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Matthew Zapruder QUOTES

Matthew Zapruder QUOTES

1 " I hope you are well in these days
or at least surviving "

― Matthew Zapruder

2 " at last the endless meeting ends

I begin to recite
the ever more infinite list
of things I do not know "

― Matthew Zapruder

3 " Poem for Vows

Hello beautiful talented
dark semi-optimists of June,
from far off I send my hopes
Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost
of Whitman who loved everyone
is there to see you say what
can never be said, something like
partly I promise my whole life
to try to figure out what it means
to stand facing you under a tree,
and partly no matter how angry
I get I will always remember
we met before we were born,
it was in a village, someone
had just cast a spell, it was
in the park, snow everywhere,
we were slipping and laughing,
at last we knew the green secret,
we were sea turtles swimming
a long time together without
needing to breathe, we were
two hungry owls silently
hunting night, our terrible claws,
I don’t want to sound like I know,
I’m just one who worries all night
about people in a lab watching
a storm in a glass terrarium
perform lethal ubiquity,
tiny black clouds make the final
ideogram above miniature lands
exactly resembling ours, what is
happening happens again,
they cannot stop it, they take off
their white coats, go outside,
look up and wonder, only we
who promise everything despite
everything can tell them
the solution, only we know. "

― Matthew Zapruder

4 " I see sad crushed plastic
everywhere and put
some thoughts composed
of words that do not
belong together
together and feel
a little digital hope. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Come on All You Ghosts

5 " This poetry - the language stretching out to almost grasp what feels like an unstated truth, in ways one cannot paraphrase without doing reductive violence to the thinking - is also a kind of association, a leap in language across the void between what we think everyday and what we sense, in a deeper way, to be true. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

6 " A poet can take one word - maybe an abstraction, like love or fear or happiness, or an object, something concrete, like a flower or mountain or book - that feels for some reason full of potential energy, unexpressed meaning. The poet then gives herself the space and time and, most important, the freedom from any doctrine to try to allow her mind to leap, for no discernible reason, to another word. then she searches for a way to connect the two. Quite often it doesn't work - there is nothing there. Maybe she tries again, maybe many more times. Sometimes one element will change, or both. Eventually something clicks, an electrical connection is made, a way is found to connect the two things, and the poem begins. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

7 " The way the mind is moving-associatively-is what the poem is "about". It could be said its "how" (form) is its "what" (content). By moving associatively, from subject to subject, the poem is asserting something about the fundamental nature of the world, and about the relations among things, relations we might not consciously perceive in our everyday lives. To create a place where our minds can experience this movement is, as much as any ideas that are expressed, the purpose of the poem. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

8 " poetry has always been a record of the movement of the mind. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

9 " Poems are common to human experience because they trace the movement of thought, "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

10 " When looking at poetry more generally, we can see that his "arc of association which corresponds to the inner life of the objects" is a subset of a general principle of associative moment. Leaping or association in a poem is just as likely to be formal: rhyme, metaphor, quick unexpected movements in a narrative, the juxtaposition of images, and contradiction are all forms of association. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

11 " Poetry is a constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

12 " Poems make possible a conscious entry into the preconscious mind, a lucid dreaming. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

13 " the real, freely reimagined and recombined, is precisely what comprises the stuff of poetry. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

14 " Your only job is to follow your instinctive, personal, idiosyncratic sense of what is beautiful, and to see what emerges. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

15 " the truths of poetry are intimately related to associative movement. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

16 " If a poem is really good, you can’t really say what it’s “about, "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

17 " Poetry is the place where the ultimately irresolvable negotiation between public and private in language, and in life, is brought forward, "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry

18 " then the most mordant of us says
if I may quote my accountant

all solutions are suboptimal "

― Matthew Zapruder

19 " Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle
when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.
I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings. I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Come on All You Ghosts

20 " W. S. Merwin said, “Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language. "

― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry