ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Matthew Zapruder
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and
writing part of that mix?
I grew up outside of Washington D.C., with no poetry anywhere near me. I never
really knew what a poem was, or thought about making them, until I had written a
few without any idea what I was doing. It was a long process for me to shed the
received idea that politics and business are what's really "important," and that
art is primarily for decoration or entertainment or some kind of vague
edification. It took me well into my 20's to even start thinking of myself as a
poet, and not until I was in my 30's did I finally stop feeling as if I really
should be doing something else. Now I can't imagine my life without poetry,
making it and reading it: it seems like the one constant uncorruptible grace
among many many of the world's failures.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other
things that inform your work?
I've always loved music, especially rock and roll: I can't help but think
that the spirit and structure of The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Pavement, The Beatles,
Guided By Voices, R.E.M., The Pixies, Neil Young, Public Enemy, Bob Dylan, Hank
Williams, Johnny Cash, The Jam, Leonard Cohen, Will Oldham, Nick Drake, Nirvana,
and all the other ways that I first and most often experienced the arrangement
of words into something more than useful communication packages has influenced
me more than anything else. Lately I listen to a ton of Wilco, Guided by
Voices, Nina Nastasia, Vic Chesnutt, and Built to Spill, just to name a few. I
think that the more confident I get as a poet, the more I'm able to incorporate
the spirit of the music I love in an organic way into my poems, as opposed to
just indie rock name dropping.
I've also been a musician for a long time -- I play lead guitar in a couple of
bands, and love to contribute directly and without much conversation to
the songs of writers I really respect (specifically Thane Thomsen of The
Figments and Mark Mulcahy, formerly of Miracle Legion, now solo). When playing
music, I think a lot about restraint, the primacy of the song, the relationship
of the texture of the sounds coming out of the guitar to the notes I'm playing
and the song in which they are appearing, and so on. I have no idea what that
has to do with poetry, perhaps something.
Painting is another obsession, though I'm no expert. Right now I'm reading the
journals of Eugene Delacroix. I'm particularly fascinated with artists
like Cezanne, Kandinsky, and Van Gogh who operated on the borders between
abstraction and representation. This seems profoundly related to poetry, which
is a discipline that can never descend fully into abstraction or gesture,
because words always (thankfully) mean something. I love to read what painters
have to say about their work, as much as I like to look at their paintings
(terrible, I know). I think that Van Gogh's letters are among the great works
of literature ever written, and essential for artists, not to mention human
beings.
3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poet become part of your everyday
life?
As I said, not until late. I began writing sporadically in my 20's, when I
went to UC Berkeley to get a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures. I left
after passing my exams and getting my Masters, in order to get an MFA in poetry
at UMass Amherst. I suppose it was sometime during those years that I began to
incorporate poetry into my everyday life, truly: the example of the poets James
Tate and Dara Wier, who live poetry and let poetry live in them, was something
it took me years to aspire to. Now I do the best I can.
I think when my first book came out, when I was 33, was when I finally felt
comfortable calling myself a professional poet. Now I am revealed as the
horrible bourgeois that I am.
4) How does your work with VERSE and your editing work effect your poetry?
I get to read a lot of amazing stuff, and also am exposed to a ton of crap.
I think that I have learned the most from the relationships that I've developed
with authors that we've published: some of them have become my best friends, and
my everyday life as a poet is intimately intertwined with theirs. Often I think
that's the biggest blessing that has come from starting Verse Press. Also,
there is a terrific community of poets in Western Massachusetts (where the
office of the press is: everyday operations are run by the poet Lori Shine,
Managing Editor of the press), many of whom volunteer their time and energy
without any compensation other than the occasional free book or pizza. I feel
optimistic and happy when I'm around those folks, and see how much they care
about poetry and the press: it makes me feel like we all have the ability to
cultivate a little garden somewhere, and that not everything is tracts of fucked
up commerce and bullshit.
5) What is your favorite food?
As a child I used to ask my mother to make meatloaf for me on my birthday
every year, whether out of love for it or spite for my siblings I cannot say.
6) Sports Team? or Activity?
The Boston Red Sox, the San Francisco Baseball Giants, the Washington
Redskins. Sports talk radio. Playing guitar. Reading graphic novels.
Listening to a baseball game on the radio. Driving by myself.
7) Vacation spot?
I love going to Ljubljana (Slovenia) to visit my poet friends, I feel so
marvelously central European and hopeful to drink tea and beer by the canals in
a country where their main central square is dominated by a statue of a poet,
Preserin.
8) Curse word?
Bitchcakes, as in "You really went bitchcakes on that poor guy, didn't you?"
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry and organic or synthetic process for
you?
In some ways in my mind those two terms mean something opposite: that is,
organic being natural, synthetic being artificial. In which case I would say
both, that is I often put things together in a deliberately artificial way
(through collage, out of found materials and from my own journals and thoughts),
until it starts to feel organic. I guess I feel like a poem should feel
organic, with all the energy and destabilization of something that is clearly
synthetic.
On the other hand I also think of the two terms as being sort of the same: that
is, they both are terms that are talking about the quality of how things are
constructed, or have come to be. A poem is something that's of primary interest
because it's a made object: someone made it, yet it feels like a part of
everything that has always existed. So both again. Hmmm.
2) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits
when you write?
Sometimes I write in public places, like a cafe where there is talking and
music, or someplace where there's a lot of movement. Other times I like to bang
away on my manual typewriter (a Royal portable that belonged to my grandfather),
because I love it as an object, in the same way that I love my guitars. So yes
ambiance, rituals and habits are extremely important, mostly in terms of sound
and texture, not visually: but I have a lot of them and am reasonably flexible
about which ones I submit myself to, probably out of necessity, because I have
an exceptionally peripatetic lifestyle.
3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your
work fall?
Hopefully, in some graceful region. Some of my poems are composed entirely
of found language (for instance, my new book The Pajamaist has a lot of
correctly and incorrectly attributed song lyrics, phrases hear in conversation
or on the radio, and even an entire poem made of lines and phrases from two
horoscopes of a particular day from a Chicago newspaper). Others are
constructed of language that I find from various writings that I've done over
days, months, hours. I think of myself more and more as a collagist (is that a
word?), and make very little distinction among the
materials I feel like I need to use at any given moment. Mainly I'm just
grateful for whatever gives me that electric feeling of hey, all right, now
here's
something that has poetry in it, now let's get to work.
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