Amherst Reads Transcript

Rafel Campo: I’m so pleased to be talking with Matthew Zapruder, Amherst class of ’89, a Russian major I may have bumped into in Val or the basement of AD, and an accomplished poet whom I’ve long admired. He’s the author of several notable books of poetry, including most recently Come On All You Ghosts and Sunbear, both from Copper Canyon Press. His many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannon Foundation Residency Fellowship, and the William Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America. He’s currently an associate professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where he teaches poetry in the creative writing MFA program. His new book is Why Poetry, just out from Echo. Thanks for joining me, Matthew.

Matthew Zapruder: Thanks Rafael, thank you for doing this. I’m a great admirer of your poetry and I’m so happy this worked out. Thank you.

RC: Me too, I think this is going to be a really great conversation. So, if you don’t mind, let’s start with your new book’s title: Why Poetry. On the one hand, it sounds like a question, or even a challenge, akin to one I hear a lot in the medical world, where an abundant skepticism of any way of knowing about the human experience other than science reigns. In another sense, it sounds like an affirmation, a manifesto, like the one I often encounter in the literary world or at liberal arts colleges like our alma mater, invoking the notion that we need the enlarging context of the arts and humanities to even hope to make sense of the human condition. How do these contrasting sensibilities predicate your approach to poetry in the book?

MZ: Well, I think that is exactly the duality of the question and the title that sort of launched me into writing it, I think on the one hand I did feel there was a challenge, you know, both from the outside, as I wrote poetry and started writing and publishing it, I came across a lot of people who had questions about poetry, what did it mean, what was it for, what was the use of it, and those questions came from strangers and from people close to me who wanted to know what I was doing with my life and why I chose to do it. And I had some of those questions myself. So I think it was that I decided instead of moving away from those questions, rejecting them as being sort of unsophisticated or philistine or something, I decided, well, what would it be like to take them seriously because I think there is something at the heart of that question, you know, “why are you doing this, what’s it for?” that is very profound.

And then in the course of doing it I also, like you said, did feel immediately and ongoing that sense of affirmation, and there is an aspect of polemic to the book, arguing for poetry, not that poetry needs any argument, it would be fine without one. But I think there’s a third aspect to it too that I wasn’t expecting, which was there’s this kind of autobiographical quality in the book, it becomes this story of my own coming to poetry, which happened a little bit later in life, I didn’t really write poetry too much until I was in my twenties, and that was also part of it. So the title, I think, just contains those different modes all together.

RC: Wow, that’s wonderful. I definitely want to ask you more about the personal story as to why poetry as we go along here. One anecdote that you mention in the book that I love is the memory of the dreaded poetry unit from high school, and I love the kind of tension and the contrast, if you will, between that sense of being told didactically how to read a poem, how do we read poetry, which I don’t think you do in the book, against what you do present, which is this more liberating, or drifting, leaping quality which you just so clearly relish in the poems you present. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about that tension too. Poetry is at once a meaning-making machine, and you refer to ??? and his notion of poetry as a machine, which sounds in some ways take-apartable or deconstructable in a tempting way, and then your insightful readings of the poems by the likes of Lipton and Ashbury in particular – I love those readings – encourage us to trust our own innate language instincts rather than to impose some presumed deeper message on them. So I was hoping you would talk a little more about that paradox for the folks listening, because I really think it’s such a key aspect of the book.

MZ: Well, when you were first asking the question, I immediately – my mind went to the fact that you and I are both teachers by profession. You, of course, practice medicine, and like all teachers, there’s always a tension between communicating information and trying to get across some sort of idea that’s important and needs to be known, but also the need to encourage people to learn to have their own thoughts about something. And it’s always a balance, and I think that when writing about – well, I should just speak from my own experience – when writing about poetry, writing about literature, I felt that tension, that inextricable tension as well. There were things I wanted to say and there were things I felt needed to be said, in order that one could have an interesting discussion about poetry, but I didn’t want to cross over to telling people exactly what the poems meant and overly directing them, so the writing of the book, a lot of it was moving back and forth between those two modes. “Have I said enough, have I said too much?”(Let me paraphrase R.E.M., Michael Stipe).

