In “Off the Shelf: Finding the Pieces that Turn Writing into Poetry,” a recent essay in The Los Angeles Times, poet Matthew Zapruder looks back over his own development as a poet, and over large swaths of poetic history, to try to answer the question: what is it that makes a poem a poem?
Of central importance to Zapruder’s essay is the fact that poetic form–in an age in which many, many great poems have been written in free verse–does not offer a satisfactory answer to Zapruder’s question. Zapruder thus looks elsewhere for his answer, and he finds it in the movements and leaps of poetry:
“Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind. This is why it is translatable, even from a language such as Chinese, which has very little in common with English. What can be translated is the leap from one thought to another: what I call the associative movement particular to poetry. That leap, that movement, is what makes poetry poetry.”
Zapruder’s essay is worth reading for many reasons–it’s personal and engaging. However, here, I want to focus on why readers of this blog might be interested in reading Zapruder’s essay: it very clearly jibes with the thinking taking place in Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, and on this blog. Zapruder’s ideas about how something essential to poetry might be found in a poem’s non-formal leaps and movements at least is very much like what is argued in “Poetic Structure and Poetic Form: The Necessary Differentiation.”
Concomitantly, those interested in Zapruder’s ideas in “Off the Shelf” might also be interested in exploring a bit this blog (including the post “What Is Poetry?”) to see some of the work that has taken place to make explicit some of the exciting and energizing leaps and turns that are a big part of the heart of the mystery of what poetry is.
Structure & Surprise 