Written and Rewritten to Order: The Gift of Generative Possibility in the Work of David Shapiro

By Noah Eli Gordon

Whether in interviews, essays, monographs on artists and poets, or even his own poetry, David Shapiro always displays an active and elucidating generosity, one which consistently foregrounds the importance and influence of other working artists on his own writing practice. Regrettably, the past scarcity of scholarship on his work demonstrates how rarified such attention to generosity can be. In many ways Shapiro is a transitional figure who, because he arose on the cusp of extreme specialization in the arts, moving freely between the now ghettoized worlds of art criticism and poetry, was never entirely given his due by either. Granted, there are exceptions, an examination of the implications for two of which shall follow. Poets Michael Palmer and Peter Gizzi have both published works that are in conversation with the poetry of David Shapiro. Palmer’s ancillary association with Language writing and current influential status among practitioners of innovative or experimental poetries, combined with Gizzi’s dedication to community building, as a teacher, an editor, and a writer with ranging appeal, testify to the extensive influence of Shapiro’s poetry.

Shapiro’s “Music Written to Order” opens with an oscillatory gesture, a re-creation of the fluctuating temporal conditions, rather than a severing of time into infinite present and irretrievable past. Attentive to the little words, specifically to the powerfully pluralist conjunction “and”, Shapiro enacts poetic simultaneity: “Now and then, now and then, now and then”. [1] The severing takes place in the following line, where the addition of the suffix “ness” to both versatile parts of speech morphs the previously unifying conjunctions into a guillotine-like device of difference: “Now-ness and then-ness.” Shapiro goes on to erect between the divided states a field upon which the poem is able to play out its intimate address to the second person:

And between now and then

You hear the sound of a projector

And revisit your ancient home, your new home of late.

There is an ambiguity to Shapiro’s “projector”. One can read the entirety of the poem after such a line as the representation of a film, albeit a film built from the quick juxtapositions and imagine-heavy canon of filmmakers like Chris Marker or Stan Brakhage. Alternately, Shapiro’s poem, like the work of Marker and Brakhage, allows for a non-linear reading, its constituent phrases accruing an ambient meaning via their accumulation. [2]

There is a different sort of film being shown in Michael Palmer’s “Music Rewritten”, which features the parenthetical acknowledgement underneath its title: “after D.S.”. Thus, Palmer’s poem, as a rewriting of Shapiro’s “Music Written to Order,” becomes an example of what Shapiro himself, in his book on John Ashbery, advocated: “[P]oetry can no longer rely on simple releasing speech, but must rely on the most complex re-writing of releasing speech.” [3] Palmer’s poem begins with an oscillation similar to Shapiro’s; however, here the sense of time is given complexity through its roots in affirmation and negation: “Yes and no then yes and no/ Soon there’ll be time enough for you.” [4] The poem continues by recounting in near clinical terms what appear to be scenes from a pornographic film:

Charlie has swallowed the fluid

L has come inside a box

which some people paid to watch

Yes and no yes and no [5]

Although Palmer’s rewrite has replaced the reverent nostalgia of Shapiro’s original with a decidedly more ominous and distanced atmosphere, the simple act of rewriting is tantamount to an acknowledgment of the value of Shapiro’s work. Such a gesture may even be considered a form of latent supplication. Philosopher Alphonso Lingis, in an essay on communication entitled “The Murmur of the World” writes, “To address a query or even a greeting to another is to expose one’s ignorance, one’s lacks, and one’s destitution and is to appeal for assistance to one non-symmetrical with oneself.” [6] Overlooking the pejorative implications of “non-symmetrical,” Lingis’s statement, applied to the communicative act of poetry, carries with it the color of one appealing to the Muse for inspiration. Among the implications of such an appeal is its ability to serve as a gesture of authenticity. To rewrite the poem of another is to elevate the other’s poem to a place of import, anointing it with the status of an original, whose presence, according to Benjamin, “is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” [7] Thus, Palmer’s inclusion of “after D.S.”, cryptic as it may be, educes both the legitimacy and generative possibility of the poetry of David Shapiro.

