<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><img id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/155/424104623_140ddd06a5.jpg" height="300" width="220"></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Dear All,</div><div><br></div><div>on weds I'll send the minutes of our very generative and provocative discussion with C.D. Wright. In the meantime I wanted to send word that copies of David Shapiro's <i>New and Selected Poems</i> is available at the Whitney Humanities Center. Our next session will be Dec 3 and the poet will join us for a discussion of his work on Dec 10.</div><div><br></div><div>Shapiro is one of the most prolific and important figures of the second generation of the New York School (having published more than 20 books of poetry and criticism). He was accepted into Columbia at age 16 and worked closely with Kenneth Koch. he published his first book of poems at age 18 and went on to write the first monograph on John Ashbery. he was a finalist for the National Book Award at 24. He is also a talented art writer and an accomplished violinist (an actual child prodigy). He covers the waterfront, as they say. Below, I'll append two short pieces about Shapiro--one is a blog post from Ron Silliman and the other is a piece by Thomas Fink. And here is a link to an MP3 of Shapiro reading in 2008 <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Shapiro/Shapiro-David_Segue-Series_BPC_3-22-08.mp3">http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Shapiro/Shapiro-David_Segue-Series_BPC_3-22-08.mp3</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>So, feel free to grab a copy of Shapiro's book, but since supplies are limited only do so if you think it is likely that you'll be able to make at least one if not both sessions devoted to Shapiro. But don't wait, copies go quickly!</div><div><br></div><div>More soon,</div><div><br></div><div>Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>=======</div><div><br></div><div>from Silliman's blog </div><h3>Monday, March 19, 2007</h3><div><br></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">Nothing is harder or <span class="GramE">more tricky</span>
than a selected poems. As Robert Grenier demonstrated when he delivered
a selected Creeley that showed the poet’s work centering <span class="GramE">around</span> the poems that confront language most directly – focusing on <i style="">Words </i>and <i style="">Pieces </i>more than on the earlier “popular” <i style="">For Love </i>– not everybody views the same poet the same way. Several Quietist poets have suggested that <i style="">Mauberly </i>represents
the pinnacle of Pound’s achievement, but then I would edit a selected
Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the <i style="">Quartets. </i>It would be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John <span class="SpellE">Ashberys</span>
we could create via a selected poems. And we know how some poets,
including both Auden & Moore, actively revised their own pasts
through cautious, if injudicious, editing. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro <span style="color: black;">who emerges from <i style=""><a href="http://www.overlookpress.com/book.php?ISBN=1-58567-877-5"><span style="color: black;">New and Selected Poems (1965-2006)</span></a> </i>captures what is unique about this most difficult (& just possibly most rewarding) of all </span></span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;"> poets. One way of looking at Shapiro might be</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">
to import Zukofsky’s musical notion of the integral & to suggest
that for Shapiro, the upper limit is Joe Ceravolo, the lower one Kenneth
Koch. That’s a range with a discernible path, but an enormous reach
from one to the other: Here is a poem that has elements of both:<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in; "><b style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">A Problem<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in; "><b style=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">There are two ways of living on the earth<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically worse<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">One arrives in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">, and the train station is a dirty toad.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">One calls up </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"> at three-thirty, one’s fiancée is morally alone.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Thinking of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"> along psychoanalytic lines, and then<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1.95in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">delicately engraving nipples<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">On each of two round skulls<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">You have learned nothing from music but Debussy’s ions<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty cerebella.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">This represents early love, which is now “total space.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; "><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">These are the ways of living on the earth,<o:p></o:p></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 12pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Satisfied or unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild rice. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">It
took me quite a few years to learn how to read a poem like this, in
good part because, while I “got” Joe Ceravolo instinctively as a young
poet, it took me a long time to warm toward the work of Kenneth Koch
whose surrealism originally struck me as far too derivative of what I’d
read elsewhere translated from the French. Here, I once would have found
myself loving certain lines & images (“the train station is a dirty
toad” and that great final sentence, which has both image & tonal
echoes of Grenier’s early work – I’m not sure that Shapiro even knew of
Grenier at the time this must have been written in the very early
1970s), wishing they hadn’t been “stuck” in the midst everything else.
