Vol. 36 No. 1 1969 - page 143

BOOKS
1 ..3
The sad thing is that Shapiro's simplistic program for writing com–
mits him - "lock, stock, and barrel," as he would say, and does–
to this kind of language and to its shabby simulacrum of actual thought
and feeling. Even if his talents were such that he could aspire to
accurate exposition, it is logically a part of his program not to write well
because the enemy is, as he tells us, "literature." Those who write well
are exactly those "stylists," snobs and phonies who populate "the
Serious World," and Shapiro's miserable prose assumes the function of
distinguishing himself from them.
In their substance, Shapiro's essays against "literature" and "the
Literati" - he actually uses that word - are the counterpart of those
embarrassing ads for "Conjecturism" in
The New York Times Book
Review,
ads suggesting that the common reader is being had by sissy
New York critics who design nothing but his humiliation and bondage.
Shapiro's implicit appeals to untutored American manliness are similar,
as are his suggestions that "art" and "criticism" are largely rackets
practiced upon the sturdy autodidacts of the Middle West by the swarm–
ing quacks and fairies of the East.
Seeing nothing defective in either the rhetoric he practices or the
simpleminded critical dialectic he has embraced, Shapiro cannot be ex–
pected to write interesting poems, and those in
White-Haired Lover
- an implausible but I suppose comforting oxymoron - will disap–
point critics and lovers alike. Even the audience of
This Is My Beloved,
solicited by a jacket blurb promising poems that are "frankly erotic,"
will demand its money back. In
To Abolish Children
we are told that
poetry is an explosion; what we are given here is gentility, padding and
cliche. I don't require that in love poems a man descant, as Leonard
Cohen and Paul Goodman do, of hard-ons and blow jobs and tits, and
I certainly don't require it when a man is telling us - although un–
asked, to be sure - why his marriage is satisfactory. But it does seem
to me that Shapiro's way of dealing with the actualities of love keeps
us at some distance from either experience or poetry:
If I could write one honest sentence now
I'd say I love you but I don't know how.
Despite all his pleas for the "non-moral society," Shapiro has not
been able to rid himself of a lurking concern with making a good
- here, a respectable - impression, and despite his strenuous antipathy
to traditional poetic forms, here he clutches the sonet as his
cache-sexe,
a device which will provide him with the fig leaves and pasties for
which, as an essentially decent person, he feels a need. These poems
pretend to send up the sonnet ("stab it" is Shapiro's awkward way of
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