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Interview with Matthew Zapruder
by Jillian Koopman
“…where this is writing
imagine a future
of equally bright hours
as the one I did
with me in it.”
-Matthew Zapruder, “Kill Van Kull,” from The Pajamaist Matthew Zapruder was born in Washington D.C. in 1967 and received his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He currently lives in New York City and is an editor with Wave Books. He has published two books: American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002), which won the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize, and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006). His poems have appeared in a number of publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Fence, The Canary, Jubilat, Boston Review, Open City, New York Quarterly, and Bomb.
The following is an interview from an online exchange that took place between 10/9 and 10/13/07.
Q: You seem to reference the future and past a lot in your work, aswell as sometimes playing with the idea of the "snapshot" in time, and how we can move into and out of it (specifically in "Ten Questions For Mona").This is also reflected in the language and structure of many of your poems, andhow they seem to throw us both forward and backwards within themselves. How doestime, or the concept of time, play into your work?
A: I'm afraid of time, because it takes me farther from people in thepast from whom I have separated, and closer to the moments when I will inevitablyhaveto part from or be parted from everyone I love. I also am grateful to time becausethe longer I've been in it the closer I have neared a true and authentic andtruly appreciative relationship both to my own life and to the people and thingswith which I am lucky enough to be surrounded. Which just makes it sadder thattime is going to keep taking me and everyone else away. Time is a constant preoccupation.Most of my poems probably have something to do with the love and sorrow I feelbeing inextricably bound up in it. It may be that this preoccupation with somethingso inevitably partof all of our lives is what gives my poems whatever value they have to thosewho choose to read them.
Q: How much of your poetry develops from questions that you have? Do you feelby the end of the poem that something has been answered?
A: I don't know about answered, but maybe deepened? I usually startwith a question, maybe not a specific one (though sometimes), but more like afield of possibilitythat seems worth exploring. The more literal this field is the better (sometimesit's even an actual field!). Sometimes it's worth exploring, most of the timeit isn't, but if I sit and work long enough something will start to happen.
That makes it sound like I start with an idea. I don't. Usually it's an impulse,or maybe just a situation or collection of words that seems promising. Over theyears of writing I've gotten a little better at being able to see those momentsof possibility that actually have something in them, and to reject those momentsthat might seem cool or interesting but are actually just shallow and boring.
I don't personally believe the end of the poem needs to be characterized by astate of relatively greater understanding of the initial question or set of concerns.Rather, I think that along the way there are various states of understanding,openings-up of new concerns that emerge from what was being talked about before,etc. Sort of like how a conversation with a friend might move, as opposed toa lecture. So along the way we know more about some questions, andhave some new ones.
I ended a recent poem with the following lines;
"it has been a hidden pleasure but mostly an awful pain talking to you
with a voice that pretends to be shy and actually is, always in search of
the question that might make you ask me one in return."
Q: You said in an online interview once that you're still struggling to "get used to having a body." Howdo you think this idea translates/has translated to your most recent work?
A: I think I also quoted the Velvet Underground: "Candy says, I've come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world." Songlyrics can sometimes say something a poem never could, mainly because there isall that musical context providing additional emotional information, that allowsa singer to pursue partial meanings that wouldn't be as palpable to the reader,or would just sound stupid or false, in the context of silence.
But that's not what you asked. Um, I think maybe I'm more at ease in the worldthan I used to be, physically, as I get older? So I'm preoccupied with otherthings? But I'm not sure.
We probably all spend our whole lives getting used to having a body until it'snot important any more.
Q: Do you feel more comfortable expressing yourself in the broken, spaced outline (like in Kill Van Kull) or in what I would characterize as a tumbling thought(a la There is a Light)? Do you feel like your work is tending to move in oneof these directions?
A: Thank you for paying so much attention to my work! I don't have muchcontrol in a sense over those "decisions," mostly because for me form is a pureexpression of emotional necessity (of the speaker in the poem, not mine). Thatis, the speaker in the poem emerges to a great extent not only through what heis saying but how he is saying it, and the challenge and pleasure of writingis for me to find the way of allowing the words on the page (spacing, syntax,diction, etc.) to assemble themselves in ways that seems inevitably intertwinedwith the needs and personality of this emergent speaking voice. These choices,in my case, are invariably instinctive and not conceptual.
To put it simply, I sit down and write and if it seems like a voice emerges thatis caring about something, I struggle for some period of time (sometimes a fewminutes, sometimes days or weeks or months or years) to find the right way ofputting words down that allows that speaker to be authentically alive in thepoem. When I feel comfortable I know I have found the right solution. But I trynot to have any preconceptions about how the poem ought to look, in relationto other poems I have written or what I imagine I am or should be doing. Thevoice in the poem absolutely must feel full and alive and human to me.
After I wrote this answer I once again came across the following very famouspassage from William Carlos Williams's introduction to his 1944 book, The Wedge: "Asin all machines its [poetry's] movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical morethan a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each caseby the character of the speech from which is arises."
