Radical empathy
Anyone who remembers tackling T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in school, trying to tease meaning from the dense modernist poem, probably knows just what Matthew Zapruder means when he takes issue with poetry’s unfortunate reputation for being “deliberately difficult.”
A poet today can seem like a practitioner of some arcane, inscrutable art form, and thus many people never return to the genre — unless they’re in need of a verse for a wedding or eulogy.
In his penetrating yet refreshingly straightforward new book “Why Poetry” (Ecco; $24.99), Zapruder, author of four books of poetry and recent poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, makes a cogent, as well as lyrical, argument that viewing poems as codes to be cracked impedes our direct experience and appreciation of poetic language.
We should stop worrying about getting the point of a poem, says Zapruder, and instead cultivate “the poetic state of mind,” the private, almost prayer-like experience of engaging deeply and personally with language in all its strange beauty.
Zapruder, who teaches at St. Mary’s College of California, spoke by phone from his home in Oakland. The conversation has been edited for length. Q: Are you surprised by how often you meet people and tell them you’re a poet, only to hear they don’t “get” poetry? A: I wouldn’t say it’s surprised me because, in my own way, I felt some version of that, too, when I was younger. What does surprise me is when people react to something simple and straightforward in a poem as if it was written in some alien language, as if all the words are standing in for something else and thus it’s inherently impossible to read. Writing this book, I started to think about why that might be and went back through my own experiences and the history of poetry to explore that idea.
Q: You place the blame in part on how we’re taught poetry in school, and single out Harold Bloom for telling us that “reading poetry begins with mastering allusion.” What can be done to counter that idea?
A: When I’m teaching I try to get students interested in the actual words on the page, what they mean and what’s interesting or strange about them, or how a word can be used in a way you wouldn’t ordinarily use it.
It’s easier for teachers to just say, “The theme of this poem is love,” or even “death,” but that’s a very minimizing way of putting an ineffable experience into some kind of manageable linguistic box. Q: You emphasize the importance of the actual experience of reading poetry, even the emotional state it can put you in, as opposed to reading poems to absorb ideas or information. Can you describe what you mean?
A: A poem can draw you into an almost lucid dreaming state, a drifty yet attentive consciousness. In the chapter on (John) Ashbery I talk about how when you’re reading a poem, you’re sharing an imaginative experience particular to the consciousness of the person who wrote it. It’s almost like being haunted, in a good way. It trains us in a radical kind of empathy that is maybe what’s missing in our culture more than anything. Q: Does poetry have greater importance today because it forces us to slow down and requires our full attention, at a time when we’re all becoming more distracted?
A: I don’t know about more important, but I would say the difference between reading a poem and the rest of our experience is becoming ever more pronounced. When people say poetry is going out of fashion, becoming less relevant to our experience, I feel, no, it’s actually becoming more so because it is so different. Q: You discuss Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka and others in your chapter on political poetry. How do you see poetry’s role at a time of such political divisiveness?
A: It’s natural that whatever is foremost on people’s minds works its way into the language of poetry, so it’s far from a surprise that poetry would be filled with people’s political and, critically today, ecological concerns.
I recently wrote the preface for Copper Canyon’s 50th anniversary edition of W.S. Merwin’s book “The Lice.” Its subject matter is ecological destruction and the Vietnam War. It is a very political book, but it’s also a dreamlike, drifty, associative book, so it proves that you can write true poems that also are engaged with the urgent matters of today.
Q: What do you think of using social media to introduce people to poetry?
A: The number of people all over the world who can read my poems has increased exponentially because of the Internet. Yet sometimes I don’t think Twitter is so great for poetry because it takes single lines out of poems and makes them sound like Hallmark cards. I’ve come across a line tweeted from a poem that I love and thought it sounded really dumb. That said, whatever gets the word out is good.
For people just starting to expose themselves to a range of poetry, it’s a lot like music. You don’t have to know why you like something, but if you pay attention, you could discover an interest in a style or a poet, and then you’re off to the races.
Jessica Zack is a freelance writer who frequently covers art and film for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com