Story of a Poem

a happy graveyard, a breeze, a ghost ship’s wake, a map in winter...

“I have always loved words for what they can do, and for all the different things they can mean,” writes the poet Matthew Zapruder early in his wise, funny, courageous, and heartbreaking new memoir, Story of a Poem. He continues:

I love how they feel in my mouth. In that way, I am like all writers I know. I am also very like my son. Now that I have become the parent of a son who is working so hard to achieve fluency in language, my respect for communication in all aspects of my life has increased. The simple act of reaching out in writing to say something to you, and you hearing me, and then responding, even if only in my imagination because you are far away and I will most likely never know you, feels ever more holy to me.

Like so much nonfiction these days, Story of a Poem is a braided narrative. It is one part personal history, one part parenting memoir, and, as the title suggests, the story of how a single poem comes into existence. (It is also generously inlaid with various complete poems by the author.) As Zapruder teases in the passage above, the central tension of the book is this: how does a poet for whom language is an existential necessity recalibrate his sense of order when he becomes the father of a neuro-divergent child, one for whom basic communication is a challenge? How do parents who were raised with a particular set of bourgeois meritocratic standards, ones that do not make space for atypical children, reimagine their values surrounding education, community, and the dominant conception of intelligence?

The self-lacerating vulnerability with which Zapruder addresses these questions would alone make this book worth reading. But there is, too, the poet’s inquiry not only into how poems are made, but into the genesis of all creativity. And through it all, we observe Zapruder learning to love his son (“my painful joy”) unequivocally, and in so doing, to love himself and others. This book, a master class in empathy, feels particularly timely at a moment when an ethic of love—so desperately needed in our communities and in our politics—is in perilously short supply.

I should disclose here that Matthew is a friend of mine, as well as a collaborator. I have set a number of poems of his to music over the years, and his diction has found its way into my lyrics. But here in the Wild West of Substack, journalistic ethics don’t apply, and I can review my friend’s book if I feel like it!

The opening chapter moves quickly (and with great humor) through Zapruder’s origin story as a poet, his initial encounter with Sarah, who would become his wife (“before she said it / I knew her Old / Testament name,” he writes in one of the poems reprinted here, poems which often satisfyingly mirror, anticipate, or echo the prose narrative), and then to the birth of their son:

[T]hey handed the absurdly tiny bundle to the extremely new father and put the two of them into a chair, alone, in a room full of unidentifiable humming machines… Perfectly calm, the boy stared up at his father with giant blue eyes taking in a bit of the world. For the first of countless times, the father thought, What are you thinking?… That night the boy slept all night on his father’s chest. It was the only time in his life the father had felt his body was perfect, and no one time did he wish anything were different, or that he were elsewhere.

But soon comes “the diagnosis,” confessions of ignorance about autism, and an array of concerns about being “exiled from the normal world.” He is ashamed of these feelings:

I don’t want [my son] ever to think for a moment that he or his life seemed insufficient to me, or scared me. But the truth is, I was very afraid, and sometimes still am, though of what I am honestly not sure… long before I did, [my wife] saw what a tremendous, necessary act of sustained will it would take for us to let go of our suburban, bourgeois programming, even though all it had gotten us was anxiety and unhappiness. She stopped wanting that long before I did, and began to see our son clearly for who he was, which was the first step toward realizing that our lives are the treasure we already have.

As he unearths and attempts to dismantle his “suburban, test-taking, competitive” biases, Zapruder’s unflinching honesty is almost too much to bear. And yet what makes it bearable is that ultimately, the father’s boundless love for his son resounds in each sentence.

I want in my poems, as in life, always to see my son. So in them I never write autism, not out of shame or because I don’t think it’s real, nor to be elusive or mysterious, but for the opposite reason. Its meaning, its sound, blocks out all individuality and actuality. The pushing away of that word is not a denial, but the creating of a space so I and everyone else can truly encounter my son, just as we should encounter everyone…

I think about how my own easy liberalism for so long smugly masked an intensely hierarchical and judgmental attitude toward anyone I did not perceive as gifted, smart, quick, cultured. This judgment was, of course, ultimately directed toward myself, as I constantly fell short of my own impossible ideals…

Now, as a father, I must reach down into myself and touch the terror of difference, which is of course my own, the terror and the difference. Both wear my own face. There is something past that fear: the possibility of acceptance, which in turn opens up the possibility of love. 