So later you were talking about the nature of language itself and meaning-making in poetry, which of course is really the heart of the book. I just try to talk about it in as many ways, usefully, as I can, but really the question is – there’s a great essay by the critic John Chiardi, “How Can A Poem Mean?” and I think the use of that word “how” instead of “what” was really astute on his part, “how does it mean?”. And that was a lot of the question for me, how does a poem mean, and one of the ways it means is by taking this material – language – that we are so used to using for certain purposes. I think poems also use language for that purpose, the words in poems mean things the way they do in conversation or all other forms of writing, but also activating all the other aspects of the material in language in all kinds of exciting ways, creating a space where the other parts of language, its nature, beyond mere communication of information, can be explored and experienced itself. And you can think of the poem as a site, or a location, or a space for that to happen, which explains why there’s so many different kinds of great poetry. And I always roll my eyes when someone has a very strong opinion about “only poetry that rhymes is good” or “no poetry that rhymes is good” or “only short poems” or “only long poems” or only this or only that, it’s just not true. The way that language can be activated and made to feel alive and fully experienced can happen in so many different forms and different types of poetry. So that’s exciting too, and that’s a big part of the book also, is to leave room for all sorts of different types of poetry.

RC: Wow, that’s wonderful. That’s such a great segue way into my next question, actually, Matthew, which is again this notion of language as this material for communication, and then this notion of it as in poetry as this wonderful space where we feel and engage in meaning without necessarily having to precisely communicate something specific. And so I was thinking about your reading recently with your sister, which I thought was tremendously thought-provoking, you know she has a new book out as well that examines the well-known film of the JFK assassination that was made by your grandfather, and I remember the two of you exploring the clash between the documentary documentation and the history recording and the sort of language in that kind of mode in that kind of application. And it made me think of the tension I encounter often in my medical work but also as a poet, this tension if you will, or contrast, between objective fact and recording a fact accurately – we do this, our intent in medicine is to get the facts right, just the facts – versus this larger notion of a subjective truth. And within the realm of poetry I think that has expression in the new critics’ approach to poetry, who famously said “nothing but the thing” in reading and writing poems. So I guess I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about how you enter poems via this intense focus on actual words on the page, and then at the same time, without a deadening explication or narration, you end up discovering these moments of hair-raising transcendence. And that’s how I felt reading you talk about these poems that I and other readers will find to be much more than the sum of the specific definitions of the words, the units of communication.

MZ: Well I hope so, thank you for saying that, I mean that was my fervent hope in writing the book is that I could somehow go together with the reader up to the poem, and maybe a little bit into it and through it in a helpfully gentle and perceptive way that would allow for illumination. But I guess in a way I’ve always been a kind of literalist, in a certain sense for poetry, and I think a part of – well, I studied literature at Amherst, and then I went on to graduate school to get a PhD in Slavic literatures, mainly studying Russian poetry, and I left after getting my Master’s to get an MFA. So I have academic training and scholarly training up to a certain level, so I’m familiar with the approaches. And I was always drawn to “what is here?” and “what are the words that are here?” and “why are they in this order, why is this choice made and not this choice, what do we know and what can we understand from looking at what’s actually here?”. And that was the part of reading that I liked. That’s not to say that there aren’t many, many other things to say about the text: where it came from and who the writer was, what their situation was. All those things are interesting and helpful and I like to talk about them. But I was always drawn to the choices, and I think the reason why is that I secretly wanted to make those choices myself. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to create those kind of texts myself, so I was drawn to those decisions. And then eventually I had the courage to begin attempting to make those decisions on my own.

