<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-no-proof:yes"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype
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</v:shape><![endif]--><img width="434" height="324" src="file://localhost/Users/richarddeming/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_image002.png" v:shapes="Picture_x0020_1"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt">Post-session
wrap up: Jim Berger talking to David Shapiro about Kenneth Koch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Annie Won looks for help.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Dear fellow poeticians,</p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>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: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">New and Selected Poems</i>,
which we first discussed at the session the week before.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But Shapiro began as a musician,
studying violin for 9 hours a day when he was 10.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>His entire family was musical and every Friday night
professional musicians would come to dinner and then perform with the
family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In essence, for him,
there is no escape from aesthetic experience because anything can enter into
that realm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In this way, Shapiro
is a “devout pluralist” because so many things, so many conditions, can count
as art in whatever form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“If you speak, something will be born,”
he insisted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In art, then,
pluralism joined to a sense of beauty becomes a receptivity to the axis of
things, experiences, and possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Humor and wit in poetry becomes not a device but a strategy for
countering dogmatism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It also
allows for shift and play within poetry in order to undermine a tendency in a
lyric poem to declaim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Once
again we thank David for his engaged, generative visit.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">That’s it for 2010.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>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).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>And more, much, much more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>I’ll provide the dates for these sessions after the new year
begins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>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.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">All best from the WGCP Co-coordinators,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, & Jean-Jacques Poucel</p>
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