Petals of Zero Petals of One
Our final two sessions of the semester will be on Friday Dec 2nd and Friday Dec 9th and will focus on the work of Andrew Zawacki. Our main focus will be his most recent collection of poems, Petals of Zero Petals of One. A useful review is found here http://jacketmagazine.com/37/r-zawacki-rb-shoemaker.shtml
Andrew Zawacki (Ph.D., Committee on Social Thought, Chicago) is the author of three poetry books: Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia). His latest book, Videotape, is due from Counterpath in 2013. His work has appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande), Walt Whitman hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point), The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (Iowa), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner), and other anthologies, as well as in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic. Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse), he has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Talisman, How2, Open Letter, New German Critique, Australian Book Review, Religion and Literature, and elsewhere in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia (Persea). His translation, from the French, of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is due from Burning Deck. Zawacki has held fellowships from the Salzburg Seminar (Austria), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Le Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), the Fulbright Foundation (Australia), the Rhodes Trust (England), the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Bread Loaf.
Claudia Rankine Visit
Claudia Rankine will visit the WGCP to discuss her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely on Friday, November 11th.
Rankine will be reading in the Graduate Poets’ Reading Series at 7:00pm on Thursday, November 10th,in room 317, Linsley-Chittenden, 63 High Street.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University.
Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. Noting that “hers is an art neither of epiphany nor story,” critic Calvin Bedient observed that “Rankine’s style is the sanity, but just barely, of the insanity, the grace, but just barely, of the grotesqueness.” Discussing the borrowed and fragmentary sources for her work in an interview with Paul Legault for the Academy of American Poets, Rankine stated, “I don’t feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth.”
With Juliana Spahr, Rankine co-edited American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) and, with Lisa Sewell, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007). Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry (2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater.
Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She has taught at the University of Houston, Barnard College, and Pomona College. For more information: http://claudiarankine.com/
A terrific interview with Rankine is available here: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_rankine.php
Ben Lerner: Mean Free Path
On Friday September 16th from 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center, we will have our first session of the Yale Contemporary Poetics Group for the 2011-2012 academic year. The focus of this discussion will be Mean Free Path, Ben Lerner’s third (and most recent book of poems). Lerner will give a reading on 9/29th and then join us on 9/30 to discuss his work (details for these and other WGCP events: http://wgcp.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/fall-2011-schedule/). Here is the bio from his publisher:
Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.
His newest book is Leaving the Atocha Station, a novel that incorporates meditations on poetics and art as part of its structure. You can read more about it here: http://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Atocha-Station-Ben-Lerner/dp/1566892740
But since we focus on poetry, we’ll discuss the recent poetry collection, Mean Free Path. David Gorin has a terrific, thoughtful review of the book here: http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-lerner-rb-gorin.shtml ; and this goes very nicely with an interview by Aaron Kunin with Lerner available here: http://jacketmagazine.com/40/lerner-kunin.shtml. Karla Kelsey offers a very smart reading of Mean Free Path: http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/mean-free-path/. And here is another useful review: http://criticalflame.org/verse/0910_pritchard.htm
A response to some earlier work of Lerner’s by Sarah Stone (under her nom du plume) is available here: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/stone-freeman-re-lerner.shtml.
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The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry. All are welcome to attend.
Fall 2011 Schedule
WGCP Schedule, 2011 — Meetings and Related Events
Subject to Change (check WGCP Minutes Archive or the WGCP Blog for the latest information)
The Beinecke Library / Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets Fridays at 3:00pm in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, 55 Wall Street (the corner of Church and Wall); schedule changes and special group meeting times and locations will be noted below.
Rae Armantrout, Poetry Reading
Wednesday, September 14th, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
WGCP Meeting
Friday, September 16th, 3 p.m.
Readings: Ben Lerner Readings TBA
Ben Lerner, Reading
Thursday, September 29th, 7:00 pm
Linsley-Chittenden 317, 63 High Street
Grad Poets Reading Series
Contact: sarah.stone@yale.edu, justin.sider@yale.edu
WGCP Meeting, Ben Lerner Visit
Friday, September 30th, 3 p.m.
Readings: Ben Lerner Readings TBA
WGCP Meeting
Friday, October 14th, 3 p.m.
Readings: Claudia Rankine Readings TBA
Dan Beachy Quick, Poetry Reading
Thursday, November 3rd, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
Claudia Rankine, Reading
Thursday, November 10th, 7:00 pm
Linsley-Chittenden 317, 63 High Street
Grad Poets Reading Series
Contact: sarah.stone@yale.edu, justin.sider@yale.edu
WGCP Meeting, Claudia Rankine Visit
Friday, November 11th, 3 p.m.
