Book review: ‘Story of a Poem,’ by Matthew Zapruder

Zapruder explores the connection between parenting and writing as he embarks on a new project: a long poem written patiently and painstakingly, a poem allowed to take as much time and as many changes as it needs to take shape. If there is a better metaphor for the act of parenting through challenge and mystery, I don’t know it.

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“Each time I sit down to write a poem, I don’t know what I am doing,” Zapruder confesses. Writing and parenting are both processes of discovery. We don’t know who our children will be, or what our poems will become. We watch, listen, and guide as much as we can. Parenting makes us question what we thought we knew — about people, about ourselves, about the world — and so does poetry.

Zapruder’s candor about the fear, bewilderment and frustration he felt at hearing his son’s diagnosis, and the scramble to coordinate interventions and supports, will resonate with parents who have received similar news. “There is a singular terror when the story is suddenly taken away, and one is left in a new life,” he writes.

Many readers will identify with the seismic shift that has occurred in their story, and in the sense of a distinct before-and-after. Before the diagnosis, life was one thing, with one set of expectations and possibilities. After the diagnosis, life was something else. The “fragility of the story” is something that will resonate with all of us, particularly with the ongoing pandemic and the steady arrival of heartbreaking news in this country. The act of revising — meaning literally, “seeing again”— applies as much to living as it does to the writing process.

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In “Story of a Poem,” we witness a writer revising a poem, a father and husband revising his expectations, a human being revising the story of his life. Writing itself is how he processes these changes. It’s how he “sees again.” Zapruder writes, “I want to keep trying to understand. The only way I can is through writing.”

But while language is Zapruder’s currency, his son communicates differently. I appreciated Zapruder’s frank discussion of the challenges he has faced with his son and the trial-and-error efforts to bridge the gap between them — not unlike translating poetry from one language to another. As a parent of an autistic child, the author must reckon with his assumptions about verbal dexterity and intelligence, and expand his thinking into other equally valid ways of being in the world.

Readers are privy to a conversation Zapruder is having with himself about literature, difference, middle age, memory and the human condition, and the range of this memoir reflects the breadth and depth of this conversation.

Prose is interspersed with poetry. Personal narrative is interspersed with discussions of poets as varied as W.S. Merwin and Rupi Kaur. First-person storytelling is interspersed with third-person “fictionalizing” of one’s narrative. It’s fairly rare that I feel like an ideal reader for a book, but everything about Zapruder’s memoir appealed to me as a parent, writer and teacher.

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Throughout the book, Zapruder, whose poetry collections include “Father’s Day” (2019), deftly navigates his multitudes: parent, partner, advocate, writer, teacher and scholar. If I have any quibble, it’s that I missed his son’s presence later in the book, when the balance seems to shift more toward poetry and away from the family narrative.

As a poet, I love reading about poetry, so my longing for more of the father-son relationship late in the book is not a criticism so much as a testament to Zapruder’s beautiful writing about that relationship. Regardless, I eagerly turned each page until the end, savoring the sentences, and I expect readers, whether they are writers or parents or neither, to do the same.

At one point, Zapruder addresses the reader directly: “I want to be as simple and clear as possible, to reach out to you, without making things simpler and clearer than they actually are, which would be a deep betrayal.” The truths this writer arrives at, both in the poem and in the life, are not neat, reductive, or easy — but the book is reassuring nonetheless. Dare I say it, this book feels fatherly. I trust it. It’s brilliant yet plain-spoken, rooted in experience, wholehearted, and wise.

What is the relation between parenting an atypical child and writing poems? The book offers us answers: love, attentiveness, mystery, acceptance. “What world can we imagine, and then make, where we all can live?” Zapruder asks. “Story of a Poem” is an argument for that world: inclusive, expansive and elastic enough to hold more than we’d previously imagined.

Maggie Smith is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which publishes in April.

The Unnamed Press. 207 pp. $28