So when I read, as a reader or a teacher, I come at it as a writer and I look at what’s on the page and I think, “The poet made that decision for a reason”. It may have been not a conscious reason, it may have been instinctive, but that doesn’t really matter. Why this word and not that word? Why in this order? What happens first, what then happens? And I just found that, as a teacher, these big, airy, generalized discussions about theme, those can come later. And plus it’s just fun, I’ve found that students – it’s just fun to get them re-centered. And it’s very funny with teaching, I’ve noticed this so often, that as you want to talk about a poem, and students, they skip the title, they start reading the poem. And I say, “Wait a minute! The poet titled the poem for a reason. They called it ‘The Road Not Traveled’ for a reason”. And what can we learn? We can spend half an hour just talking about the title and what you know and then the movement from the title to the first line. So it’s fun, not for everybody, but I think a lot of students really like it, even if they’re not literature students, they can get into it. So that was my basic approach to the book too, but obviously at times, when I wrote – I wrote a lot for this book, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words, and I threw away so much stuff – and a lot of the times I would just go deep into a close reading, and I would go on and on and on, and then get to the end and I’d be like, “This is boring. This just isn’t teaching us anything.” So I would have to throw it away. So there were a lot of poems that got read that way that didn’t make it into the book. I tried to keep only the ones I liked. There’s this quote from Wordsworth, “We murder to dissect,” and I always sort of had that in the back of my mind, so if I ever felt that I had murdered something and was dissecting it, then it needed to go.   

RC: Well I would say on the contrary, you are reading and thinking critically, and at the same time responding so viscerally to these poems. And I was hoping, at this juncture, to ask you if you might be willing to read a passage from the book. I especially – I love the book, as I hope is obvious – but I’d love for you to read from your reading of Bishop’s poem “Sestina”, which is also a favorite poem of mine, and I think it particularly enacts this challenge between responding with heart and then also with this really sharp critical mind. And all the objects in the poem, the authors, the almanac, which is, I think, an avatar for a sort of factual knowledge, and then the tears, which are this sort of effective component, in some sense, or one of the effective objects in the poem.

MZ: Did you have an almanac when you were a kid?

RC: I did.

MZ: I wonder how many poets used to have those, those almanacs that came out every year. And I completely loved those books, I could read them for hours with all those random facts. My guess is that most poets liked those things. So Elizabeth Bishop was a great American poet, a mid-century American poet, and is famous for a kind of narrative poem, very simple language. She also had this incredible facility with form, and could be extremely musical, and she was kind of a wizard, she could do anything. And this is one of her poems, it’s formal, it has a formal structure, and I describe this in a passage. I won’t read the whole passage, I’ll sort of skim a bit of it, but it’s in the middle of the book and I’m talking about the symbol.

(reads) Children have an intuitive sense of the symbolic nature of objects. This is why poems that get close to the consciousness of a child can feel so much more than merely nostalgic; they can bring back truths we have forgotten. When I look back at one of the first poems I loved, “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop, I see that a great part of its effect on me has to do with the way it creates symbolic meaning by returning to the mind of a child. A sestina is a type of formal poem in which six specific end words – in this case, “house”, “grandmother”, “child”, “almanac”, “stove”, and “tears” – repeat in a specific pattern.

This poem has always reminded me of my own childhood. I grew up in an old house in the suburbs of Maryland. Before my family bought it, the house was owned by two unmarried sisters who lived there together until their old age. When we moved in, the furnace and stove were strikingly old, and even after more than forty years, I can see them in my mind’s eye. Gradually these things were replaced, but I always felt the presence of the older, shadow version of the house still living in the new forms. Later, when I learned more about this poem, I discovered it recalls Bishop’s lonely childhood in Nova Scotia, the old house where she lived with her grandmother. For a long time, I didn’t know this as a specific biographical fact, but I could’ve intuited the outlines of it, if not the details. Most of all, though, out of all the poems about childhood, what brought me close initially to this particular poem, and why I return to it has to do with the way these six simple, repeating words gradually take on meaning and resonance as the poem goes on. Through its repetition of these six simple words, the poem taps into the elemental loneliness and boredom, but also the feeling of unsaid significance, of being a child.

And now I’ll read just the last three stanzas of the poem so you can hear the way those end words repeat.

(reads) It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

So those six words are swirling around there, and then that last short stanza that begins with “Time to plant tears” uses all of six of the words, two per line. It’s just marvelous the way she can do that and the way it sounds almost like conversational speech. It’s very difficult, as you probably know, to write a poem like that and have it not sound stilted and weird. And she’s so good at – it just flows. It’s remarkable the way that she can do it so naturally.

RC: And the way you read it, too, is just so – linking it to some of your own experience and memories, and I think that is extraordinary. Thank you for sharing that.

