Matthew Zapruder Quotes

Quotes about:

• A poem is like a person. The more you know someone, the more you realize there is always something more to know and understand. A final understanding could probably only begin upon permanent separation, or death. This is why we come back to certain poems, as we do to places or people, to experience and re-experience, to see ourselves for who we truly are, and to continue to be changed.

  Matthew Zapruder

  People, Understanding, Separation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, even if it's just for a few moments.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Thinking, Different, Moments

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I personally believe the role of poets as poets (which is something different from our obligations as citizens, community members, humans) is to write poems. I believe this because I am quite sure poetry can do something no other form or writing, or human activity, can, at least not in such a powerful and distilled and undeniable way. And that we need this type of thinking for our survival as individuals and as a species.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Powerful, Believe, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't want to set up a straw man here: I understand that for many poets - and for me, at times - writing truly means writing in a way that is difficult, simply because the poem is trying to grasp for something elusive. So the difficulty of the poem is just unavoidable, and not in any way artificially imposed. So "as possible" is the key part of the phrase above, I suppose.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Mean, Writing, Men

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Wife, My Family, My Wife

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Milton on speed. I am going to need about a decade to think about that. That delay in syntax, the putting off of the click of the sentence into itself, is something that has always intrigued me. I love the emotional effect of it, and never want it to be merely a gesture. Sometimes I try it and it doesn't work, so I have to put the poem aside, and try again, more simply and more strange.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Emotional, Thinking, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Imagination, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every moment to nameless abysses, and the way language itself is beautifully, tragically, thrillingly insufficient...these are some of the engines that drive the poem. It's natural to want to turn away from these things. But we have to face them, as best we can, at least sometimes. Poetry can help us in that nearly impossible work.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Helping, Impossible, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I see sad crushed plastic
  everywhere and put
  some thoughts composed
  of words that do not
  belong together
  together and feel
  a little digital hope.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Together, Littles, Digital

  Matthew Zapruder (2013). “Come on All You Ghosts”, p.15, Copper Canyon Press

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Choices, Purpose, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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 books.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Real, Book, Reading

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It is absolutely vital to preserve a space where the mind, by means of poetic thinking, can move in a free, even anarchic, way. It must do so, in order to find deep truths that would not be otherwise available, ones that we desperately need. Anyone who writes poetry knows what I'm talking about, because they've had the experience of thinking this way.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Moving, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Always in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return

  Matthew Zapruder

  Might, Return, Ask Me

  Matthew Zapruder (2013). “Come on All You Ghosts”, p.6, Copper Canyon Press

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Mean, Errors

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There is all this stuff about how sensitive poets are and how in touch with feelings, etc. they are, but really all we care about is language. At least in the initial stages of the process of writing the poem, though later other things start to come in, and a really good poem usually needs something more than just an interest in the material of language to mean anything to a reader.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Writing, Mean, Feelings

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Names, Imagination

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Stupid, Mean, Hunting

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Not that I play guitar anywhere near as well as she sings, but I think I have always had a tendency to play solos the same way, in emotional relation to the structure of the song. I choose simple lines, and only play what seems emotionally relevant, and often express that emotion in time, that is in play or resistance to the set time of the song.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Song, Simple, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require a deeper concentration than is usually demanded of us. So that, right off the bat, is a little difficult. Then there is the deeper issue of what poetry is really asking of us. I feel it is asking us to read with great, even sacred, care and attention. That, too, is difficult. It requires discipline and the creation of a temporary zone of privacy, which is inimical to our current conditions of life.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Thinking, Discipline, Attention

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Song, Brother, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Believe, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Relation, Feels, Bits

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Zoos, Sadness, Oakland

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Song, Thinking, Voice

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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