Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning:

“Today a ladybug flew through the window.  I was reading”

“Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway….”

“I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice”

“Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of”

“Today I read about the factory”

“This morning I rode my gray metal bike”

“Today I have the feeling that no matter”

“Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport”

Of course, that recurring intention of today gets predictable after a while, but Zapruder uses it to compose poems that sound like what the love child of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara by way of San Francisco rather than New York might sound like:  surreal, funny, dry, cynical and clever.  Like Ashbery, Zapruder makes maps of language, usually in one stanza, that speak directly to our virtual age in the somewhat disarming way many people have learned to speak to it:  with a quiet awe and a kind of increasing distraction.  Zapruder gives us a world made of incidents and images meant to enlarge living into a kind of sweet cartoon while making it feel close:  that short distance drawn between the experience and the effect of the experience:

This morning I made extra coffee
for the beloved and covered
the cup with a saucer.  Skelton
I thought, and stay

very still, whatever it was
will soon pass by and be gone.

Or a world that outlines the failure of memory:

Everything I know about birds
is I can’t remember plus
two of the four mourning
also known as rain
doves, the young ones
born in my back yard
just this April

The mind is constantly moving here, even when it is trying to be still (sorting out the past, dealing with his grief—exquisitely documented in the title poem—or revealing any saving grace the natural world has to offer).  Life is no bigger than one’s own autobiography and there’s an objectivity when one applies the pressure to its meaning.  Thoughts are things:

I like the word pocket.  It sounds a little safely
dangerous.  Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe

Zapruder reports on life as it is being lived, being chased, being failed at.  His past—in the poems where the past mostly only intersects with the present (though these poems never really follow a strict memory narrative tract)—is something that memory sifts and turns vague and general, even when it’s punctuated with subjects of clarity: children and violence, for example:

… I played
Santa in the Christmas play
which made sense.
One day Luis stabbed
another kid with a pencil
in the throat, he was also fine.
Another day i went to visit
a friendly girl and ran
straight through the plate glass
window in her apartment building
lobby and out the door
and home, my parents
never knew, I was as I would
now say unscathed.

And at the end:

I think once a parent dies
the absence in the mind
where new impressions would
have gone is clear, a kind
of space or vacuum related memories
pour into, which is good

In addition to beginning in today (which runs against Rilke’s dictum that poems should start on the turn), many poems in Come On All You Ghosts follow a speaker who is a reader as much as he is a writer and whose obsession with books is so complete that it makes living in the world seem like an interruption to reading:

Today a ladybug flew through my window.  I was reading
about a snowy plumage of the Willow Ptarmigan
and the song of the Nashville Warbler.  I was reading
the history of weather, how they agreed at last
to disagree on cloud categories.  I was reading a chronicle
of boredom that called itself The Great Loneliness
and caused a war

Perhaps Zapruder is making up the books as a way to document the imaginative mind, and it’s with that sense of invention and desire for having to know what what’s in a book that isn’t in the world that runs under all the poems sub texturally:  a kind of poetry which is a study in fixation, certainly, but also an expression of the willingness to change course, ideas, direction.  One senses Zapruder has only been thinking of his subjects only for as long as it takes him to write the poem: they’re happening, as opposed to happened and naturally they’re almost always in the present tense, beginning small with the speaker reading a book or looking at something move and ending up bigger than they were which is, in its organic way, everything one can hope for in poetry: the great and, in Zapruder’s style, always surprising enlargement of the world so we can see it.

tagged as come on all you ghosts, Matthew Zapruder, Michael Klein