No need to fear poetry, and here is why
Matthew Zapruder makes the case for poetry’s accessibility and necessity in his debut work of nonfiction, “Why Poetry” (Ecco, $24.99). “The true meaning of a poem isn’t hidden in a textbook,” he writes. “It comes to be, each time, in the mind of each half-dreaming reader.”
I spoke to Zapruder, a prizewinning poet and the former poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, over the phone; our conversation has been edited. You describe the flawed way poems are taught — as difficult codes to crack that will reveal to the reader some hidden meaning. Why is this approach so wrongheaded?
It’s a guaranteed way to not enjoy poetry. You’re going to miss having a real experience with most poems, because most poems don’t work that way. There are always further meanings to explore, but if you don’t focus the majority of your energy on what’s actually on the page, what’s actually right in front of you, it disregards the main work of the poet and the main effect of the poem.
Poetry is an ancient art; it’s our communal language. Poetry is not written for experts, and it’s not written for scholars, and it doesn’t belong to the priests of literature, it belongs to the people. I know a lot of poets, and I don’t know a single one of them that thinks they write for scholars — they write for other human beings. Why is this how poems are taught?
There’s a way that poetry is trying to get at something mysterious and strange and difficult to reach, and so sometimes people mistake that for a code or a riddle.
But a poem in a way is the opposite of a riddle. A riddle is something simple that’s said in a deliberately complicated way so that you have to figure it out. A poem is the opposite, it’s something allusive or complex that’s being communicated, or attempted to be communicated, in the simplest way possible, which sometimes isn’t that simple. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about things, so poems can appear strange or unusual. One of my favorite concepts in the book is the notion that poetry stretches out “to almost grasp what feels like an unstated truth” and in doing so makes “meaning by failing to fully make meaning.” But is that unique to poetry? I mean, what about “Twin Peaks”?
This is what I think people really mean when they say something is poetic. They think what they’re saying is that it’s pretty or it’s aesthetically pleasing, but what they actually mean is what we’re talking about: that it somehow almost gets to something that you just can’t quite articulate. It’s not that only poems do it, it’s that a poem’s main interest is doing it. It’s not that other things can’t or don’t do it, it’s that they also have other competing agendas. Take “Twin Peaks” for instance, in the first version: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” It’s great that that was the plot. If you had not answered that question, it would have been a failure. But poems don’t work that way. Chekhov’s gun does not apply to poems. They are free of that. They can’t give you the pleasure of a great narrative — we need stories, we need journalism — it’s just that we also need poems to do something else. You describe poetry as language freed from utility and that paradoxically that freedom is useful. What does that mean?
When you read the right poem for you, it can make a space of useful usefulness, or productive idleness, that’s so rare nowadays. I’m as guilty of this as anyone: Standing in line, I just pull out my phone. What happened to all those moments? What happened to all that time? I think that poems remind me of what that time was like before everything was so harnessed to usefulness. I know it sounds weird, but the old technology of the book, it starts giving you a little bit of your time back. I teach a class sometimes to my graduate students, which I call “Everyday Creativity.” I get them to write every day, but my secret agenda is to re-create the ’90s. They always say, “Should we post these poems? Should we share them?” And I’m, like, “No. They’re just for you.” In a chapter on the late John Ashbery, you say that his poem “The One Thing That Can Save America” changed your life. How so?
I was in school, in this PhD program, and there was a part of me that knew that I wasn’t in the right place. A part of me knew that I wanted to write and what I wanted to write was poems. It was buried down deep, and there was something about reading that poem that just made me think: There’s a whole world of making this kind of art that I don’t even understand or know. Whatever feeling it is that I’m getting from reading this poem — it’s a really mysterious feeling and it’s very hard to talk about, but it feels so precious to me — that’s what I want from my life.