Matthew Zapruder is, well, a presence in poetry. He’s a poet. He’s published sixcollections of poetry the most recent being I Love Hearing Your Dreams (2024). His poetry is known for exploring themes of grief, perception, and logic. He published the influential work Why Poetry? He’s written essays and articles and done translations. He’s received awards, honors, and fellowships. He co-founded a publishing house. And he teaches in the MFA and English Department at Saint Mary’s College of California in suburban Sab Francisco.
And now he’s published a memoir, The Story of a Poem. It may be the most unusual memoir I’ve read. No, it’s not written as a long poem, or series of poem. It looks like a standard memoir.
I’ve talked before about my experiences with the art of Anselm Kiefer. I’d seen two of works at the St. Louis Art Museum, and then in 2014 I walked into an entire exhibition at the Royal Academy of London. Over this past winter, the St. Louis Art Museum staged a massive exhibition of his works entitled “Becoming the Sea,” named for a line of poetry from Gregory Corso. One work also cited lines from the poet Paul Celan, and I just posted about Celan last week. Yes, I’m a fan of Kiefer’s art, but I don’t think I could quite articulate why.
Until now. I read a poem in This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed, the new collection by Mischa Willett. The poem is about Kiefer, and it’s about art, writing, and books. And it’s mostly about the act of artistic creation. The poem explained, to me, at least, what it was about Kieffer’s art that I find so profound.
One thing email and texting has done is almost eliminate the old-fashioned letter. And letters were the stuff of biographers and historians. Example: we know a lot about poets like T.S. Eliot because of the letters he wrote. Another example: Robert Frost. Ben Myers, writing for Portico, looks at Frost’s letters and asks,“Did Robert Frost Despair for His Soul?”
In 1825, a hero of the America Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, retuned to America for a visit. He survived the French Revolution, which didn’t treat aristocrats kindly, because the American Revolution and the role he played made him a national hero in France as well. Fifty years later, he came back, and the return was a triumph.
I read a considerable amount of poetry. I read all kinds of poetry – ancient, modern, Romantic, Victoriam, contemporary, poetry in translation, Japanese haiku. I’ve read The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and Green Knight, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s sonnets. I can invariably find something to like, in whole or in part, of virtually everything I read.
It’s a famous poem, author unknown. It’s called the national poem of France. It’s the story of Charlemagne’s nephew who falls in battle against the invading Saracens at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778. It’s a story of courage, betrayal, and ultimate victory. For centuries, it’s inspired playwrights, writers, poets (contemporary poet Mark Jarman wrote a poem about it), novels, stories, and even a rock song and a video game.
Detective Cameron Ballack is not only back; he’s on a roll. Two mysteries so far this year!
The wheelchair-bound detective is the creation of writer Luke Davis. He’s works with the Greater St. Louis Special Investigative Division. The unit functions as a special task force focused on murder and occasionally general mayhem.
In The Burning Glow, published in June, he helped track down a car bomber. In his recent adventure, An Academy of Murder, Ballack finds himself on farm more familiar ground. A janitor has been found dead at King’s Prep, a private Christian school. It almost looks like suicide, but the forensic investigation shows it was murder.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
He was born Paul Anschell in 1920, an only child. His life was framed by the place where he grew up and the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century that destroyed his family and everything that was familiar. Yet he survived. Under the name of Paul Celan, he continued continuing to write the poetry he began in his teens, poetry full of the images of life and death.
It’s an engaging, enthralling biography. Arno brings to life a man haunted by tragedy, horrendous events, and loss, and she shows how he folded it all into his poetry.
One of the most moving accounts I read this week was in Front Porch Republic. A writer named Jessica Birke looked at the family home where she grew up, the one that will likely be sold after her parents ae no longer there, and wonders what will happen to the place. She had me at the first line: “The land is mostly quiet now.”
Yesterday was the anniversary of a vicious attack on the Jewish community on Manchester, England. We’ve had attacks here in the United States, but we haven’t been seeing the rise of anti-Semitism that Britain seems to be experiencing. Perhaps it’s because we’re a larger country. But you just don’t expect to see an attack on a synagogue in the Britain you’ve experienced many times and the Britain of your imagination. But it’s there, and it’s getting worse. Robert Largan at The Critic Magazine looks back in anger at what happened and what it means.
I’ve been reading a biography of the poetPaul Celan(1920-1970). I must confess my ignorance; I’d never read his poetry before. And I thought, for what turned out to be an explainable reason, that he was French. I was close – he lived in France for about the last 20 years of his life.
It was the biography, published this year by Anna Arno (and translated from the Polish,) that lead me to his poetry, which has been collected into two, rather large, volumes. Memory Rose into Thresholdcovers his early poems; Breathturn into Timestead covers the later poems. The two volumes are more than 700 pages each; pat of the reason is that the poems are published in both English and the language Celan wrote poetry in – German.