Now, however, I can see all the ways in which “everything else” really
is necessary, just how very closely calculated every decision is, like
when to use punctuation & when not. There’s a whole narrative here
just in how periods are used & where: it’s no accident that they
turn up midline just twice, both times following the very same phrase,
each at the end of similar, tho not entirely parallel, sentences.
Aesthetically, read aloud, the two sentences could not have a more
profoundly different sense of sensuality – and the second makes the
final sentence so much more powerful. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">The
poem is also both sad & serious in ways quite unlike Koch, unlike
Ceravolo also for that matter, an emotional register that one finds in
Shapiro that is rare anywhere else in the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">
– there are instances of wistful regret in Ashbery perhaps, but that’s
about it. As if one of the registers of how difficult it is to live
day-to-day in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">New York City</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">
is that, even as a poet, you never can let your guard down. In this
way, Shapiro is completely different from Berrigan, O’Hara, Padgett
& many later poets, precisely because he lets us see the jagged
vulnerability that is such an important part of his psyche:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">The snow is alive<br>
<br>
But my son cries<br>
<br>
The snow is not alive<br>
The snow cannot speak!<br>
The snow cannot come inside!<br>
You cannot break the snow!<br>
<br>
But the snow is alive<br>
<br>
And the tree is angry<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">This is the first section, of two, of a poem that takes its title from that first line, a part of the title series from <i style="">After a Lost Original, </i>written some 20 years after “A Problem.” Formally, you can see how close this poem gets to <span class="SpellE">Ceravolo’s</span>
sense of a magical world, but nowhere in Ceravolo will you ever find
this tone, which is both layered & complicated, with more than a
little hurt. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">If
Shapiro is emotionally the bravest poet among the New Yorkers, it’s not
accidental that he’s also the most political – indeed, one might say
he’s almost the only political presence, at least for his generation.
Once you get to Joel Lewis, Eileen Myles & after, this isn’t so
rare, but before Shapiro – who was <a href="http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/students/his3464y/grinberg+perry/office.gif"><span style="color: black;">very visibly a presence</span></a> during the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">
student strike circa 1968 – it appears not to have been even an
imagined possibility. Try to imagine Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery at an
anti-war rally a la Ginsberg, Bly, Levertov or Rothenberg. <span class="GramE">Or
Ted Berrigan organizing a rally to support his best friend Anselm Hollo
back when the immigration service was trying to deport this partaker of
cannabis.</span> Political action is not only a fact of Shapiro’s <span class="GramE">biography,</span>
it’s in the work, in poems as diverse as “House (Blown Apart)” from the
1980s or the very recent “A Burning Interior,” one of whose sections is
this “Song for Hannah Arendt”:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; color: black;">Out of being torn apart<br>
comes art.<br>
<br>
Out of being split in two<br>
comes me and you. HA <span class="SpellE">HA</span>!<br>
<br>
Out of being torn in three<br>
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)<br>
<br>
Out of the essential mistranslation<br>
emerges an illegitimate nation.<br>
<br>
Better she said the enraged<br>
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.<br>
<br>
Out of being split into thirteen parts<br>
comes the eccentric knowledge of “hearts.”<br>
<br>
(Out of being torn at all<br>
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)<br>
<br>
And out of this war, of having fought<br>
comes thinking, comes thought.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">The very flatness of these lines almost echoes <span class="SpellE">Levertov’s</span>
most political pieces, even if Shapiro’s source undoubtedly is (again)
Koch, (again) put to purposes Koch himself could never have imagined.
But it’s simplicity is undercut with the two post-rhyme interjections –
and consider how that laughter sounds at the end of the fourth line: it
is very much laughter without joy, an extraordinarily complicated
emotion to present in a poem, even in this one, which in so many ways is
heart-breaking. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">When Joe <span class="SpellE">Ceravolo’s</span> selected poems, <i style=""><a href="http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/%7Eceravolo/green.html"><span style="color: black;">The Green Lake is Awake</span></a>, </i>appeared,
it had a huge impact on people’s sense of the New York School, gen. 3
and beyond, because Ceravolo had been something of a secret save to the
people for whom he was <i style="">really <span class="SpellE">really</span> </i>important (a situation not unlike Jack Spicer’s during the decade between his death and the appearance of the <i style="">Collected Books</i>).
Shapiro’s selected won’t have the same impact – tho it should – in part
because he’s never truly disappeared, steadily bringing forth books now
for more than 40 years, doing important work as an art critic, visibly a
presence around New York. Yet I’ve never been certain just how many
poets actually <i style="">know </i>David Shapiro & his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was very young – <i style=""><a href="http://tinyurl.com/2j8twu"><span style="color: black;">January</span></a> </i>was
not only a book of poems published Holt, Rinehart & Winston in
1965, a time when even Frank O’Hara couldn’t find a real publisher among
the trades (Grove Press was a bottom feeder there), but was written for
the most part by Shapiro when he was still in high school – it would
have been easy (but wrong) to impose on him the narrative of the
brilliant savant, and not to recognize the decades of discipline he’s
subsequently added to what he brought to the blank page in the 1960s.
He’s not Frank Stanford goes to </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">. Nor is he a jack of all arts, master of none, tho his skills as violinist (the career ultimately not taken) and art <span class="GramE">critic are</span>
daunting. And because he’s one of the more anxious souls around the
poetry scene, I’m not sure just how many people really know him as the
generous, loyal, brilliant friend to so many poets he’s been all these
years. The person he reminds me of most in that regard is Bob Creeley.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;">So
this volume is one of the great “must have” books of the year. If you
have any interest in the New York School, or in the New American
Poetries, or even just broadly in the history of the post-avant, David
Shapiro’s <i style="">New and Selected Poems </i>is required reading. It’s also a great, if complicated, joy. </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><h2> Thomas Fink
</h2>
<h1>
David Shapiro’s ‘Possibilist’ Poetry</h1><h1><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/23/shap-fink.html">http://jacketmagazine.com/23/shap-fink.html</a> </span></font></h1></div><div><div><table summary="page content begins" width="535"><tbody><tr><td><p>
During his nearly forty year poetic career, David Shapiro, born in 1947,
has often been linked with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Joe
Ceravolo, Frank Lima, and others associated with the New York School,
itself a heterogeneous grouping of poets. It is a matter of historical
record that ‘senior members’ of the New York School enabled Shapiro to
get his early start and that he has, in turn, supported writers of the
‘school’ in his own editing and criticism. However, I believe that it is
a disservice to the complexity of his poetry to confine him to this
affiliative frame.<br>
<br>
Another diverse (and, these days, tremendously influential) ‘school,’
Language Poetry, has absorbed the influence of New York School
innovations, along with those of Stein, the Objectivists, Black
Mountain, and various others in ways that bear substantial comparison
with Shapiro’s exploratory poetry and poetics. Among the Language Poets,
perhaps only Michael Palmer has cited Shapiro as a fellow traveler, but
in the crucial period of the seventies, it is clear that their cultural
spheres were significantly overlapping: members of the Language School
and Shapiro were grappling with the ‘defamiliarizing’ poetics of Russian
Formalism, the language theory of late Wittgenstein, and
Poststructuralist critical theory.<br>
<br>
In an article that acknowledges a certain degree of common ground
between Shapiro and the Language Poets, Carl Whithaus asserts:
‘Shapiro’s poetry,’ unlike Language Writing, ‘is not about revelation or
the production of meaning; rather it is about loss and memory, those
fleeting traces of the past inscribed imperfectly in words.’ I must
insist that issues involving ‘the production of meaning’ cannot take a
back seat to any other component of Shapiro’s work, even as ‘loss and
memory’ are also major concerns.<br>
<br>
Opening the title-section of the title-sequence of his most recent book, <i>A Burning Interior</i>
(2002), Shapiro, as in various earlier poems, articulates compelling
figures of ‘tracing’ as indicative of the problematic of representation,
whether of the past or of immediate intensities: ‘Burning Interior// of
a copy of nothing/ or more precisely a series/ of xerox sketches of/
burning interior-exteriors...’ (1). In diverse fashions, Shapiro’s work
and Language Poetry both feature vigorous investigation of how arbitrary
or logical placement of ‘interiors’/ ‘exteriors,’ distinctions between
supposed ‘origins’ and ‘copies,’ and designations of ‘nothing’ and
‘substance’ arise and may be contested in the uses of language.<br>
<br>
At the outset, it is important to note that poets like Palmer, Ron
Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Charles
Bernstein, and Bruce Andrews have strongly contextualized their poetic
theory and praxis as Marxist. David Shapiro, whose politics come through
in the poetry as distinctly left liberal, has never done so. An
oft-cited passage in Ron Silliman’s essay, ‘Disappearance of the Word,
Appearance of the World’ (first published in 1977) suggests why he and
other Language Poets consider the destabilization of referentiality a
crucial Marxist gesture. Silliman reads the ‘passing’ of ‘language...
