David Shapiro

David Shapiro Collages
Turtle Point Press, September 15, 2010



An Orange Hand, Here.


There was a big round Charlie Rose like table downstairs, it was the Anne Plumb Gallery in Soho. You could have called it a salon but we didn't, it was just what was happening.

I met David there probably discussing Frank O'Hara with Rene Ricard, pausing to add a remark about John Hedujk, then weaving together an idea from Goethe, there was a sense of permission. He already knew all the best poets and painters and was writing about them. He stuck everything in and continued to create his multi leveled pluralistic universe. It was a poem in progress.

David read his poetry often and I never missed it. I was far from being a connoisseur of poetry at the time but his musical voice and anecdotal goings on kept my interest.

I can remember, falling some where over Texas with his father, worrying but "safe in Texas," "safe as Texas." Different lines would stick, Blue jays and a "poor sparrow under an old car" a red bird flew. One easily loved the snow piling up in his poems.

Around the time of his, Evening Land, poem and The Seasons, did I start to catch on to the depth of associations required to approach. There was the fragile Earth behind, there were the ruins of art, a metal mouth, and a breast from somewhere before. A newspaper was blowing through, he could see, then couldn't see. Through the detritus, the constant qualifications but there was a ventriloquist's hope, a refusal to say no.

Here come the collages! I felt they were a side tributary to his poetry, running furiously for any time David wasn't writing-- they nervously ran and ran. Anyone that met David probably on the street between galleries, has a few collages hanging somewhere.

I scolded David for being so glib that, Hey, they were good but he cheapened them-- they came and came. One after the other. I grabbed for that one, No! David wanted to keep that one-- I took another. They evolved and I recognized a repeated imagery. This used over that and over, another repeated-- and then substituted.

Now, I think of the Whitman like tally, the scoring of each thing touched-- made real. The covering hands or birds like a Saint's touch conferring reality, here, here, and some still unrelated order into the scheme of things.

I asked John Ashbery about this complex once and he replied to me, I think, sarcastically, "Oh the poetry and painting thing." The oblique relations between the two arts, poets and painters. In our time seems just fine. They add enough.

David came to my studio once and wrote on xeroxes of paintings I had on my table. "The old sunflower almost blocks the sun" he wrote over a fragment of a sunflower painting. More than just oblique.

We had shared belief though knowing the difficulty or impossibility of. I think It seems to come down to just caring that much about something, a poem or painting to lend the added thought, to add ones own cherished autonomy to anothers, maybe a kind of poetic kiss.

Beside my desk is one of David's collages, a xeroxed figure of Cezanne's bather, a seahorse stamped onto this icon, adding a stuck on mystery-- it flattens to a "orange colored hand," reverberating, image to word, back.



David Shapiro Collage

Achilles/ Fire 1982

Excerpted from Clouds, leaves, waves.


4.
shaped spirits of archetypal
torsos, struggle, plunge,
release--
contemplating guilt, drunken
and whirled as dervish,
one--
plunging
to depths--
drowned in lust,
the fueled fires light the beach.

Black figures stand and stare
at shadows on the moon.
Philosophy, hardly biblical, is
powered by darkest boasts
the colors of Melville and Pollock.




9.
fires on the beach,
the silhouetted forms in black
wetsuits, heroic, from another age.
the Shadows of blazoned on cliffs,
voices whisper, here and then--
video and photos flash,
that we were here, alive tonight.
A plane blinks in the dark,
we look for the moon to rise,
platform Holly flashes like a cake
on the horizon.

She told of Ed Ricketts and
further away places in Mexico,
The Sea of Cortez, I remembered,
striped snails and his saying,
“...that many of the inhabitants
of this region, could scarcely be taken
as obvious.” We saw figures
in the stars and then forgot.








This post is related to recent post on Achilles/ Fire event in 1982.

see:http://extragregorybotts.blogspot.com/

New Mexico, selections from Road Movie

1
just wanted to camp, reading outside,
Rexroth, a beautiful poetry, reading
bringing along
Kerouac and Snyder, Ginsberg
and that fellow, Witter
Bynner from New Mexico
to read Chinese
poems, poets singing of--
Jade Mountain
mad in the mountains
wedding the west, to beloved
Snowman


2
going through all the places, people,
rehearsing the story of California
the Big Sur
Yosemite monuments
the desert Mojave

SB and LA
New Mexico,
the old west like, my movie,
ROAD MOVIE
WEST of

MOVIE/ DREAM
SECOND CHANCE
the homeless guy
no name, over there, black and blue
in the shaded corner


3
country music on the radio, out of state plates,
through windmills, my poem
becomes the song of lonely spaces ,
yearning for love, the connection in the wind
headed into it, south from Texas into New Mexico,

the west, incredibly--
as I cross that invisible state line, crystalline shapes
and cotton candy clouds reflecting earth, red
planted in green, turning to prairie
grass deepening into sage, thunderheads

beyond covering mountains in distance
anvil like cardboard cloud,
pinned to flat lonely space, varoom, the Greyhound
bus to Amarillo, passes in black smoke
and I'm left,

