Introduction for David Shapiro (EOAGH Reading Series 4/18)

 

David Shapiro, a central poet of our moment by anyone’s assessment, in referencing Jackson Pollock’s boast about being nature, once claimed that he is language. Yet I think, to his own credit and modesty, he only half-believes this boast, because phenomenology, space, experience, affect, and ultimately the social are all just as important to his multifarious poetics, and because he is too smart and influential a critic to be seating himself in the position of second chair violin to anyone else’s composition. Unlike a modernist Nietzschean coin which has lost its value by having its coin-ness continually foregrounded, Shapiro’s poetry understands that it takes someone with an unpredictable energy and ebullience, and ultimately a joy and love for language, to do what it does so well. Shapiro’s matchless ear hears subtleties of affect as abstract tones washing over and through a field of phenomenological collage, and this process produces a range of continually startling variations unabashedly specific to a life yet informed by a deep and wide-ranging understanding of philosophy. In the past I’ve noted his unique position in the history of avant garde poetry by examining his “distorted figures” or digressive similes which figure a radical relationship between body image and experience. I’ve also noted how the speed, dexterity, and messiness with which he deploys such techniques can produce a kind of tonal "antimimetic mimesis," a delirious and deeply moving effect like nothing else in poetry. Also key to Shapiro’s persistent newness is his understanding of a poem as a kind of ekphrastic riddle, the answer to which might obscure more than it would reveal, in the process exploding the relation between figure and ground. From his essential early books Lateness and To an Idea to his terrific recent volumes After a Lost Original, A Burning Interior, and his New and Selected Poems released in 2007, Shapiro’s exigent poetry has created important bridges (acknowledged and unacknowledged) for so many of us, and today he continues to restlessly explore new motifs and ideas. I am honored to welcome my friend, the great poet David Shapiro to the EOAGH Reading series today.

Comments

[Tenney Nathanson]

Lovely!