into a capitalist stage of development’ as ‘an anaesthetic
transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with
corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative
capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism”, the illusion
of reality in capitalist thought’ (<i>The New Sentence</i> 10). For him, ‘capitalism’ ‘narrows’ ‘the function of reference in language... into referentiality.’<br>
<br>
Whether or not he would agree with Silliman’s specific historical analysis of cause and effect, Shapiro in his <i>John Ashbery An Introduction to the Poetry</i>
(1979), demonstrates massive suspicion of ‘realist’ narration and the
presumption of referential solidity, and he also frequently insists upon
the importance of ‘the tangibility of the word’: ‘One of the central
functions of an “abstract” poetry’ like Ashbery’s ‘is to be aware of
itself as non-discursive palpability. Such poetry is involved in
particularity without a stable ground’ (175). These remarks are
uncannily pertinent to prose-poems of the late seventies like Ron
Silliman’s <i>Tjanting</i> and Lyn Hejinian’s <i>My Life</i>, whose
sentences feature a tremendous amount of precise, ‘worldly’ description
without pointing to a narrative or discursive center. (Of course, many
Language poets have acknowledged the influence of Ashbery’s most
syntactical disjunctive, experimental poetry on their own work.)<br>
<br>
When Rae Armantrout validates ‘language-oriented writing’ as ‘work’ that
‘sees itself and sees the world,’ thus behaving in an ‘ambi-centric’
way, she praises writers like Susan Howe, Carla Harryman, and Hejinian
who ‘bring the underlying structures of language/ thought into
consciousness’ (546). Many—perhaps most—of Shapiro’s poems illustrate
these kinds of focus. In ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ a poem published in
1983, the reiterated term ‘nothing’ marks the negative scrutiny of
referentiality’s assertions of stable ground:<br>
<br>
</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div>
<div><table summary="^page content continues" width="535"><tbody><tr><td>
<blockquote>
I’ve built nothing; you are the architect.<br>
You are near me like the sound of an archaic car.<br>
I know that I love the verb not to know.<br>
Do you love it? The distance is like a Chinese garden.<br>
I pluck pomegranates out of the Halloween stores.<br>
Then I keep looking at this phrase like summer hills.<br>
The mountain represents nothing, the mountain air<br>
Represents nothing, but two birds seem bad enough.<br>
In these things there is an immense exile like a surface:<br>
And when we try to stop expressing it, words are successful. (<i>To an Idea</i> 76)
</blockquote><p>
In an essay entitled ‘Migratory Meaning,’which stresses that readers are
trained and thus seek to bring all the parts of a literary text into
relation, and to do so as ‘parsimoniously’ (115) as possible, Ron
Silliman lists aesthetic devices in a poem by Joseph Ceravolo that
strenuously resist this effort and, thus, in Armantrout’s terms, cause
readers to be conscious of ‘underlying’ linguistic ‘structures’: ‘key
terms which resist specificity’; ‘evidence that the title does not
“name” the poem as a whole, but functions instead as a caption’; ‘a
seeming rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences’ (<i>The New Sentence</i> 119).<br>
<br>
Certainly, Shapiro’s title, ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ provides no
awareness of the poem’s totality. The only seasonal reference is to
Halloween, and, if this is supposed to be a diary entry, it grants no
access to the ‘inner life’ of a diarist. As a ‘caption,’ the poem could
refer to the day it was written, and the date may have some private
resonance to the poet, or it could ‘represent nothing.’ As in much of
John Ashbery’s work, identification of speaker and addressee and their
placement in a dramatic context in Shapiro’s poem above are unavailable.
