Idaho by Matthew Zapruder

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 23, 2014   Idaho   Matthew Zapruder

All summer it was on fire I was as always in California, looking out my window, discovering nothing, then flying back east far above those forests filled with black smoke to feel again that way I will keep failing to name. O the same mistakes O the mythical different results. It’s true one day I walked a ridge saw a hawk read three letters by Keats, bought some postcards I will never send, and in a blue scrawl made a list then fell asleep holding volume twelve of the old encyclopedia some stranger sent to fill me with pictures and information about that land where no president has ever been born. I woke wanting so much to go inside the mountain they call The Cabinet to find a few bats and the daughter of the chambers drawing ibex on the walls so I can ask her how soon and in what manner we will join them.            Copyright @ 2014 by Matthew Zapruder. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “In 2011 the artist Mel Chin used every illustration extracted from a 1953-56 set of Funk & Wagnall’s Universal Standard Encyclopedia to make 524 collages arranged in twenty-five floor to ceiling columns. These collages are pretty extraordinary. Via the poet Nick Flynn, Mel sent me Volume 12 (which included the entry for Idaho), along with a digital copy of all the collages made from that volume, and asked me to write a poem. I always love getting a task, especially such a strange and interesting one. I gratefully carried around that marvelous volume all summer. Finally I wrote this poem, which will appear in a forthcoming book about the project from Yale University Press later this year.” —Matthew Zapruder   Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). An assistant professor in the St. Mary’s College of California MFA program and English department, and an editor-at-large at Wave Books, he lives in Oakland, California.  Most Recent Book by Zapruder   Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) “Idaho Requiem” by Ron McFarland “Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake” by Timothy Donnelly “At Night the States” by Alice Notley Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038