"You will get no further than the words...
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.
