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- William Paterson University
WP asked David Shapiro, a University
professor of art history since 1981, to share some of his thoughts
on the millennium, as well as selections from his poetry
that deal with issues such as the Holocaust, the end of the century,
and the end of time. Shapiro has had a distinguished career as
a poet, art and literary critic and essayist, musician, and educator.
The author of numerous volumes of poetry
and art criticism, Shapiro also has collaborated with other poets,
as well as artists, musicians, and architects, to create composite
works of many kinds-from illustrated books and poem-paintings
to operas and films.
You ask about preparing
for the millennium?
Read and re-read the classics. Look at the great art of the apocalypse
from Grunwald and Breughel to DeKooning. Reconsider your projects
in the light of dogmatic fundamentalisms and preach, directly
and indirectly, tolerance. More and more tolerance.
The great physicist Sacharov knew what he was speaking of, during the crippling Stalinism of the '50s and beyond. He demanded pluralism. We must live in a world of many styles, many religions, many philosophies. We must learn an equitable sense of dwelling in this fractured historical time.
You cannot just say there is an end to history, as certain ideologues have witlessly done. We live in a heated, passionate time and must make the best decisions considering the conflict, the inevitable conflict, of values in this broken time. The healing of our country after Vietnam has not yet taken.
We live in the aftermath of such global catastrophes that our art is almost numb, like the ironic minimalism that creeps around us. I call for a maximalism: an art that will be clear as a tear and resonant as prayer. As Derrida asks, can we pray without hope? Yes, and then the prayer is hope itself.
TO THE EARTH
for Meyer Schapiro
I fell with my father through
space
In a space module as round
as your thumb
My father remarked of the
earth
How they had divided everything
By twos or by one (a joke)
It was better by far to visit the other side
than stay stranded in that self
We passed the poor Americas
South Africa striped as a zebra
And Russian artists who could
not practice their art
The art of the grid
While others wondered whether
we had seriously
judged the grid
But all over the earth
the artists painted
what they wanted
Except where they could not -
or what they needed -
and did not
And my father worried aloud
Knocking on the moonlit plastic module door
When we fell, we screamed
But we were safe in Texas, safe as Texas,
safe as Texas in Texas
Eating bread not electrons
Madly in love with the earth.
AFTER
There is the gate or the
copy of a gate
Blood outlines the gate, like a nude
A pink flower like a tree emits sparks
They gather into a yellow blue
fragmentary flower
In the other space, formed by flowers torn apart
It bites the ground, like a blackened moon
Blood outlines a few jagged petals
Where does this flower emerge
if not from history
The night-flower beside it is not
dark enough with
Turmoil of strokes, with labor of
having been there
The night-flower explodes, is blue less
Relentless, should there be nothing but shadow
The twentieth century falls off
below and fragility
And the kitsch of flowers above,
finesse of heaven
No one can enter here, and there is
nothing but hope
A BOOK OF GLASS
On the table, a book of
glass.
In the book only a few pages with no words
But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to
pieces in diagonal
Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve
fractures lines to elisions.
The last pages are simplest.
They can be read backwards and thoroughly.
Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic.
He who wrote it was very ambitious,
fed up, and finished.
He had been teaching the insides
and outsides of things
To children, teaching the art of
Rembrandt to them.
His two wives were beautiful and Death begins
As a beggar beside them. What is
an abstract persona?
A painter visits but he prefers to look
at perfume in vials.
And I see a book in glass-the
words go off
In wild loops without words. I should
Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says
each child
Will receive the book of etchings, but the
book will be incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass.
FOR VICTIMS
They have used the bodies
of children
As improvised bridges,
Which they later cross.
First the sun and the moon,
Then the earth comes in.
But they have lost
The atmosphere, which belongs to them
Light passersby
"To the Earth"
from To An Idea: A Book of Poems (Overlook Press, 1983)
"After" from After a Lost Original (Overlook Press,
1994)
"A Book of Glass" from House (Blown Apart) (Overlook
Press, 1988)
"For Victims" from After a Lost Original
(Overlook Press, 1994)
