Quote

It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so...useless?

Matthew Zapruder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Matthew Zapruder
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Poet
Translator
Washington
District of Columbia
Matthew J. Zapruder
Seems
Asked
Mystifying
Even
Especially
Vaguely
Something
Choose
Hilarious
Would
Anyone
Vocation
People
Times
Poets
Funny
Justify
Often
Useless
Also
Poet

More quotes by Matthew Zapruder

Image
Reading a poem is a real thing, a worthy thing. So to be there right with the reader at that moment is part of the effect of a title like Poem for something or other. Matt Rohrer does this a lot in his titles, and I think I might have gotten some of the idea to do this, or at least been reminded of how it can work, from his recent amazing book
Matthew Zapruder
Image
I am intrigued and even moved by the idea of being right with the reader in the actuality that she or he is reading a poem. So the titles are an acknowledgment of the reality and value of that act in the world.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
Mahmoud Darwish wrote that extreme clarity is a mystery. That sounds right to me. I don't want anyone hunting for anything ancillary to the true mystery. If that means risking being thought of as glib or dull or banal or stupid or whatever, I guess that will just have to be the way it is.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
It's a kind of de-familiarization in relation to the song: if she were to sing absolutely straight, right on the beat, because of the richness and intensity of her instrument - her voice - I think it could actually feel a little inhuman, too good somehow, separate from our concerns.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
I feel because I am never in my comfort zone I have an advantage.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
It may very well be that we have entered another time when most poets will feel compelled to use poetry to stop things from happening. Yet I believe that even if poetry did not do this, it would be vital to our survival.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
Well, I believe that thinking is just as real a phenomenon in the world as anything else, and just as worthy of exploration. Maybe even more? So writing about thought to me is like writing about a tree or anything else real.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
That name, SUN BEAR, just sounds like an ideogram to me. Super resonant. By the way, this all might be related to Tomaž Šalamun's famous line, Every true poet is a monster. Or why Richard Hugo writes that the imagination is a cynic. T
Matthew Zapruder
Image
For me, form is something I locate in the process of writing the poems. What I mean is, I start scribbling, and then try to form the poem - on a typewriter or on my computer - and, by trial and error, try to find the right shape. I just try to keep forming the poem in different ways until it feels right to me.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
I was thinking a little bit about this very thing - poetry and music - the other day when I was listening to Lucinda Williams. The way she sings is very emotive, and there is a kind of drag to her articulation: she sings behind the beat, sort of like she's being pulled along by the song a little, or is in resistance to it.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
It's just interesting to me that the physical enactment of that mind moving has gradually changed for you in the last few years. It made me wonder if the change was deliberate in any sense, or procedural, like when A.R. Ammons stuck an adding machine roll into his typewriter to squeeze his verses into shorter lines.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
If freedom in the imagination is a privilege, it's one I believe everyone should have, as a basic human right. I also believe that poems not only make meaning, but are more often than not engaged in some way with our deepest human issues, be they personal or societal or political.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
Mimesis has longevity on its side. But Oasis wrote two of the greatest pop songs of all time, each with lyrics that mean less and less the more you think about them. So I'm going to have to go with the Gallagher brothers.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.
Matthew Zapruder
Image
Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking particular to poetry is essential to my life. I need to think, to explore, to question, in poetry. Without that feeling, I am, in some ultimate way, lost.
Matthew Zapruder