WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: April 5, 2023

Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem: A Memoir was published yesterday by The Unnamed Press. Simply put, the book is a gift—to poets, to parents, to anyone concerned with the future of our planet and how we take care of each other.  Zapruder offers us drafts of his poems along the way, letting us in on his process. He also offers us his most private and intimate thoughts about the Empire, the environment (fires and floods which threaten his home), his loving/thriving marriage to Sarah, and the parenting of their autistic son Simon. (Zapruder’s book can be read in concert with Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth, essays about his neurodiverse boys, and Tom C. Hunley chapbook Adjusting to the Lights, poems about his autistic son.)

Early on, Zapruder describes his child as “a boy who eerily resembled his late grandfather, down to certain facial expressions and mannerisms.” This allows him to bring in his family’s painful immigrant story and his father’s death. The memoir starts out in the third person as we watch the author learn to understand “singular terror when the story is suddenly taken away, and one is left in a new life.” He asks:

What is the relation between making poems and learning to be the father of this atypical child? It felt to him like the same struggle, something he had been trying to learn for so long in his writing and now had to learn in his life. An irresistible force, which could be called love, always drew him back to poetry….

Zapruder introduces us to Simon’s kind teachers full of euphemisms (as well as full of tattoos), the strained interactions with other dads, and his own struggling against expectations.  Soon he is writing in the first person:

Long before I did, she [Sarah] 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.

By the end of the memoir, Zapruder is meeting with W.S. Merwin in Hawaii—but this is no casual writerly meet-and-greet. Zapruder, a lover of Merwin’s poetry, is also there because of Merwin’s ecological heroism:

For thirty years Merwin had been planting seeds brought here from all over the world, making a home for them. Did he dream of this place, and of it turning out this way? Did it begin with an impulse to save one tree, and then become an entire forest? Soon he would be gone, and this unlikely place, so strange, would be in all of our care.

This book is a treasure to all of us struggling with feelings of helplessness, to all of us struggling to meet people where they are. Story of a Poem: A Memoir is not an easy-fix or a self-care kind of book but rather one that really does help in terms of clarity and vulnerability.  I kept reading parts of it to friends over the phone, feeling less alone. And you will too.

 

Comments

[Rivkah Rubinstein]

Thank you for this very generous and sympathetic review of an attempt to take "private and intimate thoughts" and make them public. The transition must be difficult, a strtuggle as you say, because the self-knowledge of the writer is implicitly in question.

[Emma]

Really enjoyed reading this thoughtful review, Denise—especially how you personally connected to the book. Thanks for sharing!