This gesture of invocation on the part of Palmer is something of a gift. “An essential portion of any artist’s labor,” according to Lewis Hyde, in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, “is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.” [8] Hyde’s work on the notion of the Gift, although rooted in Marcel Mauss’s anthropological writings, veers away from any sense of expected reciprocity, wherein gift exchange functions to solidify social and economic relations. For Hyde, “it is true that something often comes back when a gift is given, but if this were made an explicit condition of exchange, it wouldn’t be a gift.” [9] Georges Bataille has argued that inherent to giving is the acquisition for the giver of a heightened status from the receiver. “[T]he gift”, he writes, “would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring of power.” [10] Hyde moves consideration of the gift outside of the framework of economic exchange and toward the more ambiguous sphere of artistic labor and its attendant life of the imagination. It is here that power is made manifest in the more difficulty measured sense of cultural, rather than economic, capital.

However, to consider Palmer’s gift to Shapiro as one tinged merely with self-interest would be to read his gesture as something other than the celebratory occasion that it is. As Simone Weil, writing on friendship, states, “There is no contradiction between seeking our own good in a human being and wishing for his good to be increased.” [11] Shapiro, himself a practitioner of the “allusion”, “quote” and “appropriation” [12] has noted, in an interview with Joanna Fuhrman:

The saddest thing in poetry is where you have what I regard as male competition. Neo-Nietzschean noble rivalry is one thing, but it becomes very male, in which one person wins and one loses. Tennis: which is not poetry. Then there’s the Swedenborgian “the more angles the more room.” Meyer Schapiro, if he praised Jackson Pollock, would praise someone doing an equal and opposite kind of work. He liked the underdog. Sometimes I think there’s an irresponsibility which certain scientists know—if a scientist doesn’t footnote a work on penicillin it’s considered a lack of generosity. Meyer Schapiro said the love of footnotes was a love of generosity. [13]

Palmer’s “after D.S.” is analogous to the act of footnoting. The generosity implicit in the inclusion of the footnote serves a dual function: the announcement of merit, viability and importance of the already existent work and the imperative to seek out that work. Palmer, asked about the use of quotation in his own writing, responded:

I like the possibility of intertextuality. I am a reader, perhaps too much of one, and I live to some degree in the book. I like the possibility of bringing in other people’s words to reflect the fact that for me experience flows at all levels, whether it’s hearing a car out the window or reading something that is affecting me profoundly. Reading becomes co-extensive with the other experiences in my life, and it enters the poem like any other object or experience. It becomes a kind of layering of the text. Maybe it is also a directive to people to go out and look at that in the way that a lot of the stuff Pound threw into The Cantos was to get people to read a wonderful Chinese or Provencal poet. So the poem becomes then a shared place among a variety of texts, without, I hope, ever becoming simply a collage. [14, emphasis mine]

The notion of the copy is a central trope for Shapiro: the first line of his latest book, A Burning Interior, reads: “of a copy of nothing” [15]; After a Lost Original, whose title immediately anchors the book to Shapiro’s ongoing investigation of the trope, begins with the line: “When the translation and the original meet” [16]; The title poem of To An Idea contains in its penultimate line the almost sardonically delivered: “as if copying could exist” [17]; House (Blown Apart), also beginning with its title poem, contains the lines: “Old work we might parody as an homage/ Losing after all the very idea of parody,” [18] a nearly perfect copy or echo (and thus a perfected enactment) of a phrase from Shapiro’s earlier writing on Ashbery: “[I]t is to parody most that Ashbery turns in his later works, if only to annihilate by its total use the very idea of parody” [19]; “Needed Inventions”, an early poem in Lateness, laments:

The problem of the firefly

Is such a delicate one

If we could only copy the firefly exactly

This problem might be done.

