Tag Archives: Matthew Zapruder

Negative Capability

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At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and what Shakespeare possessed enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. (John Keats, 1817)

Only recently did I learn of the term “negative capability” in Mathew Zapruder’s Why Poetry, where he writes “What is important is not the cause of the feeling (of engaging with the arts) but the feeling itself, those moments of deep inexplicable feeling, of sadness or melancholy or joy that we cannot place, a feeling that is maybe only possible when one is truly alone.”

This term is a revelation for me, akin to emotional intelligence, an idea to which I have a great affinity, but didn’t know was a thing and will now use as a moment for Davis n my script, Wave That Flag, where he leaves school and to explore his negative capability through a journey on tour with The Grateful Dead.

Scared of Writing

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I waited outside of Mr. Carver’s class, thinking of how I could get an extension. The assignment – a 2,000-word creative self-reflection – was due that afternoon, and I hadn’t even started. I didn’t understand why I had to do it, because I had graduated long ago and was in fact now teaching at the school.

I gave up and beetled off to my classroom, the Dean of Students behind me, a row of exiting buses ahead. As I sprinted up the hill, I opened my eyes to find it was late into morning, another cloudy day. I was scared of getting back into my writing. That’s all it was.

There is a sprawl of projects to address. I have to fine tune three scripts: Ave and Dorothy need to be established as live-bloggers from the outset of The Sacred Whore. Davis’ motivation for going on tour with The Grateful Dead needs more focus in Wave That Flag. And the background stories need to be more relevant to Davis’ isolation in Just Weird.

The Vanishing Pill is a mess. Two years in, and this book remains cluttered with notes all over. I haven’t figured out the starting point or the crisis nor where or how it ends. And then there’s my teacher’s guidebook, Fuck Pedagogy. No idea how I’m going to focus that into anything relevant at all.

To paraphrase Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, I’m afraid of being exposed, of being seen as banal, derivative, uninteresting and stupid. That’s all it is. And so, “To bed!” I will arise at dawn and begin this battle anew! Or now. I’ll do it now. And start with my first prompt: “My favorite childhood vacation…” That was in Anna Maria Key in Florida where everything was magic, especially the gift shops.