MZ: Thank you for asking me to read it. I adore that poem, and it’s one of the first full books of poetry I remember reading, that pink book, her selected poems, and she didn’t write a whole lot of poems in her life, so a kind of manageable body of work. But every single poem is just a knockout.

RC: I was going to ask you, actually, about – you mentioned being exposed to poetry at Amherst, and some of the classes you took, and your education at the college, and of course our audience this afternoon is a famously literate bunch, very interested in poetry, and we’ve got Dickinson, Frost and Merrill everywhere, in the classrooms and lecture halls of the college and permeating the whole landscape. I remember some of my own most memorable classes with Bill Pritchard and Hedgwick and the visiting poet at the time, Amy Clampitt, and like you – I think you talked about this at your reading – making pilgrimages to the Dickinson homestead and spending way too much time in the Frost library. But I was hoping you could talk a little bit for this particular audience about your exposure to poetry during your time at Amherst.

MZ: Well, I wasn’t really that into poetry at Amherst. I mean, I had written a little bit, and I took a couple of classes with David Sofield, including a large lecture class on contemporary poetry that was cool, but I had no context for it, really. And then I took one writing poetry workshop, the first one I’d ever taken, with a visiting poet, a Polish poet named Piotr Sommer, who’s a well-known poet in Poland, and he was grimly soldiering through our terrible undergraduate poetry. But he introduced me for the first time to this wonderful world of Central and Eastern European poetry that has provided a lifetime of reading for me.

It’s funny, I lived up in what we called “DKE”, the old frat house, up on the hill there, very close to Dickinson’s home, but I was mostly oblivious to that whole world. I came back about five or so years later to do my graduate work at UMass Amherst, and then, at that point, I was deeply suffused in the literary history of Amherst – Dickinson, Frost, I’m a huge Merrill fan. In fact, I went on to be the writer-in-residence at the Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, I lived there for eight months in his old apartment, which, after he passed away, he left to the town of Stonington, so they have a writers’ residency program. So I lived there where he wrote “The Changing Light at Sandover”, which is one of my favorite books of poetry, this long, epic poem where he uses the Ouija board to talk to the dead. 

So while I was an undergraduate, I unfortunately never studied with Bill Pritchard and many of the other luminaries of the college, which is a big, deep regret I have, although I appreciate very much the study of Russian literature I had while I was there with Stanley Rabinowitz and Dale and Jane and Bill and Stephanie and all these wonderful people who were there. But I wish I’d studied with Bill. I wrote him and sent him the book, and he wrote me a very nice note back, and we have a nascent correspondence, which I’m looking forward to.

RC: That’s wonderful, and that’s just the kind of place Amherst is, I think.

MZ: It is, it is! The fact that I could read all of Bill Pritchard’s books and then write him, and he’d write me right back, what a privilege.

RC: We are very fortunate in that sense, for sure, to have those mentors and those eminences, really.

MZ: And I think the literary community at Amherst has become stronger and stronger over the years, and of course you’re a notable, accomplished graduate, and you have this wonderful new selection coming out, which you kindly shared with me, which is a wonderful book. And Chapin, Tess Taylor, and Nuar Alsadir, who was a finalist for the National Book Award, is a graduate of the college, and I know that there are many others whose names are escaping me right now. But there’s quite a group of poets who’ve come through.

RC: I wanted to ask you a little about political poetry, which was a contentious subject during my own education at Amherst. We’re so used to those injunctions against writing the political poem, that politics don’t belong in poetry, and I was so struck by your incredibly nuanced and wonderful readings of some pretty difficult poems by, in one case, Amiri Baraka, and another poem of Audre Lord’s, that really question this refusal of the political in poetry. And of course, as you say in the book and as is my experience also, so many of our students are really drawn to writing about politics. So I’m wondering, how did your encounters with political poetry lead you more towards this wonderful, open engagement and dialogue and not this diatribe that I think we, understandably, resist in poetry space.

MZ: Well, for a long time, as you were alluding to, we were told a kind of false story about poetry, that it somehow isn’t politics, or political engagement or questions of social justice or all those things “don’t belong” in poetry, which is just ahistorical, it’s incorrect, it’s not true. And it makes no sense when you think about it. Why would politics, as a subject matter or as a language area, be, by definition, not available to poetry? That makes no sense. It never made any sense to me.

And I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the problem isn’t politics or social questions or questions of identity per se, I think it’s the fact that those subjects have a tendency to bring out a kind of single-mindedness of being convinced of one’s own position because the stakes of them are very high, especially in the heightened time that we’re living in now, but always. So I think it’s more that it’s difficult to write poem in which one is complete certain, from the beginning, about how one feels, and all the way through knows and never has any doubts. I’m not saying it’s impossible; it can be done, and it has been done. But that’s not, in my experience at least, as a writer or reader, the most likely orientation towards writing poetry. So the great political poems usually have some element of contradiction or working through of something. That contradiction can be very violent, it can be composed of multiple certainties colliding against each other, or a certainty that sort of hurdles towards an ultimate unknowingness. But I think, generally speaking, that’s more the problem. If a student or poet was going to write a poem about racism, I think most of us who are reasonable would agree that racism is bad and we shouldn’t be racist. So as a poet, if you’re just telling a story about racism, you start to kind of veer more towards the narrative impulse, the storytelling impulse, which might lead to a good poem, but it pushes you in a certain direction. So that’s kind of what I was interested in; I wanted to explore where poetry is most helpful in encountering these social and political issues. And I don’t think I answered all those questions fully by any means, not even close. But hopefully I introduced interesting ways of looking at them.

RC: I love your phrase of this notion that political poetry naturally emerges in the work of conscientious, moral poets.  Of course, we’re going to be drawn to those deeply troubling themes, and I love that notion that these themes do belong in poetry and again, as you say so eloquently, this sense of when they naturally arise in the writing rather than – as you were just suggesting – being more pushed out. That’s when those poems, with those kinds of collisions and frictions, can really be tremendously powerful.

MZ: And I should say, too, that I believe a stance of great conviction, and a stance of great passion, that completely belongs in poetry. I’m thinking right now of the American poet Terrance Hayes, who I’m sure you know, who’s writing this series of sonnets – it’s a book that’s coming out soon – called American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, they all have the same title. And these poems are gripping, and they’re incredibly passionate, sometimes they’re angry and sometimes they’re varying, sometimes they’re full of passion and intensity, and sometimes they have no idea what they’re saying. So it’s not as if, by saying, “A poem needs to not be so sure of itself,” that it can never be sure of itself. It just might be sure of itself at times. So I didn’t want to imply at all that poems need to be this quiet, this lacework, along the edge of the important matters. They’re at the heart of where it matters.

RC: I think on the contrary, what you convey is precisely that sense, that when these themes emerge, they emerge sometimes very forcefully, very explicitly and passionately.

MZ: And that force and passion can pull us towards a kind of knowledge that we could never get in prose, or in conversation, or in polemic. It’s the very fact that the poet is willing to risk contradiction and really, truly risk not knowing what’s going to happen next that can lead us to these incredible revelations. It’s dangerous; it’s dangerous work. It’s dangerous, important work, I think. But it takes great skill and courage to write that way.

RC: That is true in the discussions of Baraka’s poem, Lorde’s poem – in particular Lorde’s poem, which is such a difficult, remarkable poem – and then of course, some of Terrance Hayes’ work as well that you respond to so brilliantly. Can I ask you a little bit about your own poetry, Matthew? Because I just find that you also write – we’re talking a little bit about narrative, the poetic…lyricism perhaps isn’t the right word for it – but I find your poems really dance on that intersection between narrative, kind of plain-spokenness, and this wonderfully poetic language. And again, that’s not exactly the right term that I’m looking for. But I wanted to ask if your experience of writing such poems informs the new book, Why Poetry?, and if so, can you talk a little bit about that.

MZ: Thank you for saying that. Yes, I think it’s intimately bound up in why I wanted to write the book. I think I want to write poems that belong to everybody but don’t ever give up or give away any of the things that I feel certain poetry can do. I don’t want to write prose just to please people. And the reason is because I think that poems can know something and do something that prose cannot. So I’ve been trying to do that my whole life as a poet, to write those poems. And so I wanted – part of the project of the book is to explore what it is in the poems I love and the poets I love – what’s at the heart of that, what allows them or allows those poems to be those kinds of spaces where these things can be known and experienced that can’t happen in another way. So I don’t know if I was able to answer that; I don’t know if it’s answerable. But maybe just the act of exploring it, for me and for readers, can bring us closer to poetry and bring me closer to poetry, which is really all I want.

