Matthew Zapruder is the author of American Linden, winner of the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including The Boston Review, Fence, Crowd, Jubilat, Both, Harvard Review, The New Republic and The New Yorker. He is the co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu. He is the Editor of Verse Press, the co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series, and an instructor of Creative Writing at the New School in New York City. In the spring of 2005 he will be visiting professor of Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. Buys books here and here. See some work here, here, here and here. See a review here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I haven't thought about this in a long time, but the first poem I ever loved was the first one I ever read, in first grade: Hiawatha, by Longfellow. I can remember exactly a picture book edition that lived on a little shelf on the ledge of a window in my first grade classroom. It had pictures of Hiawatha in his canoe, etc., and I used to read it over and over, probably when I was supposed to be doing whatever you do in first grade. Advanced shoe tying. Reading it again now for the first time since then some of it seems kind of goofy and overwritten, but the section I particularly remember, Part VIII, Hiawatha's Fishing, is still pretty great to me. Forth upon the Gitche Gumee, On the shining Big-Sea-Water, With his fishing-line of cedar, Of the twisted bark of cedar, Forth to catch the sturgeon Nahma, Mishe-Nahma, King of Fishes, In his birch canoe exulting All alone went Hiawatha. I love the name of that river, the Gitche Gumee, the Big-Sea-Water. And I think it's cool the way he repeats words in succeeding lines, which he does a lot in the poem. One of the lame things he does is a lot of sentence inversion with prepositions, like "line of cedar," in order to maintain the rhythm. But I think that's a pretty great poem for a young person to run into and read. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? It's hard for me to think of anything written that I would consider non-literary -- maybe comic books, or as they're called now, graphic novels? I never felt guilty about reading a lot of those, and now they're starting to be considered kind of literary. I guess something like the Harry Potter books, all of which I've read, could be considered non-literary. I grew up on crappy fantasy books like the Sword of Shannara and Dragondrums, both of which I would probably still love, and science fiction, especially Robert Heinlen. The other day I read Allure Magazine. But my big vice is television. I'll watch anything -- Law and Order, Sports Center, any Red Sox or SF Giants baseball game, Mike and the Mad Dog (a sports radio show that's on television for god's sake), The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and most recently that new HBO series Entourage. I can't have TV in my house, and only watch it when I'm staying somewhere or in a hotel, in which case I'll just stay in a dark room like an opium addict and watch TV for as long as I can get away with it. My favorite show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Honestly I had no idea until recently that this show is considered an obligatory merit badge in the geek chic cub scout troop. I've been watching it off and on for a long time, and a few years ago FX started showing it every day at 6 and 7pm, so I was able to watch it in order from the first season on, and not just once. I've been known to organize very important activities around the need to be at home for those two hours. I think I love the show so much because it's a perfect combination of all the formative elements of my early aesthetic experience. It's a teen drama, a genre I love when it's well-done (that is, one part goofy send-up and the other part totally sincere empathizing); a highly developed (read dorky) mythology, which I'm sure is a result of my disturbingly deep and even more disturbingly long-lasting involvement in first Lord of the Rings, then Dungeons and Dragons, two of the most important cosmologies of my pre-teen and teen years; and most important, an ongoing story about loyalty and friendship. The common appeal of shows like this is the cast of characters, the extent to which they feel alive, and to which the watcher cares about them. This -- and not "great writing" -- is in my opinion the same kind of appeal I think many of the best novels have; I'm thinking particularly of novels like War and Peace, Great Expectations, The End of the Affair and so on where the writing isn't particularly stylized, but more somewhere between transparent and excellent. I know that there are many exceptions to what I'm saying (Nabokov and Naipaul and Bellow as great but very different stylists pop immediately to mind), but in general I think without great characters in a television show or novel for that matter it's a real grind. And I think the same thing could probably be said for voice in poetry. Without a human voice you can get attached to in some kind of way, it's pretty much of a drag to read. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? For me, philosophy is important only to the extent that its language can provide material to use in the poem; that is, I don't try to express or work out philosophical ideas (or any other kind of ideas for that matter) in my poems, at least not intentionally. When I feel philosophical statements (like conversational language, musical terms, encyclopedia entries, botanical and musical definitions, and anything else I can find) can be animated by whatever emotions or ideas I'm concerned with, or more accurately struggling towards, while writing the poem I'm working on, then I use them. I treat whatever philosophical language I encounter as equally useful as any other material, no more or less important than other types of language. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I don't think I'm going to be too original here: as a student of Russian Literature (I have a Master's from UC Berkeley in Slavic Languages and Literatures), early on I was highly influenced by the literature of Russia and Eastern and Central Europe. Specifically in terms of poetry I read a lot of Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetaeva (unlike a lot of people I'm not that into Anna Akhmatova, whom I find extremely melodramatic with the exception of her later poems and "Requiem," her great poem cycle about Russian life under Stalin), and some of the more minor early 20th century Russian symbolist poets. Alexander Pushkin is obliteratingly brilliant in the original, and, like Mandelshtam, has never been successfully translated; Eugene Onegin is an achievement comparable to Shakespeare's sonnets, and it's a real shame that people who don't speak Russian can't enjoy it. Other poets who have had a huge impact on me, especially when I was writing my first book, include Yannis Ritsos (especially his short poems in Exile and Return), Cavafy, and Tomaz Salamun -- these poets helped me push outwards in terms of what I thought a poem was and could be, while also staying clear and focused. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? When I run into a book, or even a couple of poems that I love, I get stopped, and don't seem to want to move past them. I've spent months reading parts of books of James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Mary Ruefle, Frank O'Hara, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, before I've been able to go on to the rest of their work. I read to help me write, and that's all I care about when I'm reading poetry. In my capacity as an editor I do read a lot of contemporary poetry, though I get impatient very easily. I think that with the Verse Prize, I get to read a pretty wide range of Americna poetry currently being written. There are some journals -- jubilat, Crowd, Conduit, Forklift Ohio, The Canary, and I'm sure others I'm forgetting now, that's the danger of making a list -- that I think are excellent, full of the most exciting new poetry being written today, so I try to read those whenever they come out . And with Verse Press I have the real privilege of working with many of my favorite contemporary American poets. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Boy are there a lot of things I could list. Recently I started reading Moby Dick, finally. Who knew how great it is? Why haven't you? See answer #2. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I've actually hung out with a fair number of 7 year olds, and haven't had much success explaining much of anything to them. They do love being told stories though. It's a great age because they're old enough to have a pretty good grasp on reality and logic, but still have a foot in a magical world. They want to believe the crazy stories you tell them, but also know they aren't true, which is all a lot of fun. The seven year old I spent the most time with adored Shel Silverstein. She loved all his poems, and would ask me to read them to her over and over, but her favorite thing was that book The Missing Piece, which is about a circle with a piece missing from it that goes all over the world looking for the right piece to complete it. It's super-sad and wise, but also really simple and funny. It's mysterious and also completely clear and understandable, and is just as good the 1000th time you read it as the first. And it ends in a way that isn't sentimental or artificially happy, but open and devastatingly unresolved, like life. So I would just read that to your child, and see what happens. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? When Joseph Brodsky was asked by the judge in his social parasitism trial who gave him permission to be a poet, he pointed up at the sky, meaning god, meaning not the state or anyone human. I resist a way of looking at the world where people are required to fulfill certain functions for society to work properly. It reminds me of my personal experiences with totalitarian societies, particularly that of the Soviet Union, where I lived for a year in the late 80's. I think the job of the poet is to write poems, until the poet doesn't feel like writing poems anymore. Do poems do any good, or help society? I think probably yes, and by definition in my opinion they certainly do no harm; that is, if they do harm (by advocating some kind of awful behavior or being terribly cruel in a way that doesn't permit the existence of other views) then they aren't poems, but polemics or essays or political speeches dressed up in fancy language. I do believe that people have obligations to themselves, their families, and other human beings. Figuring out how that all works and what it means is the work of a lifetime; and people who don't think about those things in my opinion aren't doing a very good job of fulfilling the role of a human being, which is to be human. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest: Lemon**Subaru Chiseled**Brancusi I**Thou Of**Mice Form**Prom 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? That question makes me think about the lyrics of the Velvet Underground song: "Candy says, I've come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world." My struggle as a person has been to get used to having a body. And I'm very sure that that struggle enters into my work, in a profoundly physical way in my poems. Also, rhythm is the essential organizing principle of my poems. I know the poems are good, and right, when they sound right in my mouth, and feel right in my body. When that's happening, and the poem talking in a meaningful and human way as well, then I know I've written a poem. Perhaps you are referring to body and text as theoretical constructs. If so, then I must say I'm usually extraordinarily unimpressed by critical writing that organizes itself around those concepts. It's not only that they seem to be stand-ins for post-structuralist ideas that subordinate art to criticism about art, which is bad enough; it's also that when those ideas come up, it's usually the start of a conversation that treats poetry as if it exists primarily to demonstrate or work out ideas. And I guess that's not what I think poetry is for.