Matthew Zapruder

Bio

Matthew Zapruder is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor who has published four volumes of poetry. His new book, Why Poetry, argues that the way we’ve been taught to read poetry is often also the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. He explores what poems are, and how we can read them so that we can, as Walt Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems” without the aid of any teacher or expert. “When I try to write a poem, I have this fantasy that the poems I write are for anyone, that anybody would like them in the right situation,” says Zapruder. “Not that everybody will like them, but that anyone could like them.”