Discussing Meyer Schapiro’s essay on Cézanne, David Shapiro writes: “Schapiro restores our sense that an artist is deeply invested in his usual constellation of images.” [20] Such a constellation for Shapiro includes, among other things: snow, knives, Venetian blinds, clouds, violins, the page, photographs, golf balls and billiard balls, insects, airplanes, and, of course, the above mentioned copy, with all of its ancillary lexicon: trace, parody, shadow, original, outline, rewrite, correction fluid, etc. Shapiro gives a heightened level of attention to the plasticity of his imagery. The opening line of his poem titled, simply, “A Wall”, reads: “I have the right not to represent it” (H[BA] 24). The nuance of humor and depth present in much of his work, combined with a subject matter that is often laced to the problem of what, exactly, constitutes one’s subject, allows for an open-ended reading, a reading which revolves around the generative possibility of remaining engaged with the multiple levels of each poem, or, for the poet-reader, re-imagining the work as what Shapiro has called Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation: “[A] powerful source book.” [21]

One such reader who has harnessed the sense of possibility in Shapiro’s work is Peter Gizzi. Asked about his reading practice in a 1993 interview, he responded:

No matter what book I read, it is my book. Every painting I look at becomes my painting. At some level of the reading. It doesn't stay there, it doesn't begin there. But at some level of the exchange it is mine. Some way into the process it becomes other once again, but parts of it are left in me. Parts of the cadences, the phrases, the vocabulary. The particular histories that it rehearses. The events emotional, historical, social. Some of that remains in me. It helps articulate me. [22]

This process of embodying outside texts, of including that which is “other” in order to articulate one’s self, is expounded by Alphonso Lingis, who writes: “One enters into conversation in order to become an other for the others.” [23] The implication here is similar to that of the footnote. By attesting to the existence of a source text with which one is in conversation, one is simultaneously attesting to the importance of the source and to one’s own work in relation to it. The notes page that closes Gizzi’s collection Artificial Heart is replete with mention of the work of others with whom Gizzi is in conversation. Concerning his poem “Rewriting the Other and the Others”, he explains: “As an attempt to erase a work, à la Rauschenburg & de Kooning, Rewriting the Other and the Others is an ‘erasure’ of the poem ‘The Other and the Others’ by David Shapiro.” [24]

Just as Rauschenberg’s decision to erase a work of de Kooning’s invariably asserts the legitimacy of de Kooning’s importance to the younger artist, so Gizzi’s “erasure” of Shapiro’s “The Other and the Others” carries the same reverential testimony. And such testimony in effect becomes a work of art in and of itself. Shapiro, in an anti-Bloomian dictum within his book on Ashbery, writes, “The poem and the relations between poems must become a matter of the joys of influence. The best poetry of our day is, more over, a form of literary criticism, both in drab and golden tones.” [25]

Shapiro’s “The Other and the Others”, from his 1983 collection, To An Idea, begins:

I wanted to paint the night sky

Too easy to make a black xerox

You are Persephone with a torch

In you the slenderness of the end of the century. (TI 89)

The simplicity of Shapiro’s diction, while immediate and uncomplicated, reveals one of his trademark strengths as a poet. Although this is uniformly referential writing, there is a sense of uncertainty, or, more poignantly, of numerous certainties, as to the mimetic qualities here. One is able to read even in the first line variant meanings. Is it the desire to create a representation of the night sky using paint? Is it an admission of the ambition one harbors in desiring to enter the pantheon of creation myths, becoming the one who gives to the sky its blackness? Shapiro’s poems carry with them openness as regards his relationship with mimeses. As often as reality is reproduced—as opposed to being merely represented—it is replaced with associative dream logic or evocative allusion. The second couplet here, in which the address turns toward both the second person and Greek mythology, exemplifies such strategies.

