Matthew Zapruder is an American poet, editor, interpreter, and professor. He is also a guitarist in the rock band The Figments.
Background
Matthew Zapruder was born in 1967 in Washington, D. C., Columbia, United States; the son of Henry Zapruder. He has two siblings. There was a lot of music and appreciation for culture in their house. The family traveled a lot, around the United States and a couple of times to Europe, particularly France, which their parents loved.
Education
During a senior year at school Zapruder had to write a paper on a poet, and pretty much at random chose Wystan Hugh Auden. He completely fell in love with Auden's poems, especially “Musée des Beaux Arts.” He wrote a little bit of poetry in high school and college, but he never thought he was a poet. He wanted more to be a songwriter, but he was more interested in playing guitar than writing lyrics.
Zapruder earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian literature at Amherst College in 1989. Then in 1994, he received a Master of Arts degree in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He also received a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1999.
The most influential professors, he studied with, were Jane and Bill Taubman, David Sofield, Stephanie Sandler, Janet Gyatso, Dale Peterson, the late William Kennick, and others.
Career
Zapruder is the author of several collections of poetry, including Sun Bear (2014), Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). He collaborated with painter Chris Uphues on For You in Full Bloom (2009) and co-translated, with historian Radu Ioanid, Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (2008).
With Brian Henry, Zapruder cofounded Verse Press, which later became Wave Books. As an editor for Wave Books, Zapruder coedited, with Joshua Beckman, the political poetry anthology State of the Union: 50 Political Poems (2008). His own poems have been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2013, 2009), Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll (2007), and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), as well as Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (2010). His 2017 book is Why Poetry, a book of prose about reading poetry for a general audience. In 2019 his new book Father’s Day was published.
Zapruder’s poetry has been adapted by some of America’s most exciting young composers. In Fall, 2012, his poetry was adapted and performed at Carnegie Hall by Composer Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider. In February 2014, composer Missy Mazzoli, along with Victoire and Glenn Kotche, performed Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival, and released as a recording on New Amsterdam records in spring, 2015.
He has taught at New York University, the New School, University of Houston, the University of California Riverside - Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and at the University of California at Berkeley as the Holloway Fellow. Now he lives in Oakland, where he is an associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing from 2013, as well as an editor-at-large for Wave Books. He is also a guitarist in the rock band The Figments.
Views
Zapruder’s poems employ nuanced, conversational syntax to engage themes of grief, perception, and logic.
Quotations:
"The rhyme is what I would call ‘conceptual,’ that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn't have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the ‘obscurity of an order, a whole.’"
"A lot of poets are trying to work out, in a very basic way, “what am I doing when I’m making a poem?” For me, I think it has a lot to do with the potential reader, the potential listener. That’s somebody I really feel the presence of when I’m writing a poem. It was extremely generative to orient myself in that way. It’s pretty simple: talk as if someone’s listening."
"Language waits to be released in poetry. Poetry enacts the possibilities and powers that lie dormant in the nature of language itself."
"The “poetic state of mind” that poetry makes happen could be described as something close to dreaming while awake, a higher, more aware, more open, more sensitive condition of the consciousness. The poem makes this happen for us by placing our mind as we read or listen in consonance with the associations being made by the poem: its “discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression."
"I think poetry is important for all types of people. You can learn so many things from poems that you can’t learn any other way, except maybe by climbing a jaguar or petting a mountain. As far as what writers can learn, generally speaking poets are extremely attentive to the micro-decisions of language, and how all of its material - not just what the words mean, but how they look and sound, as well as their histories, etymologies, hidden usages, etc. - can be put back into active use. So that’s helpful for any writer to remember."
"That’s really the only writing advice that really matters: you have to actually write, in order to be a writer."
"I am interested in what poetry can do that nothing else can do."
Personality
Zapruder uses a program called Freedom to block all social media, seven days a week, from 8 am to 5 pm. This is beneficial to his work life and his general sanity.
Quotes from others about the person
"Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture." - Dana Jennings
"Zapruder has not just a deft manner, but an inwardness which is sturdy and generous, a little reminiscent of the James Wright of quite a different era." - Tony Hoagland