to be dangerous and wrong but which don’t make any impact on most of us in a daily way. I hope there are poems in the new book that communicate my sorrow about that, as well as my faith in my friends and fellow artists of my generation, who I think embody what’s best about being American.

AS: Next, a couple of craft questions. Most of the poems in American Linden are compressed, with very short lines. How does the short line work for you?

MZ: When I look at the book now, I think that what I was feeling was a desire to speed up the poems, to find different ways to make them move quicker down the page, but also to make the poems feel inevitable formally, especially since some of their imagery and action is a little strange. Once again this was an instinctive choice.

If you are writing poems with associative logic, something needs to keep things together. One thing of course can be sound; another can be a sense of a single speaker, moving through some thoughts, And certain formal devices, such as shorter lines that lock together and don’t permit the poem to drift off of the page. I think now that I am less interested in this particular device, and more willing to let things go and try to find other ways to keep the poems feeling put together and inevitable.

AS: Your poems make very aggressive associative leaps, perhaps just shy of surrealism. What drives these leaps? Are the associations that of image or of sound? For example, in “Kick the Can,” the phrase “diffuse clumble” leads organically & musically to “thunder,” “mumbling into the clocks,” and “scumble of clouds.” Whereas in “The Book of Leaves,” we go from “Long night filled with boxes of/ of sparrows” to “I’m sorry to wear you/ like a cape/ of daguerrotypes” which feels more image-driven.

MZ: It’s very funny: while I agree with you that sometimes it’s sound and at other times something visual that drives the connections, in the two particular instances you mention I think the initial impulse was the other way around. In “Kick the Can,” what connected things for me was a visual image of that scene (specifically Amherst— Amherst College, where I went as an undergraduate, is up on a hill, and on the other side of town. U Mass, where I went to graduate school, is in a depression sloping down to the Connecticut River). Come to think of it though, you are probably right that the reason I thought of the scene in the first place was a sound-driven set of associations. Those associations of course wouldn’t have been enough on their own, anything more than just a sound game, if in this particular instance (unlike the multitude of other failed poems I was writing at that time) a strong situation didn’t emerge.

In “The Book of Leaves” I know for a fact that I was absolutely fascinated with the stutter sound of those first lines, the repeating “of.” I cannot tell you why I like it so much, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. And that rhythm was the scaffold along which I arranged a whole lot of disparate material, free-writing that I had been doing for months in a notebook an ex-girlfriend (the same one who wore the linden extract) had made for me, with a beautiful leaf pasted on the cover.

Even though sometimes the association may seem primarily sound-driven, and at other times imagistic, both the visual and the aural elements have to feel firmly in place in each instance for a connection to work. As I said before, it’s usually the feeling of a coherent speaker, a voice in a certain situation, that makes me feel that the poems feel put together. Probably in most cases I’m driven initially by a sound connection, and I only pursue the poem if something visual, or a palpable scene, emerges.

AS: The more time I spent with your poems, he more I felt I could sense a distinct narrative arc within each one, despite their surprising turns in imagery and movement. How do you handle the intersection between the lyric and the narrative? When in the writing process does the form of a poem make itself clear to you?

MZ: Somewhere along the way something emerges or it doesn’t —if I keep messing around with the music of the poem, and nothing starts to coalesce, eventually I probably start to get the sense that in this particular form, there isn’t anything there. If I really love the musical thing that’s happening in the poem, I will hope that later on in a different poem I’ll be able to cannibalize some of the best material and re-use it in a different context.

AS: Is your approach in your newer poems similar, or has your style evolved into something different? Have your thematic concerns shifted at all?

MZ: I think that in my new poems I’m trying to spread things out on the page more, write some longer poems, poems in series, etc. The title piece of the book is a prose piece, not a prose poem but something longer. I’ve changed a lot as a person in the years since the writing of the first book, so I think my concerns have changed a lot as well. I don’t know exactly how those differences manifest themselves in the poems, other than tthat these new poems are probably more confident and range over more thematic, imagistic, and tonal territories. Hopefully people will read the book and tell me what I’ve done.

AS: How many drafts of a poem do you do? How do you know when a poem is “done”?

MZ: When I was writing American Linden, I wrote almost all of the poems on my grandfather’s old manual typewriter, a portable Royal Quiet De Luxe.  Most of the poems, with very few exceptions, had a minimum of 50 drafts—retyped versions of the poem—and more often than not at least 100 or 150. Using a manual typewriter was great for me, because it forced me to slow down and not make impulsive changes in the poem. Plus I could easily retrace my steps if I went the wrong way.

I think I know the poem is done when it resists any more changes. I also generally get an electric charge when I put the final piece together. I think over time I’ve learned to distinguish between that feeling, Emily Dickinson’s “physical feeling as if the top of my head were taken off,” and the simple satisfaction of having made something at all, which isn’t enough. That’s probably the most important skill I’ve developed as a writer: the ability to subsume or evade my ego during the writing process, and then to be grateful for and mystified by the end result. The poem’s not something that belongs to me, or that I even feel like I’ve “done.” I feel like the poem is something that language, our common possession, has made through its particular instrument, me.

 

Matthew Zapruder is the author of American Linden, winner of the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize, and of The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006). His poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Fence, Jubilat, Harvard Review, The New Republic and The New Yorker, among others. He is also the co-translator of Secret Weapon, by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu.

Amy Schrader, Poetry Editor and Co-Publisher of Cranky, holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She was previously co-editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She was a semi-finalist for the 2006 “Discovery”/The Nation poetry contest, and herwork has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin Parachute Postcard Review, Cranky, and Pontoon 7, among others.

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