From pottery to ancient coinage, Persephone is often depicted holding a torch, although such depictions are representative of the period immediately following her initial rescue by Demeter. More common is the depiction of Demeter as torchbearer, frantically searching for her daughter. The torch, when appearing in Persephone’s arms, is indicative of her comfort in her role as part-time queen of the underworld, a symbol of one’s acceptance of power. Undoubtedly, Persephone would have such a torch in hand when making her infamous bargain with Orpheus. As with his diction, the strength of Shapiro’s allusion is its ability to allow for multiple reading. It’s not ambiguous as much as it is multifarious, evoking a discursive set of emotive states, whether that of bewilderment or of near tyrannical megalomania.

It is therefore difficult to attempt a rewrite of this poem. In doing so, one inevitably selects a specific reading, casting aside alternatives, regardless of how applicable they may be. Unlike Palmer’s poem, which appropriates some of the linguistic constructions of the Shapiro poem, specifically the opening of a third allusive condition between two already existent states, Gizzi’s rewrite is, in the words of Shapiro’s poem “Two-Four Time”: “[A]lways the same word-for-word translation.” [26]

Gizzi’s “erasure” begins:

I wanted to model the morning light

Too difficult to impasto the sky

You are Alcestis with a kite

The years whip by and tears cover answers. [27]

“Rewriting the Other and the Others” maintains the couplet form and syntax of its source, while replacing certain parts of speech with their opposite, and others with either an alternative word choice or an entirely different phrase, allowing Gizzi’s poem the effect of maintaining “[p]arts of the cadences, the phrases, the vocabulary” of the original. Where the torch that Shapiro has given Persephone might bring light to the underworld, the kite with which Gizzi equips Alcestis is a celebration of her having returned from it. In this way, Gizzi’s “erasure” becomes the “black xerox” of Shapiro’s poem, a photographic negative vouching for the original’s authenticity. Shapiro ends his poem with the following lines: “To enter Liberty’s body, a copy of a copy!/ As a noiseless plane, a worm, dove into its casket” (TI 89). And Gizzi’s rewrite ends: “Then reverse the Tyrants’ ideology, an original of an original!/ And a noisy sphere, a bird strafes air.” [28]

By transforming “a copy of a copy” into “an original of an original”, “[t]he Tyrants’ ideology” here can be read as a playful, yet reverent, parody of Shapiro himself. Gizzi celebrates perhaps the brightest star in Shapiro’s constellation of images, the copy, and in doing so demonstrates the reception of the gift of Shapiro’s work, which culminates in the reproduction of what Hyde calls “the gifted state”—an embodying of one’s imaginative sprit within an actual work—as evinced through the existence of Gizzi’s own poem. [29] Yet Shapiro also is attuned to the mutability of his writing. His poem “Write Out”, from House (Blown Apart), published five years after To An Idea, begins with the following stanza:

I wanted to paint the night sky

So I considered a black Xerox

and my medium was correction pen fluid

the blue correction formerly too dry to work. (H[BA] 29)

This is an obvious rewrite of elements of “The Other and the Others”, and a subtle echo of the poem “The Night Sky”, from Shapiro’s 1973 collection, The Page-Turner. Shapiro is a poet for whom the materials of production are consistently laid bare. His poetry occupies a place of becoming, rather than merely being, as one is, in reading his work, often located on the satisfyingly generative field between the imaginative impulse and its manifestation as an actual artifact. Take, for example, the opening stanza of “The Sphinx, Again”:

To keep photographing the same ice

In the same river flowing beneath the same bridge

Tying to link the shadow of a word to another word

Staring into the same sign of signs for nothing. (H[BA] 48)

Or the first stanza of “An Example of Work”:

The bluejay is bobbing out in the yard, as if amusing itself

with a country dance

That is a line you say that will produce guffaws in the Church

Well, first I saw a phrase in the dictionary amusing herself

with a the contredanse

And then I wanted to use the verb “bobbing.” (TI 46)

Or the opening to “House of the Secret”:

I met the old dead poet

And told him I no longer loved my work

As I had when a child or even fifteen

Sorry I had not written someone else’s poem but it was already

written [30]