In this movement from the individual to the collective, Zapruder gets at one of the central tragedies of our moment: the tendency to reduce those who are not like us—culturally, intellectually, politically, ethnically—to a reifying and flattening label suffused with contempt. But it is not just the labeling that is tragic, it’s what comes after. So often in our polarized era, many of us—regardless of where we sit on the ideological spectrum—reflexively assign bad-faith reasoning to the attitudes and claims of those with whom we disagree. In the same way that Zapruder resists using the word autism for the baggage it contains and the assumptions that it invites, perhaps we might all do well to resist totalizing and essentializing labels that mostly serve to drive us further apart from one another.

Threaded in and around his quest to love and accept his son is a personal history of Zapruder’s journey as a writer. “Was I supposed to be saying something I already knew in the most beautiful possible way,” he asks, “or trying to follow music, to find out what I did not know I believed?” In unfurling his origin story as a poet, his development from apprentice to master, Zapruder articulates the delicate and mysterious dynamic at the heart of art-making: the relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind.

I have often believed that moments of catharsis in art spring most readily from acts of the subconscious mind. If, as Jeff Tweedy wrote, I am trying to break your heart, I will most likely resort to cliché to achieve a desired emotional response. As an audience member, nothing gets my hackles up more than the feeling that I am being emotionally manipulated. On the other hand, the moments that astonish me, that send a chill down my spine or bring tears to my eyes, are the ones in which catharsis springs up unexpectedly. In one sense, this might seem like circular logic: of course catharsis is unexpected! But what I mean is that the source of catharsis is unexpected, as if one were to tap an oak tree and find that it secretes rye whiskey, or Nutella, or your grandmother’s dark-brothed chicken soup.

Among the many things I love about this book is the detail with which Zapruder brings forward this often painstaking process, of surrendering to the subconscious mind, and allowing that liminal state to bring about the kinds of gestures (in his case, rooted in language) that remain stubbornly elusive when we have a preordained notion of what it is we want to say.

“I was trying to maintain a more or less constant dream state while I was awake, so that many lines would come to me and bridge the gap between reality and the unconscious. I wanted my poems to reflect and engage with reality while also pointing always to something beyond it, something I did not truly understand or grasp but could feel was there. I desired the simultaneous presence of both worlds, and had no idea how to summon either, much less both.”

Zapruder’s generosity and vulnerability rests in his willingness to show us his dirty laundry. With each chapter, we get a new draft of the poem that he’s writing through the book — and he’s unremittingly direct in critiquing his own work.

“I have come to believe that writing is an endless, shifting negotiation between intention and discovery, ideas brought to the page and ones uncovered in the process of writing itself, music and truth. Sometimes I know what I want to say. Almost always, I can only really discover what I think and believe through the process of writing the poem.... I have to let myself make mistakes, be foolish and wrong, to write things down that make no sense but seem beautiful or funny or weird, and then use my intuition to guide me to what feels truthful.”

Braided narratives are a dime a dozen; the triumph of Zapruder’s book is the effortlessness with which he makes the component parts come alive in conversation with each other. A passage about his son’s tendency to invert pronouns gives way to a meditation on the poetic use of “you” and “we,” which in turn opens up onto a critical reading of Whitman’s use of “you,” and the extent to which 

it excludes those who cannot tolerate what he takes for granted, and, in the ease with which I myself feel included, implicates me as well… So often the pronoun we also is used to replace something that would be much more complicated if it were specified. Doesn’t “We the people” sound nice? Yes, but who is this “we”? We all know (do we?) it wasn’t everyone. Claudia Rankine writes, in Just Us: “from this moment forward how easily how easily will the pronoun ‘we’ slip from my lips?” Not easily at all.

Zapruder and Rankine are correct, I believe, in their interrogation of the casual and uncritical use of “you” and “we,” for these words have often been as effectively exclusionary as they are syntactically inclusive. But I would push a little: having ascertained that our “we” is incomplete, do we (haha) accept this state as permanent and retreat into resignation, or commit ourselves to the difficult but necessary work of expanding the “we” until it includes all of us?

For a book preoccupied with the art of editing and revision, Story of a Poem has an improvisatory quality. The prose is casual, conversational, never overworked. At the same time, Zapruder’s poetic diction seeps satisfyingly into his sentences, as it does in this aria of a paragraph, which seems an appropriate song with which to end this essay:

Try to be quiet for once, to listen for something you love. Let it come to you. Then build a structure in which what you love—a line, an image, a word—can exist: a situation, a scene, a sonnet, a ghazal, an ode, an abandoned palace, a happy graveyard, a breeze, a ghost ship’s wake, a map in winter, a rose factory, someone crossing the ocean in a fabulously unseaworthy craft, a marriage, a meal, a crucial childhood memory that never occurred, a radio being endlessly, impatiently tuned, so on and son on and so on until the line can live there. You hear them. Then the poem can begin.