Interview with Matthew Zapruder
“…where this is writingMatthew 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.
imagine a future
of equally bright hours
as the one I did
with me in it.”
-Matthew Zapruder, “Kill Van Kull,” from The Pajamaist
The following is an interview from an online exchange that took place between 10/9 and 10/13/07. Questions by Jillian Koopman.
Q: You seem to reference the future and past a lot in your work, as well 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, and how they seem to throw us both forward and backwards within themselves. How does time, or the concept of time, play into your work?
A: I'm afraid of time, because it takes me farther from people in the past from whom I have separated, and closer to the moments when I will inevitably have to part from or be parted from everyone I love. I also am grateful to time because the longer I've been in it the closer I have neared a true and authentic and truly appreciative relationship both to my own life and to the people and things with which I am lucky enough to be surrounded. Which just makes it sadder that time 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 feel being inextricably bound up in it. It may be that this preoccupation with something so inevitably part of all of our lives is what gives my poems whatever value they have to those who choose to read them.
Q: How much of your poetry develops from questions that you have? Do you feel by the end of the poem that something has been answered?
A: I don't know about answered, but maybe deepened? I usually start with a question, maybe not a specific one (though sometimes), but more like a field of possibility that seems worth exploring. The more literal this field is the better (sometimes it's even an actual field!). Sometimes it's worth exploring, most of the time it 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 the years of writing I've gotten a little better at being able to see those moments of possibility that actually have something in them, and to reject those moments that 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 a state 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 to a lecture. So along the way we know more about some questions, and have 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." How do 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." Song lyrics can sometimes say something a poem never could, mainly because there is all that musical context providing additional emotional information, that allows a 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 world than I used to be, physically, as I get older? So I'm preoccupied with other things? But I'm not sure.
We probably all spend our whole lives getting used to having a body until it's not important any more.
Q: Do you feel more comfortable expressing yourself in the broken, spaced out line (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 one of these directions?
A: Thank you for paying so much attention to my work! I don't have much control in a sense over those "decisions," mostly because for me form is a pure expression of emotional necessity (of the speaker in the poem, not mine). That is, the speaker in the poem emerges to a great extent not only through what he is saying but how he is saying it, and the challenge and pleasure of writing is 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 intertwined with 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 that is caring about something, I struggle for some period of time (sometimes a few minutes, sometimes days or weeks or months or years) to find the right way of putting words down that allows that speaker to be authentically alive in the poem. When I feel comfortable I know I have found the right solution. But I try not to have any preconceptions about how the poem ought to look, in relation to other poems I have written or what I imagine I am or should be doing. The voice 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 famous passage from William Carlos Williams's introduction to his 1944 book, The Wedge: "As in all machines its [poetry's] movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which is arises."
In other words, the poem is a kind of organic machine that arises to "do" what is 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—what would you say about this?
A: I generally object very strenuously to the use of commercial terminology in relation 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 have about the possibility of communication in poetry is in fact a strength (maybe even my essential quality as a writer) and not in the least a sign of my inauthenticity as 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's impossible, that we will be always fundamentally misunderstood, alone. I feel it is most honest for me as a poet to at least sometimes admit in the poem that I am worried or afraid that what I want so desperately (communication, human connection, mutual understanding) will not be attained here in the poem, for whatever reasons.
Paradoxically, that admission can be precisely what makes a human connection with the reader, and breaks through all the unfortunate apparatus that surrounds "poetry" and keeps us from just reading and being read to. I am sure I have these desires and fears in common with all other humans on the planet. And I believe in poetry that as much as the writer wants connection the reader 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 as language experts have a deep unconscious sense of its power and possibility, and we don't want to be communicated with 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 tenuousness of language and poetry, which is something I believe I have in common with my readers.
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 out of an actual dream I had. So the story I tell is to some extent "true," at least in 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 before and has not happened since. This was pretty shocking since I was in the middle of a particularly sad time in my life. The title is a kind of parody of all of those -ist novels that have come out over the past several years, but also in this case feels very genuine and resonant to me as well (something that was merely ironic 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 for others; what it would mean if that process were commodified by a pharmaceutical company; the exaggeration of the paranoia that we feel as corporations infiltrate every aspect of our lives; the sad comedy of our inability to make sense of our own suffering in relation to that of others; and the sort of science-fiction-y process of imagining a utopian society in which we found a solution to the "problem" of suffering... all those things started to happen as I let myself imagine the landscape in 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 for a novel. It was a lot of fun to write, and somehow ended up as I said above echoing a lot of the things I was thinking about at the time, which also of course were finding 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 writing feels 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 everyday lives.
I also think even though it is in prose, this piece of writing moves in a fundamentally poetic way, that is associatively. This essential quality (without which the writing would have no value) distinguishes it from fiction or other kinds of prose.
I first started calling the book The Pajamaist because I thought it was kind of unbelievable, but the more I called it that the more I realized it was the right title. I think that you know the title of your book if you can say it out loud to other people with only modest cringing. I was expecting my editor to 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 me laugh.
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.
