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While this makes one an awful boyfriend, friend, brother, or son, I think it is an excellent place to be as a young artist. I was always willing, recklessly, to change anything in the poem to make it more musical, more strange, always skating along the edge of irrelevance. An equivalent lack of responsibility manifested in my writing. I thought nothing in my life mattered, and I was willing at a moment’s notice to alter it.

More often than not, I couldn’t stop myself tinkering long enough to figure out what felt right and true to me.

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The poems, in their clean, professional fonts, looked so much better than they were. Things were always happening too fast, and changes were being made and unmade with alarming frequency. I was growing more and more frustrated with the destabilizing ease with which I was able to continually write and erase words on a computer. Sometimes flakes of snow would somehow appear inside. Winter came, and a cold wind constantly blew through the room.

The next day new flowers would do the same thing. A giant morning glory had taken over the backyard, and I marveled at how its purple flowers would open to admit the pollinators, and then close in the afternoon and die.

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A row of poorly sealed windows looked out onto the street and other crooked little houses. My bedroom on the second floor of that house on School Street tilted alarmingly. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension. Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room.

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Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed.

In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. Matthew Zapruder’s Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter and a typewritten draft of a 2018 poem.