And I think you know this. Your poems are lucid and generous and dangerous, and when you get up and read them, you must have this experience, at least sometimes, of feeling very connected to an audience and feeling that there is important work being done there that could not be done by reading a story or giving a lecture or teaching a class. And that work is the work of poetry, it’s poetry’s - if I can quote John Keats – “poetry’s high need”. So I don’t know if you can really ever exactly define it, but I think you can talk towards it. That’s what I wanted to do, and just to try.

RC: I think you really did accomplish that, Matthew, that’s a wonderful answer. Speaking of Keats, you talk about Keats’ idea of poetry’s negative capability, which his, to quote him as you do, “When a man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” And I read that again – I love that quote, I love Keats’ thinking on negative capability – but I was trying to think about it in our particular moment, with fake news and seductive, specious narratives that some might say warn us that poetry poses a danger to the true communion you were just talking about. You were talking about your experiences of reading your poems, of sharing them with audiences.

MZ: That’s what Plato thought. That’s why Plato wanted to throw the poets out. That’s exactly what he said. He said, because they tell stories that people are going to believe – basically, I’m paraphrasing – they’re going to make up stuff that people are going to believe and it’s going to mess everybody up and they can’t be part of a functioning society, basically. And I think there’s some truth to that. Poets do pose these seductive, alternate worlds. I have had that very thought to myself sometimes, to think, “Is this dangerous?” or “Is this leading us away from something we need to be thinking about?” My feeling is that it’s not leading us away, that I can understand that fear. But another person who famously felt that way is Adorno, who famously wrote after the Holocaust – again, to paraphrase – you can’t write poetry after the Holocaust, that it’s barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust. And what he meant was that his idea of poetry was something that took experience and sort of decorated it, confused it, mystified it, and that we can’t afford that kind of thinking, that that’s precisely the sort of thinking that led people to accept what the Nazis were doing because they could tell themselves these little fake stories and not confirm reality.

But that’s actually not what I think poetry does at all; I think it does the opposite thing. I think it brings us very close to reality, and I think reading poetry is great training – again, to circle back to the conversation we had in the beginning – that’s why I’m so committed to close reading and to being attentive to the words on the page. If nothing else, that’s good training for us in terms of reading and living. What’re people actually saying, what do they actually mean? And so if nothing else, my students at least learn how to read. But I think that poetry – and you know, I have a lot of writing I do about this in the book in this way – I think poetry brings us close to what’s difficult to understand and what’s difficult to accept if we let it, if we trust if, if we don’t paraphrase it or turn it into something else and treat the words on the page like they really mean something else. If we take them literally, it gets us close to some dangerous and important stuff. So I think all we can do is listen.

There’s a very – some people have a saying – not to bring this back to a political moment – some people have a saying – just listen to what people are saying with these pauses and you will know what they want to do, and you can decide whether you think that’s a good idea or not. And I thought that was good advice, just listen. And if it sounds like a horrible world you don’t want to live in, full of cruelty and nihilism, then it probably is, and we should maybe not go in that direction, we should go in a direction that is more helpful and positive.

RC: That really resonates with me, Matthew, what you’re saying.

MZ: I’m sorry to interrupt you but it must resonate with you as a poet. You’re so committed in your own poems to that same task of moving from word to word with such – reverence maybe is the wrong word because it makes it sound high-fallutin’ or something – but with such intention. That’s how you write and that’s why your poems are great. And that’s the mark of any real poet, someone who is just thinking about what they’re saying and means it.

