KARAN

Thank you, Matthew, I love your voice so much. The first poem here follows a long-standing tradition — it’s reminiscent of Rilke, Mahmoud Darwish, Robert Wrigley. You write: “People talk about flowers / all the time just like / they talk about nuns / and pianos but hardly / anyone can explain exactly / what they are for.” Here, you’re touching on the ineffable nature of poetry itself. I think I’m starting with the hardest question ever: what is it about poetry that appeals to you? What pushes you to write? Or if it’s easier, what was it that made you turn to poetry when you were starting out?

MATTHEW

Thank you, Karan. Yes, that is the hardest question! What has always appealed to me about poetry is that for whatever reason when I am writing a poem, I have the sense that if I keep searching, I can discover something that can eventually feel essential. Not “understand” but “feel,” with my emotions and my mind and a gut sense that something matters.

KARAN

Even though you write in such a colloquial way, I love your occasional lyricism. “February” ends with the striking image: “the final beam of sunlight / has wandered onto my forehead.” Your poems often blend the mundane with the profound. How did you cultivate this ability to find poetry in everyday moments? I also really like your endings. “Palanquin” reflects on childhood reading experiences, ending with “I'm still not sure how it should sound / it's like one of those names you see / carved into a stone in those old graveyards / you can find in every city if you have enough time.” Would you walk us through your writing process? How do you begin, write and finish a poem? Where do your poems come from? 

MATTHEW

Oh dear. Another hard question! I wrote a whole book about this, where I write one poem from start to finish. But that was only one example of how I do it. Within that book there are multiple examples, and lots of others, many of which I cut. I realized that I (and any writer or artist) could go on forever giving examples of how they made something. I’d love to read a book like that by anyone.

I guess if I had to generalize, I would say when I sit down to work, whatever I begin with, whether it’s an idea or a word or a desire to say something someone or just a nameless feeling, I try to be as open as possible to suggestion from language itself (which I believe is a kind of knowledge, historical as well as musical) while also retaining a loose and ever shifting (at least until I find the end of the poem) grip on what you could call an “idea,” or what the poem is “about.” Though I do not love that word “about” when it comes to poetry, because it feels as if it privileges conscious knowledge over the intuitive. Most of the time when one of my poems goes wrong it is less because I have already decided what I think, and more because I don’t yet have any real sense yet (yet!) of why what I am writing matters or is interesting, so there is no center, just a lot of language. And no matter how interesting or exciting language is, at some point for me if it’s not communicating something, reaching out to at least one other consciousness, it ultimately feels narcissistic and boring. 

KARAN

“Assistant Professor Song” presents a critique of academia with lines like “I am leaving / my job as assistant / caretaker of everything / that will only matter / after it has been approved / by the standing committee / of associate ghouls.” How has your experience in academia influenced your poetry? I see the accessibility of your poems as a direct response to the obscurity of academic language. Do you see your work as a form of resistance to institutional constraints?

MATTHEW

Luckily I had been a poet for quite a while before I got a full-time academic job, and became a real professor (now if that isn’t the perfect example of an oxymoron . . . ). I wrote that poem at the end of a truly ludicrous academic kerfuffle, during which banality battled to a bloodless draw with stupefying pettiness. But like I said, I had been a poet for a while before bullshit like that started to happen in my life, so I don’t think the way I write is a response to being in academia per se. Anyway, thankfully most of the people I teach with closely are other creative writers who are impervious to jargon. 

I have always loved simple words and a direct style in language, while at the same time really aspiring to a hopeful wildness of thought that I associate most closely with French and Spanish and Latin American surrealists. It has little to do with institutions, predating my professional association with them, and everything to do with sharing the same desperate hope of the surrealists that we could somehow reunite what we think of as “reality” and “dream,” in order to heal ourselves and stop doing violence to ourselves and others and the natural world.

I also have to say that the writers who have meant the most to me besides poets are musicians. I learned just as much about writing from Johnny Cash as from poets. No one ever doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.

KARAN

The humor of “Assistant Professor Song” isn’t lost on me. It’s hilarious, really, in a mock-heroic “The Rape of the Lock” way. I love how your poems often incorporate elements of humor alongside more serious themes. Only when I started interviewing poets, I realized that all my favorite poets are deeply funny — Bob Hicok, Leigh Chadwick, Mary Ruefle, Luke Kennard — and at once grave. I was wondering how you view the role of humor in poetry, particularly when addressing weighty subjects? Is humor a defense mechanism here, or the ax that helps you dig into the frozen sea of sadness, or something else entirely?

MATTHEW

Yeah, that seems to be exactly it. Dig into, dig out of, dig around in. Or just dig. Also, all you can do most of the time is laugh at stuff. I’d like my poems to at least contribute to some pleasurable feelings along with whatever else is going on. God knows we deserve at least a few chortles. Most of my favorite poets have always been funny, at least mordantly so. 

KARAN

Death often crops up in your work, whether in the background or as the center of the poem. In “The Death Poems of Ulalume González de León,” you write, “lots of poets / speak to the dead / or so they say / but who dies / on purpose / so she can speak / to the living.” This seems to invert the usual idea of elegies, the poets addressing the dead. How do you view the relationship between poetry and mortality in your work? Is death a preoccupation for you?

