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| Off the Shelves: Poetry Touched By Fire by Gary Counsil March 2004
If there is one generalization that can be made safely of Americans it’s that we move. Our ease and willingness to relocate across town, to another state or country, and back, only to pick-up and go again is in our nature. In David Shapiro’s recent collection of poems, A Burning Interior, our peripatetic tendencies manifest a mind touched by fire. "Our father / restless afraid of death / would say You will rest / when you’re dead" to which the poet responds "Perhaps not." Like John Ashbery, to whom he is the heir apparent, Shapiro is a poet of postmodern lyrics in which indeterminacy of meaning is central to his aesthetic. But his poems are not devoid of meaning nor are they merely language rolled like dice and cast upon the page for the reader to make what he or she may of them. Shapiro, a second-generation New York School poet, studied at Columbia University with Kenneth Koch, who is a founding member of the New York School. Intense rapport, collaboration, and partying among painters such as Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter and poets Ashbery, Koch, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara are the hallmarks of their creative process and they wrought changes in American poetry that have endured. They cultivated ambiguity in their verse and appropriated the techniques of painting and music in making poems. The school, of course, has its detractors (critic John Simon) and its champions; (poet, critic, and teacher David Lehman) though probably neither camp would argue that other than Ashbery, Shapiro is currently its leading practitioner. And in the fractured, competitive world of American poetry— irrespective of the school you pledge allegiance— Shapiro has produced a remarkable body of work that rewards those who take the reading of poetry seriously. In A Burning Interior, his ninth collection, Shapiro has brought together poems from collaborations with photographer David Haxon, artist Rudy Burckhardt and his son Daniel Shapiro. Of those poems not part of a sequence nearly all were published in little magazines. Together they forge a wide range of verse and one prose piece in the form of minutes logged from a series of family meetings entitled "1952." His grasp of form is fluent, but he is like the artist who has impeccable rendering skills but no interest in employing them. Yet that knowledge, that ability, and even an attitude toward mere technique is present in their abstractions and here as the poet expresses in "On A Tennis Court" in which he takes a shot at Robert Frost, who famously said that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. "Playing tennis in the dark; / a lot like poetry / Playing tennis in / autumn leaves, is that / too much like poetry." The amplitude of his orbit is daunting. Burning Interior is a sequence of eleven poems that verges on a manifesto for writing poetry. These poems are dense, sometimes hermetic, but they possess the emotional and psychological immediacy germane to affecting verse. Yes, they are difficult, "Now the old poet / loses his voice like a garden / but finds it again like a street in a garden." But their rewards arrive like epiphanies hours or even days after a first or second reading. Beware means be aware for some of these poems sort out best while walking and doing both can induce a fugue state that is dangerous on the busy streets of New York City. The lyric poems frequently document the making of the poem or the experience of being poet in the world. "Who but he / Would talk to a teapot / she deposed in a dream / Who but he / but that’s what a poet I replied / Does." There are elegies to Pessoa and John Cage as well as references to Shapiro’s famous friends like Meyer Shapiro, John Hejduk, Cage, and the painter Jasper Johns, which can seem a bit like namedropping at a cocktail party. Sometimes, as in the elegy to Cage, he brings aspects of the lyric to the elegy. "Jasper introduced me / as having been a child prodigy / you smiled wickedly / "He’s too young / to have been anything." David Shapiro was born in 1947. He became a concert violinist in his early teens, published a collection of poems entitled January when he was just eighteen and before he’d completed his undergraduate degree a second collection appeared entitled Poems from Deal. The indelible imprint of childhood figures in a number of poems in this collection. The distinction of being labeled a child prodigy hovers like dirigible as the poet marches toward late middle age. And although here and elsewhere Shapiro himself reminds us of his brilliant beginnings, there are clearly those days when his pedigree stays him down. Long live a city destroyed by a lake And simple water-clocks Long live the word dark The poet who was once a whiz and a concert master art historian of dhurries desperately and is now just a poet In the spirit of the New York School there are five collaborations with Shapiro’s son, Daniel. It’s not clear in reading these poems exactly how they work together or how old Daniel Shapiro was when they joined forces, but the tone and spirit indicates preteen years when children surprise with a certain kind of knowing. "The whole world is in God’s head / that is why he his so smart that’s why he is so big." In another jointly written poem entitled "Love In The Air" father and son bring together the various strands that make up David Shapiro’s restless, cerebral, sometimes obscure aesthetic. No more love is singing in the air I remember when they were flying around when we were playing tennis but now all their bodies are scattered on the ground In the pink sunset no more cicadas will be flying When the parents make love and die the kids will grow up and even when mankind is gone the cicadas will still be doing their long process Sleep, cicadas, sleep and be well rested Taken together the breadth of this collection conjures up not days but a life spent demanding of poetry that it " Crack open / the street, / break the concrete. For while on the first reading these poems seem to be about poetry, they ultimately seek to mimic how we try to understand the world around us. That’s when things get truly complicated and naturally verse must— if it’s to be of use to us— reflect the process of thinking and feeling that comprises our daily lives; clarity, befuddlement, fear, pain— the gamut of the life of the body and the mind. Gary Counsil’s review of Lights Out by Geoffrey Young appeared in the October 2003 issue of the Rail. |
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The Rail invites you to a reading with Jason Flores-Williams and Brian Carreira, along with musical guest Steve Strunsky of the Lonesome Prairie Dogs. Thurs., Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. Vox Pop--Flatbush, Brooklyn www.voxpop.net |
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OFF THE RAIL FALL 2005 at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library - Grand Army Plaza |
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The Independent Press Association-NY recently honored The Brooklyn Rail with the following awards: |