RC: That’s so true that in our own moment – my own response to those kinds of arguments is that poems actually – maybe paraphrasing what you just said so much more eloquently, Matthew – but this notion of poetry as an empathetic opportunity. What I think the best poems do, what your poems do, they present an opportunity for us to enter into the experience of another person and, as you say, really be present in those moments of otherness, to really see the world through those very – just talking about the political poems we were discussing earlier – even those more challenging poems, even those poems that present a more subversive or perhaps even suspect kind of narrative. We still need to be able to enter into those experiences to be part of a society, to be part of a culture, part of a shared language, part of a shared conversation. And I think that’s what your poems do so brilliantly. You said it before, you make language accessible to all. You make experiences that sometimes are personal but in other cases are more universal really available to all your readers, which I think is extraordinary. Why Poetry? does that as well, I think it really helps all of us to enter the experience of poetry, in the way you write poems yourself, and it teaches so many of us how to engage with poetry. So thank you so much for writing this book, it’s really extraordinary, and for your poems also, of course.

Can I ask one last question before we – I have a feeling we’re going way over here – I hope they’re still listening because I love everything that you’re saying. We’ll just have that fantasy, right? I think I’m especially prone to it myself. I wanted to ask you, as sort of a parting question, you have such as marvelously wide range of poets whose work you read in Why Poetry?: Dickinson, Whitman, Auden, Stevens, we mentioned Terrance Hayes earlier. One we didn’t, but your reading of her is also extraordinary, Victoria Chang – so I was curious, who are you reading now? And also maybe you could end by telling us what’s next for you, what’s your next project?

MZ: Well, as far as what I’m reading, I’m actually just beginning a sabbatical year of teaching – I’m a professor at St. Mary’s College in California – I’m beginning a sabbatical year, which is wonderful. I haven’t started writing very much yet, but I immediately threw myself into reading, which I felt I hadn’t had the time to do. I also have a three-year-old son, so it’s been a demanding and chaotic time in my life. And it is in all of our lives too, not just for me. So I’ve been reading a lot, and one thing I’ve read recently, that I just happened to read – I mentioned Nuar Alsadir earlier, she’s also a graduate of the college, and she had sent me her book, Fourth Person Singular, and that was actually the first book I read after the new year as part of my “I’m going to sit down every day and try to read for a while”, and I read her book and I really liked it. And I wrote her a note, and then, lo and behold, I see that she’s a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award recently, which is very nice and well-deserved. Somebody recently sent me a selection of Cole Rich’s notebooks, someone thought that I might like that, so that’s on the top of my pile right now. I’m reading this wonderful writer from South America right now whose name is Cesar Aira, who writes these very short books, he’s Argentinian, and they’re very strange and beautiful. And a lot of poetry, a lot of poems, old poems, good poems, that I get my hands on to feel inspired. What’re you reading? What’s on your desk? You’re busier than I am.

RC:  Well I’ve been reading Why Poetry?, which everyone listening to us should definitely read! I’ve also been re-reading – because I have your most recent two books, and cherish them – so I’ve been rereading them in anticipation of talking to you. So those have been my constant companions these past few weeks, and it’s just been such a pleasure to re-immerse myself in your voice.

MZ: Well, and I will say, the most recent book of poetry that I read is your most recent – your new and selected in manuscript, because I wanted to read it before our conversation. So that’s actually, to be truthful, the most recent book of poetry that I read, because I read it in the past few days. So that’s been really cool to get to see the scope of your work, and that’s going to be exciting when – but when does that book come out?

RC: It’ll be out in the fall of this year. Probably, I don’t know, September, October? Who knows? We’ll hope for September!

MZ: That’s exciting! Well I certainly hope Amherst will have you back to do a big reading, and I’ll try to make it if I can.

RC: Oh, I’d love that, and I’d love to continue our conversation, Matthew, when I’m visiting Moraga next. I definitely want to connect with you out there.

MZ: Yeah, we’ll get together. Next time, as you said, there’s a great taco place up there.

RC: That’s right!

MZ: What’s it called?

RC: It’s called La Plaza, and it’s in Concord, it’s awesome, it’s the real deal.

MZ: Take me there and we’ll keep up their business for another couple of months.

RC: Sounds good. Alright Matthew, well thank you so much again for just a wonderful conversation. I hope everyone who’s listening will go out and buy and read, with the same joy and pleasure I did, Why Poetry?, from Echo press.

MZ: Thank you Rafael, it was a pleasure.