830. Matthew Zapruder

Otherppl with Brad Listi

Brad Listi

Books, Society & Culture, Arts

4.8 • 554 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2023

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matthew Zapruder is the author of the memoir Story of a Poem, available from Unnamed Press. Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Father's Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California. Zapruder has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX. His poetry has been adapted and performed at Carnegie Hall by Composer Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider, and was the libretto for "Vespers for a New Dark Age", a piece by composer Missy Mazzoli commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He was the founding Director of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. From 2016-17 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine and Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram YouTube TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone. Welcome to The Other People podcast. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. It's good to be with you. Thank you for listening wherever you happen to be. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen and subscribe on YouTube there's another people YouTube channel
0:22.0	search for the show by name other PPL over at YouTube today on the program my guest is
0:30.2	Matthew Zepruder author of a new memoir entitled story of a poem isn't that true for writing art too? I mean, if you go into it with a, you know, with this, you know, a rigid idea of what you want to do and you just don't, you're unwilling to be changed. And you're just like, this is, this piece of writing exists for me to like, say what I think and what I mean and sometimes there's a time
0:54.3	for that for sure but but you know you're not really going to be in the dynamic responsive
0:59.1	situation that you need to be in to really make something that's going to be reflective of
1:04.4	you know of life and its actual complexity I think a lot of the time that's I really believe
1:10.6	that and I believe it because I've seen it in my own work but also a lot of the time that's, I really believe that. I believe it
1:11.9	because I've seen it in my own work, but also a lot of other people's work. So that parenting
1:16.4	and fathering and being a writer are close to me and mentality. You know, I think I say in the
1:24.3	books, I'm like, you know, I figured out a lot of things in writing that I hadn't figured out in life.
1:28.1	So I had to catch up.
1:30.5	All right, everybody.
1:31.5	That was Matthew Zaprooter.
1:33.6	His new memoir is called Story of a Poem.
1:38.3	Available now from Unnamed Press.
1:42.4	What can I say about this book?
1:50.1	It is a moving, deeply felt, deeply intelligent meditation on creation, the creation of a single poem, the creation of family. It's
1:58.9	about fatherhood. It is about parenting a neurodivergent child.
2:06.2	And ultimately it's a book about change and revision.
2:13.7	It's a very unique book. There's not another quite like it.
2:18.1	I guess you could say that about all books, but this one maybe more so.
2:24.7	Story of a poem is about the painstaking, often intuitive revision of a poem or really any work of art.
	...

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