Replay: Matthew Zapruder shares Five Things He's Learned about Honoring Family as a Source of Creativity
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
"My practice is bound up in the ability to slow myself down, as a father and a writer, and to consider the mechanisms by which we render experience into language, and are thereby as writers and readers changed."
– Matthew Zapruder, Five Things I’ve Learned about Honoring Family as a Source of Creativity
Matthew Zapruder is a breathtaking poet, translator, professor, and editor. His recent books include the justly celebrated Father's Day and Why Poetry. He also edits contemporary poetry at Wave Books, which he co-founded.
His most recent work, the deeply moving Story of a Poem offers a personal, unguarded examination of his struggle to transform a moment of feeling into verse. There's nothing quite like it. Matthew's meditation on the demands and opportunities of his craft is as moving and breathtaking as his poetry itself.
Matthew’s moving conversation with Steve Almond, Five Things I’ve Learned about Honoring Family as a Source of Creativity shares the ways in which Matthew honors his family as a source of creative inspiration, and also how he contends with anxieties about exposure and with being truthful. Together with Steve, Matthew details his sense of the ways that art transforms the impulse to explore, create, imagine, dream, and understand – an impulse he believes is shared among writers, artists, and creators of all kinds.
And also, Matthew reads and talks in detail about two remarkable, recent poems, including “My Grandmother’s Dictionary.” We’ve re-presented it here to offer the moving power and precision of Matthew’s great writing:
My Grandmother’s Dictionary
– Matthew Zapruder
It must have arrived in the hands
of a salesman whose name
shall remain unrecorded. Let’s
call him the handsome stranger.
She saw him through the little
window next to the door
and knew although she did not
believe she believed in such
things she had loved him
in a former life. She gave him
a glass of her legendary tea
and let him go. My grandfather
was upstairs in the immaculate
attic where after they died
I found this typewriter
sleeping among old blueprints.
During the war he diagrammed
routes so trucks of soldiers
could arrive precisely in time
to wait for their orders. Or
he worked in parts. I don’t
remember. I can only picture
that afternoon he told me
exactly who he had been,
I hear the resigned
tone but not what he said,
I was as is my nature staring
out the kitchen window
thinking some great hypothesis
that could easily be disproved,
that day now lost in the book
no one can ever turn
around and read. This was
in a little town that was a harbor,
its restaurant a windmill
replica turning in no wind.
We never asked her why she
always stood in the darkest
part of any room. Once
she looked up from her
eternal soup long enough to say
to me you really must remove
that terrible beard. What
is the name of that sort
of love? I want to look it up,
I think it comes from the latin
for not knowing the greek
for the particular quiet
of that afternoon I finally
gave in and picked up
the forbidden ceramic lion
from the shelf, it slipped
from my hands which already
as they do today trembled
and hit the very thick carpet
with a silent thud, exploding
into so many tiny pieces.
Out of the kitchen she came
with a broom and we both
pretended it was never there.
What is that sort of love?
The dictionary knows. I opened
it and found dust. I remember
it had a solitary gold stripe
across blue gray fabric like a dress
you wear only once, by the sea.
If you want to learn more about how one of our greatest poets balances his creative and family life, this class is for you.
The session is the first in our four-part series, Five Things I've Learned about How to Balance a Creative Life with a Family Life. Like each of the four sessions in the series, is for all kinds of creative people similarly interested in getting things right.
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