Postmodernism, they say, prefers the writerly text to the text which resists being rewritten by the reader. But many texts that have been vulgarly (rather than traditionally) viewed as readerly texts may stand up to a postmodern analysis at least as well. The more engaging question, in discussing such post-WWII poets as Creeley, Ashbery or Celan, becomes whether such texts have to be rewritten by the reader. When Creeley rejects poetry as a "descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem," does his poetry in fact do entirely away with the tension between mimesis and self-referentiality that is now more commonly read into such canonical writers as Shakespeare? I think not, for Creeley is calling attention to the fact that what's 'outside the poem' is hardly self-evident (just as Shakespeare's plays-within-plays did). Likewise, when David Shapiro writes, in his book on Ashbery, "to believe that one can escape the text, get out of it into a realm of existence beyond language, is an impossibility filled with pathos" (7), one may see a somewhat arbitrary limit placed on the work to ensure that it will not stray beyond the intimacy of self-referential enactment into the spurious 'transparency' of a too easy target.

In Shapiro's latest book of poems, After A Lost Original, "life itself" is found in problematizing the relation of text to life, of reader to writer. As the relationships are problematized, so are the problems dramatized as relationships. A recent scholar has aptly pointed out that the reader and writer become dramatis personae in Shapiro's poems. We see something in the text that tries to read, and not just because we're trying to read it. Often the speaker in a Shapiro poem is trying to read the reader, at other times the "I" is what is read. What is almost always at stake in such relationships is the very notion of identity.

Though Shapiro has written "the title is not a can opener" in his previous book of poetry, one can see the title "After A Lost Original" as the can many of the poems inside the book dramatically attempt to open (especially if the can is empty like Stevens' jar). We see Shapiro performing an expansion and collapse of the possible space(s) between the different meanings of an allegedly single word. It is within the illusion of such emptinesses that the personified meaning-complexes collide agonistically in tones no more reified and no less various than common-sense has it. In the title poem, the relationship is couched in terms suggestive not only of translation, Eliot's "Tradition and The Individual Talent" and Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, but of the way form comes on to the undifferentiated nothingness content would be without it. We could read the poem asking whether the Original is only what it's cracked up to be:

When the translation and the original meet
The doubtful original and the strong translation
The original feels lost like a triple pun...

Even if one were to stop here, we can see at least two ways of making sense of this. In the first, the second line is simply the apposite parellel to the first, doing little more than fleshing out, qualifying, the terms of the first. Yet there's also the possibility that the terms of the first line, as a result of meeting their more "fleshed out" doubles in the second line, become changed, or are seen as changed, as the relationship between them becomes changed. Thus, the second line itself is a mistranslation of the first line. One could say this is at the expense of the original--yet what the "original" may have lost in such a meeting may be more than made up for by the fact that it now at least feels.

It is this carefully employed double gesture (made possible by the poetic convention of the unpunctuated line) that enables Shapiro to expose the flimsy chronologic priority (in which the "strong mistranslation" was originally a "translation") as endlessly rewritable. We also see the "original" cast into a role bearing a stronger resemblance to a Ulysses lamenting the loss of degree than a Hendrix who wouldn't mind if a 6 became a 9, much less a Pericles exclaiming "Thou Begetest Him Who Thou Begot." But the poem's situationally undogmatic metaphrasis that quietly explodes narratives of time does not end here, and Shapiro takes the master-becoming-the-slave dialectic through even subtler turns.

Through gestures of analogy and pathetic personification, Shapiro empathizes with both the original and the translation. In so doing, the text inevitably seems biased towards the translation. Shapiro does this existentially, to deconstruct any claim of essence traditionally associated with the original, and dramatically, to expose how readers and writers cast themselves into roles. Shapiro does not deny that potential intimacy with the reader, in part because he questions whether it is intimacy. Perhaps, the poem suggests, to see ourselves as literary conventions is the most intimate way we can be, on paper, the turf of the translation, at least:

And the translation cries, Without me you are lost
Then be my dream, thin as the definition
Of a trance in a garden
The ambigious friend responds, Perhaps I do
   astonish you
Like a boy confused with a butterfly's dream
But you are my dream now, after all
If I don't think about you, you disappear
After which they both comically disappear

Since Shapiro's floating modifiers show the breakdown of differentiation between the two terms when put in contact, the "ambigious friend" could be either the translation or the original. But what it does is ultimately more significant than what it is called, since Shapiro shows no represented essences but relationships. Though on one level the confusion is endless, Shapiro does weave in and out of it as the text winds to close:

Like a slice through two trees for a thousand years
Return knowing coldly a need for guerdons,
   guardians
Letters written on clouds, snakes on curtains
   and naked devices
Frighten them no longer since they live only
   together
Father and son refracted through blue green
   black moss
They travel together to the margins of a cloud

The "letters" can be read as a transitional ambiguity mediating between the needs and the fears. On another level, we see the reincarnation of the poem's two principals (in the dramaturgical sense) as father and son. To see the translation and the original as father and son is itself a process of translation. One could say that the poem either loses faith in the emotional and dramatic possibilities any relationship between a translation and an original could have, as if the only way to change the relationship is to change the terms of it, or that the poet fears the pointless infinity of mere aesthetics. Yet, even though one of the central themes or limits of After A Lost Original, a book dedicated to Shapiro's son Daniel, is father-son relationships, it would be a mistake to claim it as more important than the ostensibly more abstract relationships earlier in the poem. For Shapiro, these relationships are one, a unity only seen through division.

The poem ends ambiguously. The cloud is no compromise hybrid but the end of the poem that makes its beginning possible. It may be seen as the undifferentiated nothingness out of which all problem poems, poetic problems, arise. For the second we see the cloud as the ground of the poem, we are back where we started (though with a different word, perhaps "Morning Glory". Thus, the title poem can be read as a microcosm of the entire book. Yet, because the working out of each poem brings in so wide a range of words (as opposed to themes), we are invited to look at both personal and abstract relationships in a new light, the light of lost words. Or, as Shapiro puts it elsewhere:

In a sense, one names something only not
To have it, the ruined theme of absence.

Throughout the book, Shapiro exposes the theme of father and son as a grid which so much of western culture clamps onto interpersonal or intextual relationships (though often from the perspective of the lyric "I"). He does so not so much to undercut its power as to open it up to a range of non-patriarchal possibilities. In "In Germany," a fatherland, Shapiro writes:

I took your way
But halfway there (Oh Germany it was insane)
Wanted my own

Like the argument between original and translation, this relationship between the "I" and the "you" here also "glides of the page" so that both become united not so much against a cloud as against a common third term (if not quite enemy), the reader:

The beam with its probing lip moved across us
Recording our model travels.

This image is echoed in the last line of the book's final poem. Yet there are other poems (or parts of poems) treating the father-son theme in which the dialectic is not so blurred. For instance, "The Snow Is Alive," a dialogue poem between the speaker and his son, casts the poet-father against his more realist son (thus reversing the traditional relationship):

The snow is alive

But my son cries

The snow is not alive
The snow cannot speak!
The snow cannot come inside!
You cannot break the snow!

But the snow is alive

And the tree is angry

It may not be the son per se saying these things, but the conscience of the poet chastising him for preferring his irresponsible escapist fancy to attending the needs of his son. In its daring dialectic simplicity Shapiro touches here on themes elaborated elsewhere in After A Lost Original. In Section #6 of the long poem, "House," Shapiro writes:

The white telephone
In the third-person profile
The white wicker chair
and the blue pants
The white shadowy plaster replica
of my father and that my father
made of you
Accurate as calipers and thus false
The desk and the empty cities
The slope of maturity, the garlands of
geniality
The hook of contempt, the stroke through
the ego
It has all replaced palmistry
Leonardo observing the dead hand
and the long lines of life
The white school paper and, stapled
in the center,
The white school paper
Even the dusty persian blinds are white
but the plant is a little monstrously green
In the white corner
In the loud night.

In the context of "House," this poem maps out "the incomplete lie of the interior" in which we see the horror of white on white, though there is the lower case "blue pants" as early as line 4. The issues raised by the "white shadowy plaster replica" swerve the poem once again into patriarchal turf. Whether or not the "you" is beyond the verticle axes of father-son dynamics does not matter as much as the fact that this "ideal form" is something that allows a son to see his father as a brother (as the beam of "In Germany" does). Yet such an equalizing achievement is in itself too white for Shapiro (like the "circle of the sky," another ideal form, from which the speaker disembarks in "You are Tall and Thin"). There is a pull in Shapiro away from poetic sublimation, as if he's OD'd not so much on the father as on the kind of relationship with the father that is the essence of the father. I say "essence"-- for without it, the father would cease to be a father. Thus, we could see Shapiro dealing with the state of fatherhood in ways not all that different from the Renaissance doctrine of the king's two bodies. At the end of "You are Tall and Thin," the paternal "you" that Shapiro originally associated with the ideal form of the circle of the sky is seen delegating a different kind of authority "like a lake" and is a wild riddle by the end, as if the "I"can finally admit "I was wrong to see you were wrong. The circle of the sky may have been wrong, but you are not merely that."