Santa Fe train, a B-line into the distance my spirit
here enlarged, nothing like it,
Arkansas woods are interior
compared to this New Mexico-- space
and lonely wind, following the long march

of Katchina looking power-poles, a raven swoops
surfacing and the sinking,
butterfly stroke, swimming in this bottomless
lake of saline solution, unstinging to the eyes,
surface and sink

heavenly body of water,
immersed in my journey
leaving behind inside turning
to outer space
dying into this land, free

a soul left out flapping,
wholly bodiless
in the sun and wind, clearer again than I
could remember, here remembering
it even as I see,



4
Gallop, New Mexico
is the perverse twistings of one culture
upon another,

a sorry drunken Indian asking--
we were spotted as tourist,
I surprised myself
by letting out a rude reprimand,
I became the sorry one

as I watched him shrink away,
we turned
fast from this town of pawn and aimlessness,
lost without expression, lost pride
with out place,

invisible at the coffee shop,
we sheepishly downed
our enchiladas and coffee,
drifting out
onto the mysterious emptiness

of the winding path, confused,
washing machines on roads and
refrigerators in the cottonwoods
winking in the hot breeze
wrecked cars,

there a painted pony
lovely against the mesa sky
we WERE GOING TO A HOPI DANCE
a corn dance,
dancing for rain

and thanks for what crops were received
Kachinas represented these feelings
and prayed for the life, to continue
a tradition of designs carried their selves
weaving disparate places like Phoenix

and Hotevilla together, no Indian is the same
as I am not, the generalizations of an-- other
do not work, who would be the more spiritual
one? question mark?
I have a stone thrown at me

and a motion tells me to remove
my hat, Gringo with no respect,
the others all shielded from the sun, with umbrellas
and hats, too? I shrug, this is tricky
business but the mesmerizing music, or

rhythm continues, continues and that
is what is important, this art is about
continuing, being something different, and the
same, that stopping-- owning their life
is just their-- just wanting to go on, asking

nothing, before the corrupting addictions
to quell a people full of fear, arriving
we roamed to the rhythm
kicking shards
of dreamed pots at our feet, everywhere

where pots and bones, the procession
arrived in green fir and black grease,
the rhythm produced in the hot sun
a hallucination like
a hand bringing

something forward unseen, coaxing
over and over, the drone of bees, design
brought forward, differing feelings
and fads of the place, the figured spirits,
there, we watched from the roofs

of the tiny rock town, spirit ladders
reaching to the sky, watching
shuffling from foot to foot, captured
there in a time’s bubble,
clouds arriving

and-- looking up with surprise
to passing wind and rain
every one murmuring, the drone
continuing
the brief sprinkle

fleeting into dryness
of desert air, continuance,
the rhythms of sex,
or death, in the
cycle of life, beauty way

the meaning of order,
in a poetry of belonging
to something even larger
than this sacred place
standing apart is not allowed

or could one be capable of--
buried in that dirt I can only glimpse--
I cannot give up this divided life
a hypocrite? thrown stones
reluctantly we leave,

amazed and confused
driving away, to our civilization
and culture, we regretted
our decision, to go
we had been close and needed

to leave, we ever anxious to keep going
on to the next,
off balance a bit, we drove on
hardly stopping through
the tourist laden trading posts



5
dashed upon--wave after wave
remembering the yellow rabbit
brush, blue sky, green against red, earth
of New Mexico design, brings me back
coloring the place, already

but now, I’m driving highway culture,
East, now and I NEED TO PEE
I have to begin the search, losing the freedom
relying on Burger King--
I’ll be happy-- to see, my old friends,

I miss, but then the doubts, I’m so out of it,
out there, here, the
tightening spaces
make obvious the social ills
having become the life,

of the east,
the built upon built,
upon tension of--
the power politics involved,
becoming savvy in this Art,

the painting’s sensuality, so old fashioned
in that we don’t have the depth
for those big paintings any more
and the fashion changes to small,
“A Good Thing,” they say

the profane world is the subject
what we can see, that’s trouble enough
forgetting that inner space
although it is obvious
that it is becoming the only space

left, the new West the reaches
of the Romantic inner distance,
the debased art, the empty church
everything for sale,
in the what’s new

next economy, picking through for Poetry,
“negotiating rapture” I’ve heard it said
beyond innocent transcendental reach,
my poem repeats ,
un- original thought

if this was all there was, I’d end the poem here--
in desperation
add glamour to that despair
never seen reality, the ordered poem
what Long Island had been

looking for new poem, to keep going,
flipping through the fashion magazines,
having replaced art becoming the art,
next thing,
down runway,