“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.
Desnos:
“I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath
filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame
lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.”
Zapruder:
“you were born in a butcher shop
owned by your father an addled ghost
who might have also run a tavern
the tablets are unclear.”
As suggested by the book’s title, I Love Hearing Your Dreams, dreams, ghosts, skulls suicides, and the otherwise dead populate this collection. 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. Sadness floats through these pages, yet equally do we slide past boredom, sweetness, and above all, curiosity, even in melancholy recollection.
“When I was so deep in my trouble
he sent me a jade skull
I looked at it every day
and felt its pale green
laugh
fill me and turn
into a few words.”
This workaday Hamlet speaks to us, in the most direct, yet disconcerting manner, an elegy. It would be easy to overlook the poet’s mastery of form, given the deceptive, tossed-off way in which form manifests, often in sequences of couplets or a single long stanza, lines invariably brief. Out of seeming paucity, Zapruder wreaks astounding effects. I found myself reading many poems twice, three times, believing at first each had partially eluded me, yet letting each subsequent reading settle in and realizing there was no true trickery at play, but rather meditation and method requiring patience.
now she cries only when she is alone
so no one but you can gather the liquid
full of tiny silver clouds
for now in the butcher shop
the baby sleeps and outside
under sinister chimneys wraiths
of knowledge walk toward the door.
Out of evanescence, we may, if we choose, “gather the liquid full of tiny clouds,” and watch them become “wraiths of knowledge.” Zapruder’s endings tend to offer soft landings, like that aforementioned acrobat, alighting from the air onto the platform, the motion natural, nearly soundless.
The gentle elusiveness of the ever-changing, ever evolving whos and whats, in this case a Black Madonna of miraculous powers, leaves us in a wonder. This sensation is not uncommon when one reads the poetry of what Marjorie Perloff, no stranger to French modernism and its salubrious yet inebriating effects, denominated the “Other Tradition.” William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and John Cage are in no way linguistically inaccessible. After a fashion, they say exactly what they mean. They simply leave a lot of space between each word to let you think. If the 20th century taught us nothing else, it is that words refuse to stop being objects, no matter how frequently they are conscripted into service as vehicles. And sometimes dwelling in that humble space between words is so easy that it is hard. When one returns to Stein, it is always as a student sitting in the back row, preparing to be outwitted by her carefully plainspoken yet wily speech.
In an interview with Washington Square Review, Zapruder explains an aspect of his method with characteristic level-headed self-expression:
“I try not to have preconceptions about what is ‘poetic.’ The movement itself is ‘poetic.’ I think enough poets have proved that this movement can happen among mundane as well as exalted things…I try to be attentive to where things could go, and to follow them there, to see if there’s anything going on.”
This purposeful digression is on full display in Zapruder’s couplet-governed “Dead Flowers,” dedicated to poet Gerald Stern. The elegy begins thus:
“Now that you are gone
I’ll never get hit
by a piano dropped from a cloud
I’ll probably die
holding a book I told
everyone that I read
without you everything will be the same
my son turns his light on so early
I have already thought unspeakable thoughts
And you will never drive again
Along some river with too many
consonants in its name
it will keep flowing
north like the Nile
crying tears of comprehending joy
without irony or shame.”
This elegy immediately introduces a note of dark hilarity, a Looney Tunes slapstick as the speaker imagines himself flattened by a falling piano, Wile E. Coyote style, thus made dead like the deceased poet he’s mourning. And he is weirdly disappointed that his end is likely to be less “epic” than that. Further, he confesses that he might not have actually read the book he was holding (one of Stern’s perhaps?), lampooning his own supposed erudition and faithfulness. The grief expressed is hardly of the grand, clothes-rending sort one finds in Milton’s “Lycidas” or reverberating with melancholy history like Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” The net result of the loved one’s loss gets captured in the flatfooted declaration “everything will be the same,” as it might be spoken by Buster Keaton, which can be read either as indifference, or blank acknowledgement of the fact that sadness comes and goes, and even the most bereft person, in most cases, will gradually adjust to the reality that life continues, no matter who dies. If anything, this deadpan elegy is perhaps truer than Milton’s to the ongoing, fitful, on-again off-again nature of grief, where one minute you are imagining your own death, the next, you are thinking instead about attending to your son and his ever-immediate needs.
