[Wgcp-whc] Minutes--David Shapiro visit
Richard Deming
richard.deming at yale.edu
Thu Dec 23 13:12:47 EST 2010
Post-session wrap up: Jim Berger talking to David Shapiro about
Kenneth Koch. Annie Won looks for help.
Dear fellow poeticians,
In the waning days of 2010, just past the end of the fall semester, I
wanted to send a note about our most recent session. On Friday, Dec.
10, we met for our last session of the semester. We were joined by
poet, critic, and art historian David Shapiro to discuss his work with
a particular eye to discussing his most recent collection: New and
Selected Poems, which we first discussed at the session the week before.
Given that Shapiro has been publishing work since he was 17 and was a
protégé of Kenneth Koch, Shapiro has been an important factor in the
construction of the legacy of the New York School of poetry. Given the
interaction of poetry and the visual arts in the 1960s, Shapiro was
able to move from one discipline to the next. This means not only did
he write poetry, but also he wrote the first monograph on John Ashbery
and he wrote important early books on figures from the artworld such
as Jim Dine and jasper Johns. But Shapiro began as a musician,
studying violin for 9 hours a day when he was 10. His entire family
was musical and every Friday night professional musicians would come
to dinner and then perform with the family. Shapiro was destined for
the life of a child prodigy, but as an act of early rebellion he
turned to poetry as a way of freeing himself from expectations that
were put on him as a violinist.
The fact that he moves across these different forms of aesthetic
expression is indicative of his belief that different forms of art are
not simply fields of knowledge, but they are the practice of
knowledge, as well. Rhythm, for instance, is not limited to only one
aspect of poetry or music, but is a form of experiencing sound
(musical, linguistic) as patterns, and such kinds of sensual
experiences reaches across boundaries of genre or discipline. Shapiro
does have perfect pitch and so he cannot help but think of any sound
in terms of specific tonalities—and thus everything can facilitate or
be the grounds for aesthetic experience. In essence, for him, there
is no escape from aesthetic experience because anything can enter into
that realm. In this way, Shapiro is a “devout pluralist” because so
many things, so many conditions, can count as art in whatever form.
Shapiro’s three most central influences are, he informed us, Jasper
Johns, John Cage, and Meyer Schapiro, all of whom work to blur
boundaries of form (and the dismantle any perceived difference between
content and form). As Meyer Schapiro once said, “Nature and abstract
forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other
flows from historically changing interests.”
If for Cage music is a way of life, for Shapiro language is a way of
life, especially if one moves towards a plural notion of what counts
as language. Language is necessarily plural, he argued, and that with
language, ideas are realities that are being formed all of the time
through the use of words. “If you speak, something will be born,” he
insisted. In art, then, pluralism joined to a sense of beauty becomes
a receptivity to the axis of things, experiences, and possibilities.
This isn’t to say that everything is poetry or art, but rather that
anything can be experienced that way as long as they strive for an
inexhaustibility of meaning and potential. The act of writing or
painting or collaging or playing violin all become forms of devotion
to a larger experience that goes beyond daily isolation or
estrangement. Humor and wit in poetry becomes not a device but a
strategy for countering dogmatism. It also allows for shift and play
within poetry in order to undermine a tendency in a lyric poem to
declaim. At the same time, Shapiro tries to allow for a range of
discourse, tones, and modes to enter into his poems so that the poem
enacts that axis of experiences that he sees as being part of the
inexhaustibility of aesthetic engagement with the everyday world. In
terms of the criticism he hears about poets who seemingly only write
about poetry, Shapiro pointed out that for poets poetry is life, and
to write about poetry is to write about life itself.
As is immediately evident, Shapiro’s discussion covered a huge range
of topics and his insights were erudite and intense and clearly had a
sense of stakes in terms of what poetry and art in general add to the
possibilities of being human. Once again we thank David for his
engaged, generative visit.
That’s it for 2010. Join us after the break—when we’ll have visits by
Jorie Graham, Susan Stewart, and Kaplan Harris (scholar and editor of
the forthcoming Selected Correspondence of Robert Creeley). And more,
much, much more. I’ll provide the dates for these sessions after the
new year begins. In the meantime, happy holidays to all and to all a
good set of direct, aesthetic experiences that amount to a discernible
pattern of repeated, repeating conditions which might commonly be
referred to as “night.”
All best from the WGCP Co-coordinators,
Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, & Jean-Jacques Poucel
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