A friend of mine says that an Alan Shapiro collection is like a novel within a series of novels that tell you what it is like to be a person in a culture and from a family. I think that is true, as Alan Shapiro is also a real stylist because he has to be one. Any poet whose work offers novelistic pleasures and insights, working with the unlovely and anti-poetic aspects of life while writing true to the compression and elegance of lyric poetry, has to be a stylist. In Against Translation, the sequence continues. Of course, you don’t have to know the earlier books, any more than you would need to know The Return of the Native to get wowed by Thomas Hardy’s Moments of Vision. You can begin here or you could begin earlier, but if you have not read Alan Shapiro, or if you thought you had him figured out, you should start reading his books now and start here, and if you have been reading him all along, this one will add to your list of favorite Shapiro poems.
In a sense, Against Translation is a book of after effects, not so much as elegies, but of honest reinterpretations. For instance, the poem “Gary” starts off seeming like an elegy for a childhood friend, but it turns out to be a lament for the pains of lifelong, romantic frustrations. The poem begins by remembering Gary, an African American kid with a single mom whose apartment served as an unsupervised hangout spot:
. . . . next to a rightside-up crate
full of records we sat before in prepubescent limbo smoking his
his brother’ cigarettes as we listened
to Gary, scrawny and bucktoothed, hold forth about his brother and
the girls he did it with
and how he did it, sometimes in parks, in cars, at school and also
right there where we
were sitting, that very floor, that dingy carpet: Gary our cocky seer
whose every word we were
too callow not to believe, predicting how soon before we’d do it too
and with whom and in
what positions, and then he’d put on “Louie Louise” and, as if he
couldn’t hear his own falsetto
(more Tiny Tim than Kingsmen), sing the lyrics that to us seemed
unintelligible, slurred with sexual
vacancies . . .
It’s a shock when approximately halfway through the poem, we learn that soon after this scene, the lively kid has been killed riding his fabled brother’s motorcycle, and that Shapiro feels that there has been something rote about his choosing to memorialize him (“It’s like I’ve plucked him out from among others / who have long since joined him, some whose names I don’t recall”), and the real point becomes that Gary has missed a whole lot less than he might have anticipated: “there never was for any one of us / early or late a Peggy Sue or Barbara Ann, and nothing’s dedicated to the one you love, and no it wouldn’t be nice / if we were older, and yes, you gotta go, you gotta go now, right now, let’s go.” Oh I know. It is a formal elegy, and unrealized and unfounded promise is what he elegizing. Why this bleak poem should feel so consoling has to do with its resistance to comfort, its anti-nostalgia for both ignorance and knowing. It’s also striking that the poem embraces the distances of being a narrator, without treating the figures of the past and the past self as more valid and authentic for being younger than the older person who moves through times and writes poems with an evolving consciousness. Shapiro would not necessarily want to be a dopey kid to learn it all again, but the trials of age are as problematic for him as they were for Ben Jonson (“And if no other misery, yet age?”) or Philip Larkin (“The Old Fools”) or anybody who is actually old.
Far from elegiac, Against Translation is also a book of poems written in an unsparing and critical spirit about difficult parents after they have died in advanced old age. If we have read Shapiro’s earlier books of poetry and prose, we have known these people for a long time, in both ugliness and strength and in their Job-like suffering as they have endured with the poet himself the deaths of their other children, events at the center of Shapiro’s two classics of the immediacy of grief, Song and Dance and The Dead Alive and Busy. Similarly, if we know Happy Hour from 1987 and Tantalus in Love from 2004, then we know that when the poet writes of the end of marriage in “Dental Floss,” he is writing about the end of another marriage, and we see that his honesty is intact, his fidelity to feelings and insights that cannot be reconciled with each other, his paradoxical balance or equanimity that allows for anger and forgiving anguish, have grown more extensive.
One of the things I valued about Alan Shapiro when he was my teacher — a beloved teacher to all who studied with him — and which I still value about him — is his willingness to say the ugly true thing in the same spirit in which he will say the unguarded and tender true thing. Shapiro always adjusts his technique to serve the emotional demands of his subject. So when his brief book about the death of his brother Song and Dance came out, I was astonished by how he registered the immediacy of grief by writing staggered triplets propelled by broken through-lines of iambic pentameter to register his wheeling and suddenly more associative mind, and then in Old War, I rejoiced in the Larkin-like clarity and more traditional skill and dark humor of poems in “From the Book of Last Thoughts,” a sequence of dramatic monologues in which various ghosts, including a few sleazy political operatives, contemplate their deaths. In the midst of that book’s initial sequence of poems celebrating the euphoria of love and carnality, he was still writing a poem about the sadness and indignity of an earlier love ending, “Egg Rolls,” a poem structured like a narrative joke with an amazingly unfunny punch line, a prelude for that book’s finale, a poem about a stand-up comedian at an “Open-Mike Night in Heaven” that sounds suspiciously like hell. Against Translation includes another poem in this serious and comic line of structural invention, an extended riff on the cemetery lot sales business, “Letter to a Cemetery Owner.” At heart, this poem contemplates the loneliness of being single in old age, but it also pitches the idea of a drive-in funeral business for mourners in a hurry (“here’s your motto: Remains to Be Seen”). This would be an excellent poem for somebody to post on Tinder. With irony and honesty in such short supply lately, I am sure that it would get somebody a few dates.
