Story of a Poem: Music & Conversation with Gabriel Kahane & Matthew Zapruder

Sun, Nov 05

Oregon Symphony Creative Chair Gabriel Kahane sits down with friend and collaborator, the award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder, for an intimate afternoon of music and conversation orbiting Zapruder's new memoir, Story of a Poem. This event, part of Portland Book Festival's Cover to Cover, will include music performances by Kahane and readings by Zapruder. Admission is free, but reservations are required. Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work increasingly lives at the intersection of art and social practice. As a songwriter, he has released five albums, the most recent of which, Magnificent Bird, chronicles the final month of a year-long hiatus from the internet. In 2018, Nonesuch Records released Book of Travelers, a musical account of Kahane’s 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 election, an album hailed by Rolling Stone as “a stunning portrait of a singular moment in America.” Gabriel’s creative collaborators range from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Sylvan Esso, and Chris Thile, to Caroline Shaw, Anthony McGill, and the Danish String Quartet. His prose has appeared in The New Yorker online and in The New York Times; a wide-ranging newsletter “Words and Music,” can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com. As a theater artist, Kahane’s work has been heard on Broadway (The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May); off-Broadway at the Public Theater (February House); and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which presented his album & stage spectacle, The Ambassador, at the Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. In the 23/24 season, Gabriel makes his conducting debut with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, in performances of his piano concerto, Heirloom, written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane. That work will also receive its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall later in the season. In January of 2024, the BBC Concert Orchestra will give the UK premiere of emergency shelter intake form, Gabriel’s oratorio addressing economic inequality through the lens of homelessness. Other premieres this season include works for Attacca Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, and the Oregon Symphony, for whom he has just begun a second term as Creative Chair. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane recently relocated to Portland, OR, where he lives with his family. Poet, translator, professor and editor Matthew Zapruder was born in Washington, DC. in 1967. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he studied with Dara Wier, James Tate, and Agha Shahid Ali. Zapruder is the author most recently of Father’s Day, Copper Canyon, 2019, and Why Poetry, a book of prose, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2017. He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He teaches in the MFA and English Department at Saint Mary’s College of California. He also plays lead guitar in the rock band The Figments, a Western Massachusetts based band led by songwriter Thane Thomsen. Zapruder’s other collections of poetry include Sun Bear (2014), Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). He collaborated with painter Chris Uphues on For You in Full Bloom (2009) and co-translated, with historian Radu Ioanid, Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (Coffee House, 2008). Come on All You Ghosts was selected as one of the year’s top 5 poetry books by Publishers Weekly, the 2010 Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry, the 2010 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association poetry book of the year, and as one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2011. His second collection, The Pajamaist, was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. His first book, American Linden, was the winner of the Tupelo Press Editors Prize, and was published by Tupelo in 2002. German and Slovenian language editions of his poems have been published by Luxbooks and Serpa Editions; in 2009, Luxbooks also published a separate German language graphic novel version of the poem “The Pajamaist.” A collaborative book with painter Chris Uphues, For You in Full Bloom, was published by Pilot Press in 2009. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Harper’s, Bomb, Slate, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll; Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything; and Best American Poetry 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2019. His awards include a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX, and the May Sarton prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at New York University, The New School, the University of Houston, and at the University of California at Berkeley as the 2010 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry.