Joanne Kyger and the Making of a Poem
Matthew Zapruder is the author, most recently, of Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019). He teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California and is the editor at large of Wave Books.
In summer 2018, I went to the North Shore of Oahu to teach at a writing conference. How quickly such a sentence has come to seem unreal in these pandemic days. The conference was at this former Boy Scout camp, right on the beach. Most of the people were there to work on memoirs, but I taught a little poetry class about how to start writing from nothing, and then how to use music and association and not mere logic to move forward in a poem.
In “The Mythologizing of Reality,” Bruno Schulz writes: “Poetry reaches the meaning of the world intuitively, deductively, with large daring shortcuts and approximations. Knowledge seeks the same meaning inductively, methodically, taking into account all the materials of experience. Fundamentally, one and the other are bound for the same goal.”
I want to agree. But I don’t know if I believe it. It may be that the same knowledge we discover through poetry can be reached otherwise, through prose or some other investigation (inductive reasoning? scientific experiments? numerology? storytelling? logical proofs? magic?). But I feel sure that whatever I figure out at the