Early in his career, apparently some of the neo-formalists tried to co-opt Shapiro to their project because he is brilliant with form and structure, but he responded with a definitive take-down essay about that movement, “The New Formalism,” working from the point-of-view of what actually happens on the level of the ear for duration, and claiming that the neo-formalists actually knew only how to count to ten and divide by five, part of his overall rejection of rigidity and puritanical ideals and divisions. I remember this essay with particular fondness because once when I was his student, he responded to some terrible pentameter I brought around to him by holding his arms straight out in front of him and saying, “Oh no, David, Frankenstein iambs, Frankenstein iambs, too regular, arrgghhh,” a move that he must have made only once he had correctly judged me as a person open to and amused by tough love. If we turn to his critical writing from that time period, we also find a useful description of style. We all make “extra-literary judgments” about what is and is not important, with good writing balancing the claims of these judgments against the primal allegiances of experience, the head, mores, and love. Considering these judgments and tensions, style becomes “consciousness in action.” So I received my other favorite piece of Shapiro criticism when I wrote a poem about a friend having a schizophrenic break. The poem struck him as too calm and accepting, too lacking in conflicting impulses to feel real or necessary. “Come on, David, doesn’t this just piss you off, happening to some kid? Doesn’t this make you angry? It should.” He was right. I was trying to be too smart about somebody else’s suffering, being too objective. Humanly speaking, I was writing like an asshole.
In this new book, the formal structure Shapiro uses to suit his purposes to most striking organizational effect are those of the prose poetry series of tableaux or discrete scenes. Although the prose poem form is fluid and changing as the prose poem has become in some ways as ubiquitous as heroic couplets in the eighteenth century and poets find their new formal inspirations everywhere from social media feeds to sudden fiction to simply not knowing much about linear variations in either free verse or formal prosody, most older poets who write prose poems have been influenced by either Baudelaire or Rimbaud, or both, whether consciously or not. That throws a wide circle around one of the major forms of international modern and contemporary poetry, and it doesn’t do justice to the influence of Gertrude Stein on contemporary prose poetry, but you can find a really useful version of that story in the chapter on difficulty in Stephanie Burt’s new book, the democratic Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. Baudelaire’s prose poems are often narrative, or they are purely descriptive tableaux, or they are rhapsodic invocations that rock on periodic sentences. Rimbaud’s prose poems tend to be disjunctive, gestural versions of these same structural kinds, and they work against expectations for florid eloquence with choppier musical effects. My favorite of Shapiro’s new prose poems is one called “Geese.” Here the poem, using a narrative and chronological logic, unfolds as a sequence of scenes and imagined scenes ending in a choppier, metaphorical rhapsody:
Geese
More dream now than memory, though memory is all it is: after an early dinner, I’m dropping them off at their cottage, besides the artificial pond in the retirement community she loves and he hates. Families of geese are crossing in front of us as they get out of the car: he’s in a beige windbreaker and floppy safari hat, she’s in a washed-out housedress and sweater, holding the Styrofoam box of leftovers his one hand, the other jiggling the key into the lock, while, nearly blind, he waits behind her, hand on her elbow clutching the fabric of the sweater the way a child does to steady or reassure himself, till she opens the door and, entering, gently pulls him in behind her. Just that and nothing else, the end of another unremarkable, dutiful evening of getting them out, of eating for a change, eating something other than what he calls that slop you wouldn’t feed a dog, so they could sit in a restaurant saying nothing, heads bent rabbinically over plates, as if in study of the fork, machinelike, going slowly up and down. I watch the door close on another outing, another week of filial acquittal, eager to resume my life but for some reason this time I don’t immediately drive away. I’m staring at the door that’s closed behind them, as if it were the border of the known world on an ancient map beyond which someone has scrawled “Here be Monsters!” — I picture him still in windbreaker and safari hat clinging down to the fabric at her elbow as she leads him shuffling into chaos howling across a vast savannah inside the cottage while out here in the falling night geese cluster in the road in front of me, defiant, unyielding, even as I pull out edging forward, honking the horn, leaning on it hard now, yet all they do without dispersing, is squawk and shit and waddle every which way.
We can see a number of things that are characteristic of Alan Shapiro’s poems here. One is that the poem inhabits a contemporary space and makes us see it, in this case the landscape, fountains, and fauna around an assisted living facility in the South, but in other poems it might be baseball fields or the Tobin Bridge to Boston, or it could be just a stand of trees on the edge of a neighborhood of sub-divisions where a jogger might encounter a dying turkey. Another is that while the poem feints towards being “highly relatable” in its situation with old people and leftover containers, the poet in fact resists the expected emotions of self-pity and mawkish sentimentality to reach a more visceral sort of emotion. Big emotions are highly hybrid experiences and never as simple as what C.K. Williams called our impoverished vocabularies for our feelings would suggest. Shapiro makes us feel the reality of all the figures in his scene by being outwardly hard on them all, which is just what Checkhov would advise, as Stephen Dobyns points out in his essay on him. This poem is both sort of mean and also intensely sympathetic.