In other words, the poem is a kind of organic machine that arises to "do" whatis necessary given whatever the voice that is speaking needs it to.
Q: Sometimes I feel that you "buy" poetry and sometimes not—your poems seem to both question the genre and reaffirm it. It seems like every now and then you are having an argument with poetry on the page, or at the very least that the argument is there—whatwould you say about this?
A: I generally object very strenuously to the use of commercial terminologyinrelation to poetry. Especially since we essentially don't get paid to do it,so at the very least we should be spared that kind of language. Ha ha.
However, I know what you mean, and I think your question is exceedingly perceptive.I think it took me a long time to realize that the deeply felt doubts I haveabout the possibility of communication in poetry is in fact a strength (maybeeven my essential quality as a writer) and not in the least a sign of my inauthenticityas a poet.
It's difficult to communicate. And we all know that in a deep way. Our fear,whether or not we are conscious of it, is that we won't be able to, or that it'simpossible, that we will be always fundamentally misunderstood, alone. I feelit is most honest for me as a poet to at least sometimes admit in the poem thatI am worried or afraid that what I want so desperately (communication, humanconnection, mutual understanding) will not be attained here in the poem, forwhatever reasons.
Paradoxically, that admission can be precisely what makes a human connectionwith the reader, and breaks through all the unfortunate apparatus that surrounds "poetry" andkeeps us from just reading and being read to.I am sure I have these desires and fears in common with all other humans on theplanet. And I believe in poetry that as much as the writer wants connection thereader does as well, whether or not he/ she knows.
Incidentally, I think this is why poetry is dismissed and mocked in our culture:not only because it (understandably) fails so often, but because all of us aslanguage experts have a deep unconscious sense of its power and possibility,and we don't want to be communicatedwith so intimately.
So I don't think it's so much that I'm having an argument on the page with poetry.I think I am trying to be honest and acknowledge my consciousness of the tenuousnessof language and poetry, which is something I believe I have in common with myreaders.
Q: What inspired you to take the form that you did in the poem, "The Pajamaist?" Also,what made you call the collection The Pajamaist?
A: The main character (the Pajamaist) and situation came directly outof an actual dream I had. So the story I tell is to some extent "true," at leastin the sense that it's somewhat based on a real event that happened in my life.I actually had that dream, and then woke up laughing, which had never beforeand has not happened since. This was pretty shocking since I was in the middleof a particularly sad time in my life. The title is a kind of parody of all ofthose -ist novels that have come out over the past several years, but also inthis case feels very genuine and resonant to me as well (something that was merelyironic or funny wouldn't end up sitting very well with me I don't think).
The ideas that there could emerge a person who figures out a way to suffer forothers; what it would mean if that process were commodified by a pharmaceuticalcompany; the exaggeration of the paranoia that we feel as corporations infiltrateevery aspect of our lives; the sad comedy of our inability to make sense of ourown suffering in relation to that of others; and the sort of science-fiction-yprocess of imagining a utopian society in which we found a solution to the "problem" ofsuffering... all those things started to happen as I let myself imagine the landscapein which the character finds himself, writing in a mock essayistic style.
It never occurred to me to write a lineated poem in response to this impulse.I just started writing this kind of fake essay which turned into a synopsis fora novel. It was a lot of fun to write, and somehow ended up as I said above echoinga lot of the things I was thinking about at the time, which also of course werefinding their way into and drifting among the poems I was writing in the book.So the poems and this piece of prose seemed to belong together.
In my opinion "truth" in literature has a lot more to do with how close the writingfeels to our concerns as humans, than with how believable the events in it are,or how much they seem like something that might happen to us in our everydaylives.
I also think even though it is in prose, this piece of writing moves in a fundamentallypoetic way, that is associatively. This essential quality (without which thewriting would have no value) distinguishes it from fiction or other kinds ofprose.
I first started calling the book The Pajamaist because I thought it waskind of unbelievable, but the more I called it that the more I realized it wasthe right title. I think that you know the title of your book if you can sayit out loud to other people with only modest cringing. I was expecting my editorto tell me it was ridiculous, but thankfully he liked it as much as I did.
The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence . . .
1) Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A. Lidija Dimkovska
2) What kind of child were you?
A. Sullen.
3) What is your relationship with rejection like?
A. I used to fear being destroyed by it but now it kind of makes melaugh.
4) What book did you suffer for the most, and why?
A. James Schuyler's Collected Poems, because I felt myself feeling in
every instant I was reading it.
5) What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A. How much fun it is when I write every day, without exception.
6) What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A. My tendency to pace in bare feet and brutally stub my toe over and
over again on the same chair leg.
Lastly . . . (one random fact to top it off)
What did you have for lunch today?
A. Coffee, onion soup with one egg in it, and the unrequited desire for a cigarette.
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