Home > Author > Matthew Zapruder
21 " Poets are alchemists of nothingness. They aspire to turn silence, nothingness, absence, into something palpable. "
― Matthew Zapruder , Why Poetry
22 " Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions. "
23 " The symbol in a poem does not function the way it does in everyday life. It operates the way a metaphor does, by introducing the possibility of comparison. But unlike a metaphor, the comparison is never completed. There is only the original thing, and the very strong feeling that it is going to transform, as in a metaphor, but without the other, completing term. Ed Hirsch writes in his Poetic Glossary that "in poetry, a symbol offers a surplus of resonance." This surplus is that strong feeling of meaning, implied but ultimately left unspecified and undefined. "
24 " It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives. "
25 " Poems are imaginative structures built out of words, ones that any reader can enter. They are places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion. "
26 " People do not disbelieve in inequality or racism or global warming because they have not been informed: they disbelieve because they cannot or choose not to imagine. They are cruel because to them, others have become an abstraction, and cannot be truly imagined. "
27 " The fundamental mechanisms that make a metaphor—unexpected association, and an activation of the latent potential energy of words, along with a reminder of their dangerous and exciting provisionality—are central to poetic activity. "
28 " Metaphor is not the original thing being compared, or what it is being compared to, but the interaction between the two of them. It is not merely a comparison of one thing to another, but the creation of a new, third resonance, a field of meaning. "
29 " Poetry brings into play a countervailing force, one that pushes us toward a state of mind that can feel paradoxically both ambiguous yet full of strong, obscure, yet somehow palpable feelings, ones that do not fall into the usual categories we use to name our emotions and experiences. "
30 " The true symbolic effect of the text depends on a magical transformation, where the things themselves—sea, old man, boy, fish, sharks—somehow remain themselves and also together create a feeling of greater meaning, one that is never specified. "
31 " ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES OF READING POETRY IS TO FEEL "
32 " Poems are the place where the actuality of language and of life is most made available. And it is up to us not to evade it. "
33 " Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. "
34 " that choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet. "
35 " To resist the pressure of the real is to preserve a space within ourselves, where everything we see and know can get recombined, in the hopes of a deeper and more mysterious knowledge. we do this resisting, this pushing back, not with the euphemism or the rhetoric of politics, nor with the received dead language of any ideology, but with words alive with possibility, charged with meaning. "