[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
A Matthew Zapruder poem is a strange, sincere, funny,
melancholic, capacious entity and unmistakably his own.
The poems often contain the flint
of his poet ancestors, Dickinson, Tate, Keats, Celan,
Whitman, Moore.
These sparks fly off the wheels as the poems go.
He apostrophizes and odes.
He engages syntax in subtle ways but to great effect.
Many of the poems in his latest collection, Father's Day,
are carved from one long sentence then razored
into short lines, and the effect of it is a kind of kinesthesia,
harkening waterfall.
At times, these waterfalls are carved from acrylic
and found in a futuristic mall court, food court.
But regardless, you, dear reader,
will tumble down and through these poems,
and at the bottom, rather than death,
find yourself very much alive in a pool of silence.
Other Zapruder's poems employ longer lines, syntactically
stretched phrases.
These create the feeling of leaves, like maple leaves,
floating down from the arms of trees.
And at the end, you, dear reader,
are left in leaf piles of maybes where the white tailed deer
of sadness are looking on.
Yes, we must stand in mystery.
The frozen eye of clarity cannot take everything in.
"I have done my best to leave behind the machine.
Anyone with a mind who cares can enter," he writes.
Zapruder is not only a prolific poet.
He is also a translator, a musician, a professor,
an editor of Wave Books, an essayist, and a memoirist.
In Why Poetry, he talks to us about how
to teach poetry and talks to us with humility about how
we are doing it wrong.
It's a book I highly recommend to all the teachers that I know.
His latest book is a memoir, which
he'll be reading from tonight in part called Story of a Poem,
is currently a nominee for the National Book Critics
Award in this category.
This book feels like an unfurling and unfurling
and unfurling of experience and self-portrait
within the frames of fatherhood, of parenting
a neurodiverse child, of being a writer and a poet
and a citizen in the face of all we now face.
His mind truly does wring beauty from the suffering air,
and that's an intentional misprision
from Mary Karr's blurb.
You'll see why.
If I can turn this.
I want to mention he has a new book of poems
forthcoming from Scribner called I Love Hearing Your Dreams,
and we will patiently impatiently be waiting for it.
We're so fortunate to be listening in tonight.
Doing so, as he himself puts it, before the enormous spiral
of wrecking balls in a dress--
and I think I see Dickinson here--
made of laughing glass.
All the ghosts are here listening tonight too.
Please join me in welcoming Matt Zapruder.
[APPLAUSE]