Background, strona 1

Like any other poet, Shapiro worked with language. His poetry used language as a material, tool and subject of analysis; in a highly conscious manner, it explored the functions, effects, and imperfections of language. The poet once said in an interview that [his] ”poetry is an insidious private language, yielding an alternative to the public language of TIME magazine and TV. My art is intervention. My method is doubt (...) My poetry is just snowflakes.” This quotation shows that Shapiro weaponized poetic language and simultaneously acknowledged its limited impact on reality - short-lived and transient as a snowflake.

Language can bring about powerful associations or trigger action: words carry sounds, words convey meaning and possibly have consequences. And so, citing his hospitalized mother's words, Shapiro writes in a poem:

The worst words in the English language
Are these David - Don’t move
And what do you think the best words are: Here’s some water...
   

 (To An Idea, p. 67)

In his writings, Shapiro often refers to Walter Benjamin, and appears to draw on the German philosopher's belief that literature is a rendition of a certain "pure language." In his "Task of the translator," discussing the possibility of translation from one language into another, Benjamin remarks,

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence, something inessential. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information - as even a poor translator will admit - the unfathomable, the mysterious, the 'poetic,' something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?

When commenting on one of his poems, Shapiro revealed:

Music is my first language; language was my second language. Since my childhood, I liked to tear up language and put things back together like a broken ashtray. I grew up in a family of musicians, and my father preferred Bach and Rodin to science (...) You can call me a miniaturist, but I love putting long sequences together more like chamber music or unaccompanied sonatas (...) My favorite medium is eraser fluid and the human voice. Dear reader, if poetry weren’t music, how could there be songs?

This passage reveals a lot about Shapiro's language philosophy,* which is full of paradoxes: a miniaturist poet writing long sequences, being so careful about his poetic language, even though that language is only secondary to music. To my mind, the statement about eraser fluid is of particular importance as it shifts the attention from what is written to what could potentially be written. Shapiro was a self-limiting poet deleting whatever in his poems seemed unnecessary.

*language philosophy is a useful term I came across when reading about Polish poet Miron Białoszewski, and I decided to apply it to Shapiro's poetry as I noticed numerous parallels between the two poetics

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed;

an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

David Shapiro authored eleven volumes of poetry, numerous essays, monographs, and a number of prefaces to  other poets’ books of poetry. As his career spanned more than fifty years, a natural evolution of his poetic diction is visible, while there are some characteristic stylistic and thematic choices that make this poetry unique.

Among the recurring questions that Shapiro’s poetry tackles one can find the problems of referentiality and representation.

Referentiality as a term is used to explain the relation between language and an object it describes. Any text, including a poem, can be analyzed as a set of linguistic signs which refer to elements of reality, or referents. The notions evoked in this manner in the reader's mind are called concepts. By linking the internal with the external, referentiality helps to establish meaning.

Nonetheless, the notions in our minds are abstract by nature and, in order to be conveyed properly, they must assume the form of symbols and images. Thus, if one wishes to produce a poem that is to be read and understood by others, the initial concepts must be rendered by means of representation. Representation can be therefore understood as the rendition of what the poet aims to describe using figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and other tropes (which Shapiro calls "naked devices").

Truly, a large portion of Shapiro’s poetry illustrates his reflections on referentiality and representation: testing the possibility of achieving these, he concludes that he (at least partly) fails at both. At the very best, his “words can reach and not touch”.

Topics that Shapiro’s poetry touches include love, art, language, architecture, and family, whereas the underlying theme that permeates his literary quest is poetry itself. Therefore, one can consider this poetry predominantly self-referential.

Among Shapiro’s favored symbols, the readers will find snow, clouds, birds, lions, bridges, blinds, and boats. He often explores such binaries as copy-original, original-translation, father-child...

Interestingly, along with painting, Shapiro quoted science as his inspiration: he would turn physics textbooks into poetry and write about stars, universes, lightning or gravity. But at the forefront there was architecture, with its power of constructing, of shaping space, of incarnating and immortalizing abstract ideas.

As a method, Shapiro often resorted to dreams, which he wrote down, and which combine various eclectic elements, both realistic and surrealistic ones. Dreams constitute a convention that justifies the speaker's talking with the dead or "receiving" unwritten poems of other poets.

I see Shapiro's work as oscillating between confessional and non-confessional poetry because he juggles biographical and autobiographical elements in such a way that that the reader is no longer sure what precisely they refer to. A lot of recycling, assembling and reassembling goes on in this poetry; digressions, allusions and intertextuality make it both complex and intellectually demanding.