The indeterminacy of the pronouns ‘infects’ and is further ‘infected’
by other undefined ‘key terms.’ What is it that ‘the architect’ has
‘built,’ literally or metaphorically, and why is the speaker unable to
‘build’ anything? Is the ‘mountain’ an architectural or linguistic
structure or natural ‘thing’? And how and why is it, along with the
surrounding ‘air’ (atmosphere or song?) and ‘birds’ (real birds or odd
people?), not a source of representation? How can ‘exile’ inhere in the
solid presence of ‘a mountain,’ unless that mountain is but a word?<br>
<br>
On the one hand, at least in the first six of the poem’s ten lines,
‘rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences’ is apparent in the
strange shifts from image to image. For example, how does the ‘Chinese
garden’ relate to the ‘Halloween stores,’ as if any store is confined to
the sale of items for one holiday (other than Christmas)? And yet,
there is a tenuous ‘narrative’ push/ pull involving a ‘you’ and an ‘I,’
and one may impose a scenic quasi-continuity in the movement from
‘hills,’ to ‘mountain air,’ to ‘birds,’ and finally to the ‘we’ (you and
I?) asked to refrain from ‘expression’ to allow language to ‘succeed’
when its users do not presume to make it represent more than it can.<br>
<br>
The concluding sentence does seem to indicate that the poem can be read
as a performance of Armantrout’s ‘ambi-centric’ gesture: poetry
attending to its own materials and representative possibilities and, in
some mediated way, to the ‘world’ of unstable selves, ‘mountains,’ and
‘birds.’ Perhaps the ‘I’ is the poet who does not ‘construct’ language
(the ‘you’), since the ‘architecture’ of linguistic possibilities
precedes him/ her. In writing a poem, the poet expresses ‘love’ for (and
perhaps frustration about) his own inability to know and experiences
the intense pleasure and/ or pain and, finally, acceptance of an ‘exile’
of phenomenological imagery from symbolism and meditative coherence,
the severance of ‘surface’ (or what Shapiro in the Ashbery book calls
‘palpability’) from ‘depth.’ Given all of the disjunction and sounding
of ‘nothing’ in ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ such a reading can be no more
than plausible, if unverifiable speculation.<br>
<br>
In concert with the skepticism about narration and transparent
‘referentiality,’ both Shapiro and many of the Language poets are deeply
committed to an expansion of poetic possibilities and a resistance to
limitation of stylistic avenues. In ‘An Interview with Hannah
Mockel-Rieke,’ Charles Bernstein observes ‘that the interconnection
among the poetic styles attended to in <i>L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E</i> has to do
with the rejection of certain traditionally accepted techniques for
poem-making and an openness to alternative techniques — together with a
distrust of the experimental as an end to itself,’ as well as the
refusal to valorize ‘any new style or technique or device’ as ‘the gold
pot at the end of the rainbow’; for Bernstein, ‘a commitment to the need
for a multiplicity of stylistic approaches among a multiplicity of
poets, and even for one poet’ (<i>My Way</i> 64) is central.<br>
<br>
Admittedly, Shapiro’s forays into prose-poetry have been less sustained
than those of many Language poets. However, sequences in his last three
books juxtapose different strophic and stanzaic patterns, prose and
verse, relatively coherent narrative elements, dream elements, and
fragments of meditation. The elegiac opening of the sixteenth section of
the sequence, ‘Voice’ (1994) entitled ‘A Note and a Poem by Joe
Ceravolo in a Dream,’ provides a cogent lyric explanation, not only of
Ceravolo’s approach, but of the drive of Shapiro’s own poetics to expand
possibilities:</p>
<blockquote>
<i>He was a poet of grammar</i><br>
<i>and a love poet and what</i><br>
<i>is more he showed the re-</i><br>
<i>lationship between grammar</i><br>
<i>and love. When he perturbed</i><br>
<i>syntax he seemed to in-</i><br>
<i>vert? reinvent? universe?</i><br>
<i>the possibilities of love</i><br>
<i>by making so many multiple</i><br>
<i>relations possible and/or</i><br>
<i>present or present tense.</i><br>
<i>He is a possibilist poet</i><br>
<i>entrances with its naïve</i><br>
<i>or Utopian anti-grammar. (After a Lost Original 70)</i>
</blockquote><p>
Rather than being ‘anti-grammar,’ Shapiro often pushes for ‘Utopian
alternative grammar’ that abandons unitary utterance for multiplicity.
