Immediate Memories: (Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate) Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro

As a New York poet writing at the end of the twentieth century, David Shapiro's works have often been read as a continuation of poetic projects begun by earlier New York School poets (e.g., Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch) or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (e.g., Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and Ron Sillman). Shapiro's writing can been seen in relationship to these poetic projects — his writing traces over and over the surface of words, while the "depth" of narrative or confession is exposed as illusion; yet, Shapiro's poems insist on their attempts to connect with the past. Shapiro's writing (heroically) acknowledges that the past — at least in poetry — is always "grasped" (and lost) in the present by a reader and not the poet.