MATTHEW

I mean yeah, isn’t it for everyone? It’s the old news that just keeps on being shocking. When my father died rather young (more and more so it seems to me) of a horrific brain tumor, it took me a while to start writing again. When I did, I wrote the poems that eventually ended up in Come on All You Ghosts, my third book. It was, as third books so often seem to be if people can hang on that long, a big leap forward for me. Some subjects that had been latent became explicit, especially dying. It just seemed like I finally was able to metabolize some things that had just been abstract fears before. So I just started writing poems and saying stuff that was very direct. 

As far as the poem you are referring to, this poet is one who has recently and wonderfully been translated in three volumes, and I just love her poems. In the second volume in particular she really does seem to be speaking to us from a place of recent death, and often when reading I could actually feel her presence, like she was breathing right behind me, but in a dead way. 

KARAN

Your poem about Rilke seems to challenge some poetic conventions, stating “I don't want to hear about translucent stones / or precisely how much anyone desires / to be near the great secret of death.” What is your relationship with tradition? Do you find yourself in dialogue with or in opposition to certain poetic legacies? I’m also thinking of “Elegy for Tuesday:” “you can read her book / and still find / the door to the past / and yes the war / survived her / but not her poems.” I see multiple tributes in these poems? What is it about the “after poem” that has its hold on you? Are you paying some kind of a debt? My sincere apologies for asking multiple questions at once.

MATTHEW

I love Rilke, but I also get mad at him sometimes, because he just cannot let anything alone. So that poem was just following a certain frustration about poetry in general. In another poem I wrote for the great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who famously wrote an essay called “Against Poets,” part of his lifelong diary project, I wrote “your voice will be there/ saying poets are enemies/ of anything real,/ poets think flowers/ love them/ and every pastry/ deserves an elegy.” This is the quality of poets, including myself, that can be really annoying, but of course it's also necessary, to treat everything like it is of equally massive importance. 

My relationship to tradition is that I love it. Debt, despite its unfortunate financial provenance, is the right word. I have great friends who are poets and I adore their work. But like most of my contemporaries, I have read and thought about certain poets so much that they feel like surrogate parents.  So it is natural to me to look up from my desk and see a beam of sunlight touch the spine of one of their books and think, I feel now like expressing my gratitude, usually in the form of some unspooling enthusiasm that leads god knows where. I cannot relate to poets who say they don’t read anything after x date, or something like that. There’s so much wisdom and joy and love in the past, and I think rejecting it out of hand is just self punishment. 

KARAN

If I show these poems without your name affixed to them, anyone familiar with your work would instantly be able to tell that these are Matthew Zapruder’s poems. You have a distinct voice, something all writers and poets and filmmakers and visual artists hope to create for themselves. I can tell your poems apart from others like I can do with my most favorite writers, the same way one can tell a Picasso painting from others. At once intimate, melancholic, nonchalant, inventive, rhythmic, tender, full-of-love, your voice magnificently captures the full range. Here’s a question about capital-V “Voice” — is poetic voice something one “finds”? If so, how did you find/construct yours? Is the work toward having a “unique poetic voice” a worthy occupation?

MATTHEW

In my experience, one starts out writing with a bit of originality, but mostly sounding like other people. That’s not always the case, but it is most of the time. And that’s fine. Like I said above, I think that as things started to happen to me in my life, the apprenticing I was doing to language, my enthusiasm to continually explore what language can do and what emotions and experiences can be found, made me ready to say what I needed to say when the time came. Hopefully that will continue to happen. 

I don’t know if I think originality is the most important thing. Sometimes I aspire to sound like something that could have been said not by anyone but anything. That is, I’d like to sound like the world talking through me. Maybe that is what gives my poems the feeling that you so kindly describe above as having “the full range.” I want to be able to say almost anything, though I do not gravitate toward the cruel or the tyrannical. Seems like those feelings have plenty of representatives already. 

KARAN

This next question has become a staple for us and I’m always delighted by the variation in the answers. So, there’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. I can, of course, see all these elements in your poems, as one would expect in a good poet. But I’d love to know where you feel you’re writing from. And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

MATTHEW

Soul. And if I’m moving anywhere, I’d like it to be toward music, literal and metaphorical. 

KARAN

We recently made a point of asking seasoned poets for advice for young writers. You’ve had books published that are so well-acclaimed, and you’re a professor and the editor at large of Wave Books (my most favorite poetry press!) What is something you’d like to say to young writers, as way of advice or caveats?

MATTHEW

I am struggling to find a way to answer this question that will not seem annoying or patronizing. In the end, poetry cannot be a career. Nor can it be a platform, or a brand. Those things may get you someplace in the short term, like to money or jobs or a little bit of poetry fame (another oxymoron). Of course almost all of us need money and jobs, so I would never criticize anyone who is trying to get those things (within ethical bounds of course). But if that is the goal, it will not be satisfying. It’s not enough. The only solution is to give up on getting anything for your writing, and to push everything as far as you can, in whatever direction you feel deep inside your (yes) soul really, truly matters. If you are doing that, you will be ok, whether you are a professor or a baker. 

That’s why people can say whatever they want to me about my writing and I truly don’t care, because I know I have done whatever I can do to make it as true as possible. If someone has constructive advice, I will always listen. But if someone says, I don’t like what you made, I can just say (or think) that was the only option! So maybe you will like the next thing, or maybe not. But there is not that much I can do about it. I write for the ancients, for my beloved peers, and for the ideal reader, and I hope that whatever I do is somehow additive and full of love.