The fragmentation within (or following) the second sentence in the
passage above is a good example. Two infinitives are followed by a noun
(‘universe’) that can either be interpreted as the object of the
infinitives, banging against the most obvious object following the last
question mark, or as a new verb coinage.<br>
<br>
Shapiro’s question hinges on the subtle shift of the second to last
letter in two verbs (‘r’ to ‘n’). According to the first reading, the
poet asks whether Ceravolo desires through syntactical innovation to
shuffle the ‘universe’s’ existing elements or to make new ones, and ‘the
possibilities of love’ stand in an apposite, hence equivalent, relation
to ‘universe.’ According to the second reading, Shapiro seeks to know
whether his late friend and colleague attempts to ‘invert’ and/or
‘reinvent’ and/or bring a ‘universe’ into being out of the materials of
love’s ‘possibilities.’ (The verb ‘universe’ is not merely a synonym for
‘universalize about’; it is something more actively generative.) There
is no compulsion to choose between the two alternatives, but their
co-presence tells us that multiplicity exists in the uncertainty of
grammatical and syntactic relations, as well as Shapiro’s heterogeneous
imagery and frequently surreal tropes. Of course, those who have scorned
Language Poetry tend to confuse multiplicity of these kinds—the
insistent cultivation of possibility that can be characterized as
‘possibilism’—with total randomness and utter unreadability.<br>
<br>
The second example of ‘perturbed syntax’ in Shapiro’s passage involves
the lack of punctuation separating the weird enjambment of ‘poet’ and
‘entrances,’ the unsure identification of ‘entrances’ as plural noun or
third-person singular verb, and the jarring use of the pronomial
adjective ‘its.’ An ordinary sentence might read: ‘He is a possibilist
poet whose/ work entrances with its naïve/ or Utopian anti-grammar’ or
‘...poet who/ entrances with his naïve/....’ or ‘He is a possibilist
poet./ He provides entrances with its [the poetry’s] naïve/....’ None of
my versions have the compression, lyric charge, or range of what
Shapiro wrote, and that distinction indicates that commentary can only
chase after the poetry without catching it.<br>
<br>
Could the Marxist contexts of Language Poetry significantly negate my
attempt to sketch common ground between the ‘possibilist’ practices of
Language writers and those of David Shapiro? Leaving this question to
other readers and other critical occasions, I maintain that it is
important for Shapiro’s work to be part of the general conversation
about contemporary poetry that, in Silliman’s terms, advocates for ‘the
tangibility of the word’ over ‘the illusion(s) of reality.’<br>
<br>
<br>
</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div>
<div class="biblio">
<table class="bgltgr" summary="^" width="535" style="position: static; z-index: auto; ">
<tbody><tr>
<td class="bgltgr">
<hr>
<h5>Works Cited</h5><p>
Armantrout, Rae. ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ <i>In the American Tree</i>. Ed. Ron Silliman. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. 544-546.
</p><p>
Bernstein, Charles. <i>My Way: Speeches and Poems</i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
</p><p>
Shapiro, David. <i>A Burning Interior</i>. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 2002.
</p><p>
———. <i>After a Lost Original</i>. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1994.
</p><p>
———. <i>John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry.</i> New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
</p><p>
———. <i>To an Idea</i>. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1983.
</p><p>
Silliman, Ron. <i>The New Sentence</i>. New York, New York: Roof Books, 1995.
</p><p>
Whithaus, Carl. ‘Immediate Memories: (Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate)
Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro.’ Rocky Mountain Modern Language
Association. (1997)<br>
<a href="http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/53.1/articles/whithaus.asp">http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/53.1/articles/whithaus.asp</a></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></body></html>