"House: 6" also recalls "The Snow Is Alive" in that the lower-case p(l)ants provide just enough contrast to make the white-wor(l)ds of these two poems compelling. "The Snow Is Alive," as a deceptively simple dialogue poem, also relates to more complex dialogue poems such as "Broken Objects, Discarded Landscape" and "Untitled Dreams." Though the poet-speaker in both defends his art/vision against an interlocutor, we could also read such dialogue poems as portraits, not of the "other" as much as the relationship (which may be all we can know of the other anyway). In "Broken Objects..." we see an abstract argument crossing a personal relationship:

A novelist took a vacation with me.
She ate breakfast in my old house like a sister.
She asked me to play chamber music but only for
a moment
Then found another way to waste the afternoon
alone.
We ignored the immense museum--
Those frightened by space those by nearness
walked quickly together.
I asked her what she thought of all this work on
paper.
Form inhuman form she cried though I begged
her to hear a voice I was apologizing for my
whole life.

The irony of this portrait lies in the fact that were this woman, as portrayed, to pass judgment on the "work on paper" she appears in, she could not logically pass the same judgment without ceasing to exist. Thus, the woman points to a logical fallacy by refusing to be a mere object, or even a 3-dimensional Buberian Du. The speaker, too, does not have to be read as desperate for the approval of the woman. When he writes "I begged her to hear a voice," he could be acknowledging that, as Frank O'Hara put it, one has to be hurt into poetry. For we can read the voice the speaker begs her to hear as something that wasn't there until he begged her, as if the speaker is the one who wants to break out of the passionless relationship into a four-dimensional game more convincing than the mere line level of "the train starts down the river like a regionalist." When the poem ends:

She was the narrator all right
But she was also the sacrifice.
Thus if I painted double helixes she would call it
Abstract but I would be painting life itself

I am reminded of Blanchot's Thomas The Obscure where Anne, the narrator, turns out to bear a striking resemblance to the text itself "having left behind that which can still be represented":

Since it was the only way to prove that she never had so much attachment for all that surrounded her, she was seized by the desire to cry out, ready to make a move to reinforce every bond, to see in those near to her beings who were ever nearer."

Like Blanchot, Shapiro shows the most passionate entanglements are often made possible by the most severe abstraction, or as Harold Bloom puts it, both know "life cannot be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, even when that life is wholly sacrificed to the aesthetic realm."

If we contrast this to the first half of "Untitled Dreams":

The painter is deposing my poetry. He says that he works from 9 to 5 every day, not mere painting, but thinking 'outside.' He says that my poetry is too "either/or" whereas the best art is "just and." He also thinks I have purposely made my poetry coherent to get the other members of the so-called School drunk (or make them look drunk? I cannot remember)....I say, But, painter, that is just what was said about you, in a sense, in relation to an expressionism, that you took it and made it something curiously coherent like the United States of America. No response.

We see several differences. Unlike the novelist, the painter talks about his own works on paper. If Shapiro ends this section of the book with "A Note About The Author (Or 'Not Writing A Novel')", this poem, more informally in prose, can be seen as Shapiro's "Why I Am Not A Painter." If the relationship with the painter is more contentious it's also more superficial. The speaker can easily call the painter's bluff on the aesthetic objections raised to his work. When the painter attacks the poet's "either/or" work, the persona of the poem seems to let the challenge slide, yet his "Hospital City," the second stanza of this piece, is certainly more "just and." Though the reader could say he prefers the "either/or" of the first, by placing them beside each other Shapiro creates a "disastrous relationship" that may be read as a defiant gesture in response to those who only want "just and."

The painter also objects to the alleged intoxicating powers of a coherence he can't even define. As in other poems in After A Lost Original, the anxieties of aesthetic method are mocked by appearing on the page rather than in the unwritten part. Furthermore, the offhand ease of the parenthetical expression is echoed in a more serious key at the end of the sequence "House:"

But what one doesn't know are the geometries
that might have described or created
that possible world.