The most skillful move here is how Zapruder segues into a more serious examination of his self-torment (“I have already thought unspeakable thoughts”), then personifying that emotion in a North-flowing river, while at the same time wittily imagining such a river has “too many/consonants in its name,” (thus unspeakable) and countering that thought with the brutal shortness of “his” river: Nile. Then, unexpectedly, the sequence culminates with tears, as he disavows irony, leaving behind in a few short parting words the opening gesture of the piano dropped from the sky. The emotional range is astounding, played out quickly and with a half-shrug, as Beckett did with “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” at the end of his 1953 novel The Unnamable. Zapruder is a poet of paradox, working blithe overstatement against sincere understatement.
That is how Zapruder follows where things go, to see if anything’s going on. In an interview with Volume Poetry, enlarging on Emerson’s notion of language as fossil poetry, he observes that:
“I can learn more about a certain moment in culture by looking deeply into certain words in a poem from that time than I can from reading a hundred newspaper articles. Or at least something different.”
One of the poems that best serves as a test case for this trapeze swing between strategic irony and the sincere search for this knowledge is “Peoria.”
Peoria at one time stood iconically for bland, conservative, judgment-laden, forgettable middle America, the erstwhile bellwether of our national tendency to settle for mere adequacy, thus the phrase “what’s playing in Peoria.” Zapruder’s poem is an ode to his father, in which he turns Peoria into a half-comic, half-earnest locus amoenus, because that is where his dad traveled to win his first legal case and brought the son back a snow globe as a memento.
Zapruder is partial to the poetic charms of Rilke. Yet instead of transports of angelic rapture in trying to capture the ineffable, here we are offered the scaled-down equivalent, by means of parodic-yet-loving travesties of American popular culture (think Max Apple, the more astringent T. Coraghessan Boyle, or the more tender Steven Millhauser in the fictional realm).
He must have stayed a while,
maybe in the Mark Twain Hotel.
he could not have been far
from young Richard Pryor.
maybe the famous bison watched him
from a field or commemorative
mug with facts about megafauna
and the Quaternary extinction
event on the other side.
A few still live in the zoo,
their shaggy mountainous
shoulders permanently
hunched in preemptive defeat.
I found the emotional low-balling here captivating. To the extent one is a tourist (we all sometimes are), the objective correlatives of Mark Twain and Richard Pryor have equal power of evoking a lost or transient world in this ode. Whether bison occur in a field, or on a commemorative mug is not a meaningful distinction in the Peorias of a universe winding down. One is as good an emblem as the other to recover the past. Genghis Khan, Benjamin Franklin, Shakespeare, Madame Curie—choose your own adventure—they all are reduced to equivalence in such circumstances. The “predicament of culture,” as James Clifford reminds us, begins in the ethnographic museum, that diorama of erroneous simulation of life. That does not mean the poet is merely dismissing these bison and their “native” Peoria or making fun of its rude inhabitants and the passengers who find their way there by intention or happenstance. For his is not a book of cheap shots. Despite the wink at the reader (we are all in on the joke), there is a sincere, if not precisely Proustian, sense of remembrance of things past, allowing this ode to show evocative power after all. The image that nails this sequence, summoning light pathos, is the extended description of the “famous bison.” They are famous because a mug says so. They have the honor of figuring among the last wave of extinctions, thus lying closer to us and Mark Twain. The living survivors have their “shoulders permanently/hunched in preemptive defeat.” So much work gets done by the placement of that one word, “preemptive”! This is precisely what Zapruder means when he says, “I can learn more about a certain moment in culture by looking deeply into certain words in a poem.”
The poem goes on, sweetly acidic, finally modulating into a sincere and affirming, yet slightly cockeyed, Coleridgean affirmation of the power of subjectivity, memory and dreams.
The past is always misremembered.
Hold it to your ear. It has
the sweet hum of the superstore
buried inside an apple. You can
almost hear it say be glad your father never told you
elsewhere, that’s where life is.
Be where you are. The oranging of America, with its surfeit of identical convenience stores offering slushies in fluorescent colors one does not find in nature, as it turns out, is not fatal to authenticity. The fact of those stores existing has not us taken us that far from the passionate singularity of Eden and its foredoomed enchanted gardens. Nor has it precluded us from acquiring, without succumbing to original sin, a different kind of knowledge.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
