Since Harvard Review has re-arranged its website and appears to be no longer archiving articles online, I'd like to post this article of mine here. It originally appeared in issue 27.
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David Shapiro's new book A Burning Interior gathers together a series of elegies for deceased friends, including his student Richard Horn, composer John Cage, photographer Rudy Burkhardt, editor Arthur A. Cohen, and poets Joseph Ceravolo and Allen Ginsberg. But rather than simply mourning or attempting to offer consolation, these poems function as commemorative acts which celebrate the possibility of a radiant and libidinous pluralism. The book's centerpiece, an eleven-part long poem, bears an epigraph which dedicates it to Shapiro's friend the architect John Hejduk. The title "A Burning Interior" frames this sequence by naming poetry as an architectural space that contains human frailty, in the process referencing an exploded version of the body and the bourgeois bedroom in which it resides. In this poem Shapiro's speaker, who is always a poet wielding the requisite powers of word-magic, employs anaphora in acts of incantation, as in section xiii, "Prayer for a House:"
Blessed is the architect of the removed structures
Blessed is the structure that weathers in spring snow like lies
Blessed is the crystal that leaps out of the matrix like a fool
And Blessed is the school (p. 17)
Throughout this poem, the examples of particulars change repeatedly in relation to the act of blessing, continually redefining and recontextualizing what they are named by: "Blessed is the empty center"(p. 18). The paradoxical construct here of unity-in-multiplicity seems to have at its root a religious vision derived from Spinoza's assertion that the body has no limits: "Holiness in sin, that enraged Gershom -- the doubled books / And the body's words: Blessed is He who created the creation. / Blessed are they who created the blessing"(p. 4) If the body in Shapiro's work is already one with God, this changes the nature of elegy and reinvents it as a song of homage, or an expression of one's own resolution to keep living.
But lost friends are not the only thing elegized here: also at stake is Shapiro's own history with and relation to poetry itself, toward which the speaker-poet here adopts an attitude of "wistful resignation / half-concealing half- / revealing a still / smoldering passion"(p. 35). As both a child prodigy inducted into the early New York School and also as an important unacknowledged influence on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Shapiro through his restless experimentation has sometimes found himself in the role of transitional figure, opposed to the macho politics of master narratives or agons of systematics. In "The Weak Poet," Shapiro identifies with the derivative half in Harold Bloom's "Anxiety of Influence" theory, as opposed to the "strong poet" who succeeds by swerving away from the predecessor:
When a poet is weak,
like a broken microphone,
he still has some power,
indicated by a red light. (p. 5)
Although the "smoldering passion" of the interior remains submerged here, we still read it loud and clear. This pared-down diction is a fairly new style for Shapiro, whose work has in the past been precocious and wildly expressionist. But the new sparseness gives him tight control over metaphorical language:
Now the old poet
loses his voice like a garden.
But finds it again, like a street in a garden. (p. 6)
Confronting the reader with an oddly-torqued simile, "loses his voice like a garden," this passage creates an abundance of potential meanings. But then the confusing exfoliation of metaphor opens to a way out by turning the vehicle of the previous metaphor (a garden) into the tenor of a new figurative act, or turning the metaphorical into the real. The sparseness of these poems allows Shapiro, a master of similes and figurative language, to create a poem-world loose enough to incorporate collaged elements, yet tight enough to lend consequence to each noun, each thing posited, as in "Long Live the Snowflake":
Long live the catachresis
of our lives in New Jersey
and Troy and in wandering eraser fluid
and books of many naked devices (p. 13)
The poet's personal references remain obscure, though they animate the foregrounding of writing (or erasing) that takes place. In the service of elegy, Shapiro's poet-speaker employs a vocabulary at once obliquely personal (a Jasper Johns-like figuration) and abstractly public (foregrounding the materiality of writing). Both are necessary to the poem-work of mourning and commemoration. Though less frequent in this book, Shapiro's precocious abstract expressionism still glows in moments when he emphasizes such "naked devices" in an apostrophe: "And it all sings (back to him) / It the your you speaks back to him"(p. 9), or when he enters the physical vocabulary of music, painting, or writing. At such moments emphasis is thrown once again onto the sound of words as material, on the edge between crying and laughing, "when the / bedroom doesn't the Tolstoyan hanging / in the sonata of bilingual espressivo" (p. 1). This moving book is one of Shapiro's best accomplishments to date.