"You are the You," another dialogue poem exploring the complexities of contention and representation, can also be read as an attempt to force the reader to see himself in the poem. Here, we see Shapiro talking in the second person to a third person who can't believe that the second person in Shapiro's poems isn't really a third person. Though he conventionally genders the beloved as "she," Shapiro grapples with the inherent contradicitions of a you-based poetry by exposing how slippery any "bachelored word" (as Jakobson would have it) like intimacy is. What Shapiro has written on Ashbery could apply here as well: "The poet creates an Ich-Du relation with his own web and in this way establishes not just narcissism but an elemantary relation....For some, this is a horrible dessication. For others, aesthetic honesty."

In "Prayer For My Son," a poem addressed in the second person (in contrast to its "parent" poem Yeats' "Prayer For My Daughter"), Shapiro can be seen addressing all his readers as sons, though he speaks to his son in a childish way. While Yeats' poem begins with a horrific evocation of a storm as backdrop, and laments the lack of an effective obstacle, Shapiro's poem begins with a lack of a storm and a candid admission that he, "the hated father," is the obstacle. By so doing, this self-proclaimed appropriation of "the grammar of another mind" lays bare the devices that Yeats employs by calling the bluff of the Caedmon-like "shelter" from intimacy they serve. He does this both ethically (if not morally or psychologically) as well as aesthetically.

Aesthetically, the persona of this poem doesn't just react to Yeats, for the method of this rewrite is consistent with the kinds of conversational / painterly / disjunctive devices that are among Shapiro's trademar ks (on first reading one need not even be aware of its indebtedness to Yeats). When Yeats writes:

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind
I have walked and prayed for this young child an
hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;

Shapiro writes:

Stars glisten
Outside the window of the tower
The bridge has no scream
Detail it
The architecture of chaos
In the stream...

One could see Shapiro's more Minimalist evocation as a workshop exercise of which Yeats' poem could be a result. Though Shapiro is enough of a craftsman to value Yeats' oft-quoted "stitching and unstitching" notion of poetic creation, he nevertheless calls into question the seductive beauty of Yeatsian illusion as rhetoric in service of a kind of theatricality.

On an ethical level, the contrast is even more profound. Near the heart of Yeats' "prayer" is a parthenogenesis fantasy that becomes a double-bind for the woman:

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

While it may be argued that Yeats is simply praying for his daughter's best interest here, there is the disturbing assumption that her beauty in itself can be the cause of others' pain. Sure, there are women (and men for that matter) who have suffered by banking on skin-deep beauty, yet by not entertaining the possibility that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and has no intrinsic antagonism to natural kindness and heart-revealing intimacy (not to mention intellectual/artistic creativity), Yeats avoids intimacy with his daughter by making her too transparently a theme for argument. Just as "Apple Jacks" would be more accurately called "Salt Jacks," Yeats' poem could be more accurately called "My Ideal Woman"--the prayer stuff being merely decorative and incidental to the poem's business, which Harold Bloom calls "sprezzatura, disguising rigorous pronouncement of doctrine as so much rumination."(Yeats-325).

Shapiro's persona, by more off-handedly admitting his desire to make his son a carbon-copy of himself ("Be a string musician"), moves into a kind of advice that eschews the baroque trappings of Yeats' 'rumination'

The Dalai Lama says Be Kind
No Maybe
The Russian says Humiliate no one

The "No Maybe" can be taken at least two ways. Either the Dalai Lama says that when it comes to certain issues like kindness there is "no maybe" or we could read Shapiro at first reacting to the wisdom of "Be Kind" and immediately reacting to his own reaction to "rest" on the word "maybe." He "settles" for "maybe" as a kind of synthesis, thus also showing the restless mind's intern- alization of proverbial wisdom in a way that is truer to dramatic complexities than Ginsberg's stubborn "first thought best thought" koan. Both readings of this line are central themes of After A Lost Original, a book in which Shapiro shows the unsettling possibilities of even the easiest words.

As Shapiro's litany of proverbial advice continues:

A friend is better
Than friendship
The Fool speaks truth...
Be fastidious as you want but eat
And avoid the contaminated meat
Of governments serving us up
As if we were underdone
Forget what you have earned
Learn to know what you have not yet learned
Until you confuse the good
With the beautiful
Don't seek out the wise, be wise
Never abandon the beloved
Just close your eyes
To the world and open your eyes.