Readings: Claudia Rankine Readings TBA
SPRING
Susan Howe, Poetry Reading
Thursday, April 5th, 4:00pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
Yale Student Poets Reading
Tuesday, April 24, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Poetry Reading
Spring 2012, Date TBA
Linsley-Chittenden 317, 63 High Street
Grad Poets Reading Series
Contact: sarah.stone@yale.edu, justin.sider@yale.edu
Elizabeth Willis, Poetry Reading
Spring 2012, Date TBA
Linsley-Chittenden 317, 63 High Street
Grad Poets Reading Series
Contact: sarah.stone@yale.edu, justin.sider@yale.edu
Susan Stewart Visit 4-29
Poet and critic Susan Stewart will visit the WGCP at WHC from 3-5pm on April 29 to discuss her recent collection Red Rover.
About Susan Stewart: Susan Stewart is a poet, critic, and translator. Her five books of poetry include The Forest (1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; Columbarium (2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and, most recently Red Rover (2008), soon to be published in Italian translation by Jaca Book in Milan.
Her song cycle, “Songs for Adam,” commissioned by the Chicago Symphony as a collaboration with the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with the baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO in October 2009.
Stewart’s collected essays on art, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, were published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. Her collaborations with visual artists include most recently work with Ann Hamilton and Sandro Chia.
Her other books of criticism include the forthcoming The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which received both the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism; Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991); On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), and Nonsense (1979).
Stewart published her translation, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, with Princeton University Press in 2009. She also translated Euripides’ Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. Currently she is completing a translation of the selected poems of Milo De Angelis with Patrizio Ceccagnoli and a translation of Laudomia Bonanni’s novel La Rappresaglia with her Princeton colleague Sara Teardo.
A 1997 MacArthur Fellow, Stewart has received fellowships as well from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Pew Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Foundation. In 2010 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Stewart currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
The Correspondence of Robert Creeley
The Correspondence of Robert Creeley
a discussion led by editor Kaplan Harris
Friday, March 25, 3 p.m.
Location: Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street (Beinecke Class Visitor Guidelines)
Kaplan P. Harris is Associate Professor of English & director of the MA Graduate Program at St. Bonaventure University. Recent & forthcoming criticism appears in American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Artvoice, Wild Orchids, Paideuma, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket2, & Postmodern Culture. He is editing, with Rod Smith & the Peter Baker, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (forthcoming in late 2011 from University of California Press).
Kaplan P. Harris is Associate Professor of English & director of the
MA Graduate Program at St. Bonaventure University. Recent &
forthcoming criticism appears in American Literature, Contemporary
Literature, Artvoice, Wild Orchids, Paideuma, The Poetry Project
Newsletter, Jacket2, & Postmodern Culture. He is editing, with Rod
Smith & the Peter Baker, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley
(forthcoming in late 2011 from University of California Press).
Kaplan P. Harris is Associate Professor of English & director of the
MA Graduate Program at St. Bonaventure University. Recent &
forthcoming criticism appears in American Literature, Contemporary
Literature, Artvoice, Wild Orchids, Paideuma, The Poetry Project
Newsletter, Jacket2, & Postmodern Culture. He is editing, with Rod
Smith & the Peter Baker, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley
(forthcoming in late 2011 from University of California Press).
Jorie Graham to Visit WGCP
Jorie Graham will join the WGCP to discuss her most recent collection, Sea Change, on February 18 from 3-5 PM in 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: “For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption — intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic — rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems.”
Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990.
Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Recordings of Graham reading form her work can be found online:
“Embodies” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20169
“Just Before” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20164
“Nearing Dawn” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20165
Upcoming WGCP Related Events
The Graduate Poets’ Reading Series presents: Christian Hawkey
7:00 pm, Thursday, February 10th
Linsly-Chittenden, Room 317
63 High St., New Haven, CT
Christian Hawkey is the author of Petitions for an Alien Relative (a chapbook by hand held editions, 2010), Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007), Hour, Hour, a chapbook which includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski (Delirium Press, 2006), and The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), winner of the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2006 he was given a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award and he has also received awards from the Poetry Fund and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
Books will be sold at the reading, Cash or Check Only. For more information, please email Justin Sider (justin.sider@yale.edu) or Sarah Stone (sarah.stone@yale.edu)
——————
New Writing in German / Neue Literatur at Yale
You are invited to a one-day set of workshops and readings by 6 of the best up-and-coming German, Austrian, and Swiss novelists. Please join the Yale Department of German on Friday, February 11th from 1-7pm in Room 309, Wiliam H. Harkness Hall,
as they welcome:
who will discuss their recent work and the state of the novel written in German today.
1:00pm-5:15pm Workshops in German
5:30-7:00pm Readings/ Roundtable in English
7:00 Reception/ Dinner
WGCP with David Shapiro
Post-session wrap up: Jim Berger talking to David Shapiro about Kenneth Koch. Annie Won looks for help. Friday, December 10, 2010.
David Shapiro–New and Selected Poems
Copies of David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems are 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.
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 http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Shapiro/Shapiro-David_Segue-Series_BPC_3-22-08.mp3
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from Silliman’s blog
Monday, March 19, 2007
Nothing is harder or more tricky than a selected poems. As Robert Grenier demonstrated when he delivered a selected Creeley that showed the poet’s work centering around the poems that confront language most directly – focusing on Words and Pieces more than on the earlier “popular” For Love – not everybody views the same poet the same way. Several Quietist poets have suggested that Mauberly represents the pinnacle of Pound’s achievement, but then I would edit a selected Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the Quartets. It would be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John Ashberys 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.
So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro who emerges from New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) captures what is unique about this most difficult (& just possibly most rewarding) of all New York School poets. One way of looking at Shapiro might be 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:
A Problem
There are two ways of living on the earth
Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,
Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically worse
If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.
One arrives in England, and the train station is a dirty toad.
Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.
One calls up America at three-thirty, one’s fiancée is morally alone.
But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.
Thinking of America along psychoanalytic lines, and then
delicately engraving nipples
On each of two round skulls
You have learned nothing from music but Debussy’s ions
And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty cerebella.
Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.
This represents early love, which is now “total space.”
These are the ways of living on the earth,
Satisfied or unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild rice.
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.
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 New York School – 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 New York City 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:
The snow is alive
But my son cries
The snow is not alive
The snow cannot speak!
The snow cannot come inside!
You cannot break the snow!
But the snow is alive
And the tree is angry
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 After a Lost Original, written some 20 years after “A Problem.” Formally, you can see how close this poem gets to Ceravolo’s 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.
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 very visibly a presence during the Columbia 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. 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. Political action is not only a fact of Shapiro’s biography, 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”:
Out of being torn apart
comes art.
Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!
Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)
Out of the essential mistranslation
emerges an illegitimate nation.
Better she said the enraged
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.
Out of being split into thirteen parts
comes the eccentric knowledge of “hearts.”
(Out of being torn at all
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)
And out of this war, of having fought
comes thinking, comes thought.
The very flatness of these lines almost echoes Levertov’s 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.
When Joe Ceravolo’s selected poems, The Green Lake is Awake, 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 really really important (a situation not unlike Jack Spicer’s during the decade between his death and the appearance of the Collected Books). 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 know David Shapiro & his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was very young – January 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 New York. Nor is he a jack of all arts, master of none, tho his skills as violinist (the career ultimately not taken) and art critic are 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.
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 New and Selected Poems is required reading. It’s also a great, if complicated, joy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thomas Fink
David Shapiro’s ‘Possibilist’ Poetry
http://jacketmagazine.com/23/shap-fink.html
| 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.
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. 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. Opening the title-section of the title-sequence of his most recent book, A Burning Interior (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. 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’ (The New Sentence 10). For him, ‘capitalism’ ‘narrows’ ‘the function of reference in language… into referentiality.’ Whether or not he would agree with Silliman’s specific historical analysis of cause and effect, Shapiro in his John Ashbery An Introduction to the Poetry (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 Tjanting and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, 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.) 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: |
| I’ve built nothing; you are the architect. You are near me like the sound of an archaic car. I know that I love the verb not to know. Do you love it? The distance is like a Chinese garden. I pluck pomegranates out of the Halloween stores. Then I keep looking at this phrase like summer hills. The mountain represents nothing, the mountain air Represents nothing, but two birds seem bad enough. In these things there is an immense exile like a surface: And when we try to stop expressing it, words are successful. (To an Idea 76) 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’ (The New Sentence 119). 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? 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. 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. 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 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 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’ (My Way 64) is central. 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: He was a poet of grammar 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. 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. 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. 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.’ |
Works CitedArmantrout, Rae. ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ In the American Tree. Ed. Ron Silliman. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. 544-546. Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Shapiro, David. A Burning Interior. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 2002. ———. After a Lost Original. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1994. ———. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. ———. To an Idea. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1983. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York, New York: Roof Books, 1995. Whithaus, Carl. ‘Immediate Memories: (Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate) Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro.’ Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. (1997) |
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