To an Idea: A Book of Poems

by David Shapiro, David Shaprio

A book of Poetry by David Shapiro.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 1983

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Either this poetry completely went over my head or Shapiro has no fucking clue what he's doing. Most of these poems are unintelligible. You can re-read but they will still be unintelligible. I admit that I didn't try very hard to find meaning in them, but the poems are either some sort of surreal Freudian masterpieces, or drug-fueled ramblings. Ideas come out of nowhere. I'll provide some excerpts so you can judge for yourself:

Forget it just become conscious
think about thinking Just think about it
What you're doing is an umbrella
I'm going to push your face in That's a cliché
Not a ceiling, not a floor
as a sun dwells on a dictation machine

(p. 20 "Sphinx Skin")

   WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN BY PERCY SLEDGE

When a man loves a woman by Percy Sledge
he is like a polygonal block of limestone
She is the city and city wall measuring 2½ meters
Two of his gates are still to some extent preserved

(p. 32 "A Song")

Silent man takes a repeated test, a second photograph.
Rotten willow you have an abortive stem.
When one studies crime or the prevention of crime,
   the peony has no money
Dear flower, destitute and household god, my enormous
   youth beneath.

(p.73 "IV Friday Night Quartet")

I know that I love the verb not to know.
Do you love it? The distance is like a Chinese garden.
I pluck pomegranates out of the Halloween stores.
Then I keep looking at this phrase like summer hills.
The mountain represents nothing, the mountain air
Represents nothing, but two birds seem bad enough.

(p.76 "November Twenty Seventh")

I feel like I gained nothing from this book. It's one of those ones that you get through joylessly, smiling and nodding because otherwise you would abandon the book altogether.

Poems that I thought aren't completely terrible:
"Snow," "The Night Sky and to Walter Benjamin"

=2/49 (4.1%) poems that I thought aren't completely terrible.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 3.5

In terms of craft, this book was an easy five stars; Shapiro's writing is astoundingly elegant for the most part, with a large number of times when the words fit together better than almost anything else I have read. Some of those moments include: "From Malay": "Like sugar in a summer bicycle basket/The newly dead are easy to find"; Friday Night Quartet "I. St. Barnabas": "My mother said,/I'm not wavery because I have a wall/And I love it-/Walls are convenient because they don't move"; and "To the Earth": "But we are safe in Texas, safe as Texas, safe as Texas in Texas//Eating bread not electrons/Madly in love with the earth."
Unfortunately, in terms of readability, the collection receives only two stars. While I am perfectly willing to concede that my lack of understanding is almost definitely my fault, a conversation with a woman who knew him when she was in graduate school solidified my feeling that he was being deliberately confusing. This sort of "I'm smarter than you are" attempt to make readers perplexed is not a quality I find enjoyable in a collection of poetry. The pieces that seemed to be designed to stymie understanding were frustrating; I could not even get enough out of most of them in two or three reads to justify trying to uncover all their hidden layers. Having levels of meaning (as in Friday Night Quartet) is good; preventing your readers from knowing where to start digging is frustrating. The two-star experience and five-star writing average to a 3.5 rounded up because of a few truly shining, wonderful poems. The poems I really enjoyed exploring were "Falling Upwards", "To the Earth", "Scheherazade School Screen", " 'What Does Bankruptcy Mean to You' ", Friday Night Quartet (my favorite piece in the book), and "From Malay".
This is recommended to readers who are willing to spend more time than usual on such a small volume and don't mind puzzles. A large amount of experience in the systematic study of poetry would not be unhelpful (I probably won't reread it until I have done some significant scholarly work with other poets who want to be confusing and can figure out what that is meant to accomplish).