Announcement of Special Guest

We are pleased to welcome poet, essayist, and editor Matthew Zapruder as a special guest of the California Book Club this Thursday. He’ll be talking to Ada Limón and host John Freeman about Limón’s Startlement: New and Selected Poems, the CBC’s November selection.

Zapruder has authored six collections of poetry: I Love Hearing Your Dreams (2024), Father’s Day (2019), Sun Bear (2014), Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). He has also published two books of prose, Story of a Poem: A Memoir and Why Poetry.

Zapruder is the editor at large at Wave Books. From 2016 to 2017, he edited the New York Times Magazine’s poetry column. He teaches in the English Department and the Creative Writing Department’s MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California. His work has been honored and recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ May Sarton Award for Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as Harper’s, the Paris Review, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Believer, Real Simple, and the Los Angeles Times.

In Story of a Poem, which is Zapruder’s memoir about the connections between poetry and parenting his autistic son, he points to Keats’s concept of negative capability, which is the capacity to dwell “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability involves a tolerance for ambiguity and contradictions, an openness to experience, that is important to creative work.

Zapruder writes, “If I were forced to make a social justification for poetry, I would probably say something about how it keeps language, and therefore a part of us, alive and free. Or how it connects us in a direct, electric, unmediated way that can tap into vast, hidden reservoirs of empathy. But I also think it has something to do with this ability to hold more than one idea at once in the mind. Negative capability is the opposite of our current discourse. It is not how people think on social media, on cable news, on podcasts about politics.”

Poetry, as Zapruder conceives it in the book, can be, at its best, profoundly imaginative, deeply connective, strange, and even revolutionary. If you’ve been reading Startlement along with us, you may recognize the role of negative capability in Limón’s work, which so often delivers the natural world to us, as readers, with unusual perceptions and juxtapositions. Her poems pull us away from thinking of words as simply the logical tools of communication that are used to construct newspapers and social media posts about nature; they draw us into thinking about words as a means by which we imagine, question, move, and resee natural phenomena. Zapruder’s verse does this too. In an interview with Heather Scott Partington about Father’s Day, in which she asked what central question his work asks, Zapruder replied, “William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.’ My poems are always asking, How can I discover the news of poetry, and help myself and hopefully others not to die every day, miserably or otherwise?”

Thursday’s conversation is bound to be a brilliant one among accomplished poets. Join us!•

Join us on November 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Limón will sit down with Zapruder and host John Freeman to discuss Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Register for the Zoom conversation here.