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    Story of a Poem
    Story of a Poem
    Story of a Poem
    Ebook218 pages3 hours

    Story of a Poem

    By Matthew Zapruder

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    About this ebook

    "Story of a Poem is the luminous, lyrical meditation on wringing beauty from suffering and air, threaded with a singular, moving story about parenting an atypical child. I read it in a single gulp, and you will too.” —Mary Karr, Bestselling author of The Liars' Club and Cherry

    Matthew Zapruder had an idea: to write a poem as slowly and intentionally as possible, to preserve its drafts, and record the painstaking, elusively transcendent stuff of its construction. It would be the end cap to a new collection of poetry, and a means to process modern American life in a time of political turmoil, mega fires, and sobriety. What Zapruder didn’t anticipate was that this literary project would reveal a deeply personal aspect as well: a way to resolve the unexplored pain and unexpected joys he was confronting in the wake of his son’s diagnosis with autism.

    The result is a remarkable piece of writing, one that explores not just what it means to be a poet and father, but also what it means to be alive on this planet during this turbulent and extraordinary time.  By comparing the writing of a poem with his own tangled evolution as a son, husband and father, Zapruder unfolds moments of his own life in the reflection of an increasingly uncanny world. With a wide range of reference points— from Celan, Li Bai and Frank O’Hara to Whitman, Merwin and Rupi Kaur—we join Zapruder on a poet’s journey; that in some alchemy of literature, becomes a journey of our own.

    Ultimately, the poet asks us to join with him in the search for a crucial answer. In his words: “What world can we imagine, and then make, where we all can live?”  With Story of a Poem celebrated poet Matthew Zapruder offers a personal, deeply unguarded examination of a poet’s eternal struggle to transform a moment of feeling into verse, as well as a subtle and enthralling roadmap to the practice of poetry and finding its threads in everyday life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Unnamed Press
    Release dateApr 4, 2023
    ISBN9781951213800
    Story of a Poem
    Author

    Matthew Zapruder

    Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including Come on All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Father’s Day; Why Poetry; and Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider and Attacca Quartet at Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Performances and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. He was Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

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