You can find the lyric turns in the emotional and intellectual movement of Shapiro’s prose poems, just as you can find them in the long, colloquial and generous lines that amplify into song when “Gary” gathers its emotional intensity into the surprise of its actual, unforeseen subject of disappointment. Remember, the neo-formalists wanted this guy on their side before he wrote them his “no way, you suck” missive. In “Geese,” everything after “Here be Monsters” does some of the things that Shapiro says imagination should do in the introduction to In Praise of the Impure:
“The salient feature of imagination is to bring together what our conventions tell us should be kept apart. Imagination is the something within us ‘that doesn’t love a wall,’ that seeks to violate boundaries, transgress borders, challenge our customary ways of thinking so as to make our rules, systems, [and] habitual perceptions more responsive to a wider range of life.”
Our “habitual perceptions” are problematic in a number of ways, not the least because they translate as clichés in poetry. They are ways of not imagining the claims of other people; they are reductive of people and situations. We might learn in one poem that Shapiro’s mother was theatrical, distant and image-conscious at times, and in another that his father was a racist and a bully, but when Shapiro judges them — judgment and justness being essentials for the high stakes of conscious life in his poetry — he holds his own experience with theirs in the balance. His style considered as style and drama shows his respect, love, longing, envy, bewilderment and irritation at the same time at the end of another poem:
“As I put away the groceries and cleaned the various messes he had made just in the past few hours, they sat like that and talked, their voices barely audible, like parents in a bedroom late at night, keeping their voices down so as not to wake the children. They sat like that, where sixty-three years had brought them, each telling the other how they were, what had hurt them in the days and weeks they weren’t together, and what was hurting now.”
How beautiful and moving the sentence craft and the complex of emotions that render and complete this seemingly plain scene of irritation and abiding.
Poets like Alan Shapiro, who are writing in this responsible, responsive, fearless and disillusioned or generous way, seem important to me if we are going to get to the bottom of the lousy and destructive ways we conceptualize adulthood and personhood in terms of perfection and ambition. With all of their bad news, his poems are leaving markers on the trail for the punks to come later. This seems to be part of Shapiro’s project in poems like “Manhood” — a poem about the shaming of a child in a world increasingly without levity and more prone to bullying — “Hurricanes” — a poem that explores the way Shapiro’s family loved the Amos and Andy show and the racist cable television coverage of the Missouri protests and riots, a poem that works against both racism and sanctimony — “Father,” and “Photograph of Neo-Nazi March through Spokie, Illinois, 1977,” the last being a poem that turns into a Grecian urn scene of a handsome young anti-Semite locked in a stare-down with an elderly and distorted looking old Jewish man, with “the signifiers falling” into the urn that the poet as a maker of forms has made of the poem “as quietly as ash.” Although these poems are obviously responding to what we might call Trump’s America — and most conservatives are at heart deniers of personal age and change, as one can see when watching them on television with the sound down, though there is Botox enough to go around, one way or another — Shapiro has been taking the lid off of defensiveness for years, and these poems sent me back to another of his earlier books, Mixed Company, another one of my favorites, sentence for sentence and line for line, and for its sense of who people are when we consider them together with ourselves.
If I sound like somebody who would like to see a new edition of a selected poems from Alan Shapiro, that is because I am that person. His impulse towards looking at this culture through the lenses of expanding, imperfect kinship and responsible honesty seem to be one of our best ways forward as readers, writers and people in general. It takes a plain style master to show the limits of the metaphysical, self-important and grandiose styles, what J.V. Cunningham called “spiritual noise,” and what might be called “the mirror” in Terrance Hayes’s sonnets. The title poem “Against Translation” makes us imagine a primal state of tragedy, with scenes that could be from Homer or Virgil or some other awful chronicle of another forsaken, tragic past that he never specifies. Of course, there is also a somewhat fading convention of including intelligent bits of translation in books of American poetry, so the title is also signifying a greater allegiance to lived life rather than to literary culture. Shapiro opens this book with this mysterious poem before moving onto his more characteristic material, a family poem about watching the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis on television, with “the fear a kind of closeness, the cramped rooms for once no longer spacious with disaffection … nobody was at anybody’s throat.” Why talk about that now? Maybe Shapiro is saying we can do a lot better than this uneasy family peace felt only with the pressure of an external threat, and, of course, we could also do a lot worse because usually this is not even peace, and we have done worse, and going forward, if we play the odds alone, we probably all eventually will. Watch out.
[Published April 1, 2019 by the University of Chicago Press, 95 pages, $18.00 paperback]