Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry's accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry--and poetry alone--can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.   

Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, "possess the origin of all poems," without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. 

Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder's personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

Matthew Zapruder lives in San Francisco and works as an editor at Wave Books. He holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts and is the author of three collections of poetry: American Linden, Come on All You Ghosts, and The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was honored by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. He is also co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, Zapruder is a member of the permanent faculty at the low residency MFA in creative writing at UCR-Palm Desert as well as the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. His poems, essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer and The Los Angeles Times.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062343079
ISBN 10	0062343076
Title	Why Poetry
Author	Matthew Zapruder
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2017-08-15
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.