![]() Much of this book involves your relationship with your son, which recalls your father’s presence in Why Poetry. Also, pronouns are a big subject of the book, so putting that issue right up front made sense. I wasn’t sure whether it would feel off-putting or odd, but it was clear this was the only way I could write a preface to this very personal book. Once I wrote that, everything came with ease. So I thought, OK, I’ll just write that down and see what happens. In despair, I remembered I had gone to a craft talk by the novelist and memoirist Rachel Howard where she said that every story begins with “once upon a time,” even if that is most of the time just implied. I wrote at least 20 different versions of the introduction, each worse than the last. But I could not figure out how to explain what it was I was going to do that was not either pompous on the one hand or too personal and obscure on the other. I tried to write that preface so many different ways, each uniquely terrible. So I knew I needed to set up the premise: that I was going to start writing a poem from a first draft and write about that process, and my life. People who read early versions of the book found it very confusing without some kind of introduction. Can you talk about the decision to start that way? Story of a Poem begins in third person before shifting, for the most part, to first. Recently, we corresponded over email about Story of a Poem the poet’s first book of prose, Why Poetry and the overlapping and related questions that emerge throughout his work. Zapruder and I are old friends we have been talking about life and literature for many years. In that sense, Story of a Poem is a book in conversation-with itself, of course, but also with the whole of Zapruder’s writing, which is remarkable for its sense of movement and discovery. It’s not the first time Zapruder has approached such material it emerged in his 2019 collection of poetry, Father’s Day. Relying, for a spine, on the process of creating a single poem, the book features drafts and critical commentary as a way of opening to a deeper, more elusive narrative: the author’s experience as the father of a neurodivergent son. If it seems that the world is unable to live by them, then at least we can continue to repeat them, as a way of showing an affirming flame.M atthew Zapruder’s second book of prose, Story of a Poem, interweaves craft and memoir, poetry and essay, to make something that defies form and genre…or better yet, reimagines them. Why? Because they are still relevant, still powerful, still important. ![]() Sixty-two years later those lines were being sent round the world through the internet (I think Auden would have approved) in the wake of another September catastrophe. Later in that year he would write a poem commemorating the start of WWII on September 1st. Auden wrote those lines for Yeats in 1939. It is language and discourse (and poetry) that make us civil. Words are not guns, but they can fire the imaginations of those who carry them.Īnd conversely, words can provide solace in times of financial despair and continuing war. ![]() The shock jocks, the teabaggers, the birthers are fighting their campaign with words – angry, bilious words. ![]() Congressman Grijalva said it is ‘civility that is needed in both our discourse and our debate.’ He went on to say ‘words have meaning’ it is the discourse of hatred that has brought about the horrendous state of affairs in America today. I thought of Auden and that poem this morning while listening to Congressman Raúl Grijalva on the radio talking about ‘civility’ in the wake of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Auden was writing in memoriam to Yeats, whose ‘gift survived it all’, whose political commitment was never separate from his poetry, whose poetry is still spoken and read today. It is a way of finding meaning, keeping sane in the modern world. What Auden is really saying is that poetry isn’t like gunfire or a bomb blast, it cannot change the world beyond recognition (like war can) but it survives violence and strife to give us something to believe in when it is hard to believe there is anything left. Raw towns that we believe and die in it survives, Would never want to tamper, flows on southįrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, In the valley of its making where executives Here are the lines in full, from ‘In Memory of W.B Yeats’:įor poetry makes nothing happen: it survives That oft-quoted line of Auden’s came into my head again this morning. ![]()
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