By — Elizabeth Flock Elizabeth Flock Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/often-taught-poetry-wrong Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Have we been taught poetry all wrong? Poetry Jun 19, 2017 4:44 PM EDT “I have a confession to make: I don’t really understand poetry.” So goes the opening line of poet Matthew Zapruder’s forthcoming book “Why Poetry,” which looks at why a lot of people feel alienated by poetry (this line is one he’s heard countless times before) and what can be done to remedy that. The book is part personal, part explanatory and part polemic, saying: Here’s my experience with poetry, here’s how it works, and here’s why we desperately need it. It is the last part that is perhaps most interesting in an age of information overload. Zapruder argues poetry is a necessity, because the knowledge we gain from it can be deeper and more human than from other texts. “It’s an intuitive, associative understanding that you can get from poems, which can really open a person up and make them aware of other human beings, of themselves, and of the natural world,” said Zapruder, who has published four collections of poetry and edited the poetry page of the New York Times Magazine. “It does that in a way that can’t be done by any other form of writing.” Courtesy: Ecco But this intuitive, associative power, he says, can be lost on people because of the way poetry is taught. He argues that we are too often asked to find the “hidden meanings” in poems, as if a poem is a riddle — telling you something simple, but in the most complicated way possible, as if the poet is being deliberately opaque. Good poetry actually does the opposite, says Zapruder; “it’s something elusive and complex, said in the simplest way possible.” (Though writing about the complexities of life is not always very simple.) Throughout the pages of “Why Poetry,” Zapruder traverses the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Sappho, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Adrienne Rich and many others, using a wide range of poets and styles to illustrate how poetry can function in many different ways. He unpacks both how their poetry works (through the technique of “defamiliarization,” for example, of making the familiar strange) and also the feeling and imagination they inspire (often, he says, poems provoke both longing and confusion). In the end, Zapruder said he was happy to have finished writing “Why Poetry,” and to be able to go back to writing poems, instead of about them. “Writing this book reminded me of the very thing I was writing about,” he said. “Which is that there is a different kind of knowledge, and a different kind of experience, to be gained when writing poems. A search for dream knowledge. It’s a pleasure to get back to that.” Below, read one of Zapruder’s poems, “I Wake Up Before the Machine,” and listen to him read it aloud. I Wake Up Before the Machine By matthew Zapruder I wake up before the machine made of all the choices we are together not making lights up this part of Oakland it’s dark so I can imagine another grid humming in the east already people are deciding I lie in the western pre-decision darkness and almost hear that silent voice saying go down there the coffee needs you to place it in the device its next form will help you remember daylight is coming but dreams do not go away they just move off and change your mind is a tree on a little hill surrounded by grasses that look up and say father wind loves moving through you Matthew Zapruder is the author of “Why Poetry” (Ecco, August 2017) and four poetry collections: “Sun Bear”; “Come On, All You Ghosts”; “The Pajamist”; and “American Linden.” An Associate Professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor-at-arge at Wave Books and from 2016-2017 was editor of the poetry column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, CA. By — Elizabeth Flock Elizabeth Flock Elizabeth Flock is an independent journalist who reports on justice and gender. She can be reached at elizabethflock@gmail.com @lizflock
“I have a confession to make: I don’t really understand poetry.” So goes the opening line of poet Matthew Zapruder’s forthcoming book “Why Poetry,” which looks at why a lot of people feel alienated by poetry (this line is one he’s heard countless times before) and what can be done to remedy that. The book is part personal, part explanatory and part polemic, saying: Here’s my experience with poetry, here’s how it works, and here’s why we desperately need it. It is the last part that is perhaps most interesting in an age of information overload. Zapruder argues poetry is a necessity, because the knowledge we gain from it can be deeper and more human than from other texts. “It’s an intuitive, associative understanding that you can get from poems, which can really open a person up and make them aware of other human beings, of themselves, and of the natural world,” said Zapruder, who has published four collections of poetry and edited the poetry page of the New York Times Magazine. “It does that in a way that can’t be done by any other form of writing.” Courtesy: Ecco But this intuitive, associative power, he says, can be lost on people because of the way poetry is taught. He argues that we are too often asked to find the “hidden meanings” in poems, as if a poem is a riddle — telling you something simple, but in the most complicated way possible, as if the poet is being deliberately opaque. Good poetry actually does the opposite, says Zapruder; “it’s something elusive and complex, said in the simplest way possible.” (Though writing about the complexities of life is not always very simple.) Throughout the pages of “Why Poetry,” Zapruder traverses the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Sappho, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Adrienne Rich and many others, using a wide range of poets and styles to illustrate how poetry can function in many different ways. He unpacks both how their poetry works (through the technique of “defamiliarization,” for example, of making the familiar strange) and also the feeling and imagination they inspire (often, he says, poems provoke both longing and confusion). In the end, Zapruder said he was happy to have finished writing “Why Poetry,” and to be able to go back to writing poems, instead of about them. “Writing this book reminded me of the very thing I was writing about,” he said. “Which is that there is a different kind of knowledge, and a different kind of experience, to be gained when writing poems. A search for dream knowledge. It’s a pleasure to get back to that.” Below, read one of Zapruder’s poems, “I Wake Up Before the Machine,” and listen to him read it aloud. I Wake Up Before the Machine By matthew Zapruder I wake up before the machine made of all the choices we are together not making lights up this part of Oakland it’s dark so I can imagine another grid humming in the east already people are deciding I lie in the western pre-decision darkness and almost hear that silent voice saying go down there the coffee needs you to place it in the device its next form will help you remember daylight is coming but dreams do not go away they just move off and change your mind is a tree on a little hill surrounded by grasses that look up and say father wind loves moving through you Matthew Zapruder is the author of “Why Poetry” (Ecco, August 2017) and four poetry collections: “Sun Bear”; “Come On, All You Ghosts”; “The Pajamist”; and “American Linden.” An Associate Professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor-at-arge at Wave Books and from 2016-2017 was editor of the poetry column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, CA.