There is a childlike simplicity here as Shapiro recalls his own beliefs in a disarming way Yeatsians would probably call "unpoetic" (thus sparing themselves from being disarmed by it). Though we could see Shapiro siding with Shakespeare (if not Polonious) against Yeats in his acceptance of Fools, in some ways Shapiro actually echoes (rather than refutes) Yeats' desire to avoid what tempts one from natural kindness. But even as Yeats may seem to allow immense freedom for his daughter when he writes:

Nor but in merriment begin a chase
Nor but in merriment a quarrel

Shapiro's speaker, who at times can bemoan that his interlocutor does not "take dictation like daughters," is nonetheless more attracted to the possibly mutually beneficial relationship the "good and the beautiful" can have. His acceptance of confusions (both aesthetically and ethically) allows him this synthesizing freedom that is not the opposite of performance. When Shapiro writes "Learn to know what you have not yet learned," he may be saying that we never learn it, or only learn it "the way light at the edge of a beach in autumn is learned" (as Ashbery puts it in "The Wrong Kind of Insurance"). This can be contrasted with Yeats' pedagogy which serves up his daughter as if she's underdone:

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts
   are earned.

By embracing poetic confusion, Shapiro shows far more negative capability (and thus can be seen closer to high romanticism at its best) than Yeats. When he says "Just close your eyes/ To the world and open your eyes," we don't know whether he's saying "You have to close your eyes to the world to open your eyes" or "You have to blink" (as in Spicer's "Imaginary Elegies"). In rewriting Yeats' Lear-like father, Shapiro can parodically acknowledge his own needs in the relationship: "Let her be late/ And you be on time to beat me up/ But without hate."

Harold Bloom writes that Yeats' "self-delighting,/ self-appeasing, self-affrighting" soul casts out hate only by becoming 'autistic'. Though Shapiro's poem swerves away from such autism, when he writes "Forget the bric-a-brac-/of an infantile howl," we can see that this "Howl" is needed by both Shapiro and Yeats as a backdrop. Just as Yeats needed the storm as a backdrop, couldn't one say that Shapiro needs Yeats' "howl" as a backdrop? In Lectures In America, Gertrude Stein writes: "If it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know it is moving."(170). Shapiro himself echoes this heavily qualified call for backdroplessness elsewhere in this book:

Stretching toward the air
as if one would be strong
Without anything to be strong upon or with

Hazlitt once praised Milton's "mighty intellect, that becomes more distinct from others, the nearer it approaches them." Throughout After A Lost Original, Shapiro shows that this may not be such a mighty thing, but a necessary thing to save one from the white-horror of backdroplessness. For rubbing up against Yeats allows Shapiro's own ethical mask to come in sharper focus.

As the poem winds down, the contrast between Yeats' vision of the value of ceremony and Shapiro's becomes clearer. Yeats:

And may a bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the fares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
For Yeats the question contains its own answer. Shapiro, on the other hand, in a kind of playful curse, writes:

Let pride come upon you unawares
Like a traveller
Who always has the fares
In a pocket without precedent
And even without money...

Like the "you" in the book's other prayer whose names one avoids but starts singing in travel, "pride" is unavoidable here.While many poets foreground "the right cliche/at the wrong moment," Shapiro does the opposite by disguising his descritpions as commands.

Though "Prayer For My Son" ends on as bouyant a note as the book's sexiest poem, "Dreams of A Young Architect," one must not forget the darkness that fuels Shapiro's world. His is a world in which "the door is absent/ unless miseries have caused some door"(a line which could fruitfully be read against Keats' "those for whom the miseries of the world are miseries" as well as the social critique in Shapiro's own "For Victims"), a poetry in which we see the certainty of the last line called severly into question by the previous certainty it called into question (see, "House: 3,"). Yet if Shapiro rejects all answerable questions as finally trivial and naturalistic and thus the heart of these poems can not be gotten to in an essay, one may at least provisionally sum up After A Lost Original by loosely borrowing from Shapiro's 15 year-old introduction to his Ashbery.

For instance, one could say Shapiro attempts to find logos in order to find the plurality of words, that he assigns the overly designed to the father, accident and the personal touch to the son, and that his poetry "deals with the opacities of a context that seem to contrast only with silence" or absence. If one is interested in pursuing (or approximating) Shapiro's poetry further, one may turn not only to Shapiro's art and literary criticism but also to the recently published The Poetry Of David Shapiro by Thomas Fink. Though Fink may overemphasize the difference between Shapiro's earlier more disjunctive work and his more recent work, as well as the centrality of patently heterosexual poems in Shapiro's ouevre, he meticilously contextualizes Shapiro's political project and includes lengthy discussions of two poems in After A Lost Original.

lingo 4

Books in print by David Shapiro
Books in print by Chris Stroffolino

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