Or, finally, the first two lines from “Drawing After Summer”, which echo the poem “Summer”,

appearing seven pages earlier in After a Lost Original: “I saw the ruins of poetry, of a poetry/

Of a parody and it was a late copy bright as candy.” [31]

Everywhere in Shapiro’s poetry one finds the tracings of a crossover between the imagination and the work it might (and ultimately, does) produce. In many ways, the tracing is simply a reconstruction of the myriad frustrations of one’s inability ever to completely realize the transition, enabling his work to remain in flux, to enact the gifted state. Both Palmer and Gizzi share with Shapiro this anxiety of the finality of representation. Palmer’s “Music Rewritten” ends:

First there’s sameness then difference

then the letter X across a face

then a line through a name

which is the wrong name in any case. [32]

And Gizzi’s recent work has included this totemic line: “I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem, a we-see poem, a they-love poem.” [33] Both Palmer and Gizzi, in making use of the work of David Shapiro, in celebrating and honoring it, have fulfilled what Lewis Hyde considers an essential element of the gift—its continued transference.

NOTES

[1] Shapiro, Lateness (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1977), unpaginated. In further quotation from Lateness, lines are sufficiently located in the text, and so no citation appears.

[2] Shapiro, commenting on Rimbaud, has touted the value of such an approach: “The sentences are held paratactically, with the sternest breakdown of connectives. This expunging of the connective tissue holds the widest possibilities for painting, music, and poetry.” (“Poets & Painters” 11).

[3] Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1979), 10.

[4] Palmer, First Figure (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 35.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 87.

[7] Benjamin, Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1969), 220.

[8] Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 144.

[9] Ibid., 9.

[10] Quoted in David Kosalka, “Georges Bataille and the Notion of Gift.” 1999. The Historian Underground. 15 Sep. 2005 http://www.lemmingland.com/bataille.html

[11] Weil, The Simone Weil Reader. Ed. George A. Panichas. (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1977), 367.

[12] Shapiro, “After the New York School.” Interview with Joseph Lease. Pataphysics Magazine. 1990. 15 Sept. 2005 <http://www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/shapiro_interview.html> . For a valuable discussion of Shapiro’s rewriting of a poem by Yeats, see “After A Lost Original: David Shapiro” by Chris Stroffolino, reprinted in his collection of essays Spin Cycle.

[13] Shapiro, “Pluralist Music: An Interview with David Shapiro.” Interview with Joanna Fuhrman. Rain Taxi. Fall 2002. 15 Sep. 2005. <http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2002fall/shapiro.shtml>

[14] Palmer, in Lee Bartlett, Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 138-139.

[15] Shapiro, A Burning Interior (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2002), 1.

[16] Shapiro, After a Lost Original (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1994), 11.

[17] Shapiro, To an Idea (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1983), 15. Further quotations from To an Idea are cited in the text using TI; when lines are sufficiently located, no citation appears.

[18] Shapiro, House (Blown Apart) (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1988), 15. . Further quotations from House (Blown Apart) are cited in the text using H(BA); when lines are sufficiently located, no citation appears.

[19] Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry, 79.

[20] Shapiro, “Mondrian’s Secret,” in Uncontrollable Beauty, Ed. Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (New York: Allworth Press, 1998). 309.

[21] Shapiro, Poets & Painters: Lines of Color (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1979), 13.

[22] Gizzi, Interview with Samuel Truitt. 1993. Brown University. 15 Sep. 2005 http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/pgizzitruitt.html>

[23] Lingis, 88.

[24] Gizzi, “Notes,” Artificial Heart (Providence: Burning Deck, 1998).

[25] Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry, 4

[26] Shapiro, The Page-Turner (New York: Liveright, 1973), 35.

[27] Gizzi, Artificial Heart 76.

[28] Ibid., 77.

[29] Hyde, 151.

[30] Shapiro, After a Lost Original, 21.

[31] Ibid., 88.

[32] Palmer, First Figure, 36.

[33] Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 81.