A Different Kind of Knowledge: Matthew Zapruder’s “I Love Hearing Your Dreams”

“The combination of dread and cheer these reveries bring about could accurately be called the optimist’s nightmare. The poet-speaker holds compassion as the stalk of a dandelion holds juice, hidden yet keeping the flower active and aloft through sheer tensile strength.”

The first thing one notices upon reading Matthew Zapruder’s forthcoming book of poetry I Love Hearing Your Dreams is how simple the language appears to be.

“I want to fall asleep

in the middle of the afternoon”

or

“who can tell me

the names of those flowers”

or

“on the radio I heard

that inimitable accent.”

He talks the way we do when we are conversing among familiars. Almost never in this volume does Zapruder use a word that could not be understood by a ninth grader of median intelligence. Inimitable is an outlier. A false syllogism would conclude that therefore Zapruder would write simple poetry. No conclusion would be more wrong. The space he requires to operate within may be imagined as a large, airy tent, preferably containing what Joan Miró imagined in The Harlequin’s Carnival, a ménage of delightful floating objects. The poet is the trapeze artist. As he swings past each object, coming close without striking any, his death-defying acrobatics register casually, as if he were merely doing a handstand in a grassy field. Above all, the trapeze artist wants his feats to appear to the spectator as easy, rather than studied.

No one can accuse Zapruder (perfect circus acrobat name) of showing off, despite his possessing and displaying a large range of literary reference to his contemporaries and chosen predecessors (as Eliot stated, we create our predecessors). These presences lurk throughout his poems, their names sometimes given up generically in a title, such as: “Poem for Robert Desnos,” an early twentieth century poet associated with dadaism, surrealism, and automatic writing.