Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry explores the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry explores the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
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Overview
Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry explores the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226404202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Series: | Phoenix Poets |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 102 |
| File size: | 781 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Life Pig
By Alan Shapiro
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-40420-2
CHAPTER 1
The Hebrew Ouija Board
With yellowish dry skin, dark crooked teeth,
and her old-styled buttoned-up high-collared dress
with long sleeves covering her wrists, a dress
she almost seemed to hide in more than wear,
Mrs. Dubrow, a tiny woman, made herself
even tinier when she leaned down to watch us,
watch our faces take in the photograph,
our little bodies squirming in our seats —
her curly black hair jiggling angrily
as she nodded in approval without smiling,
walking from desk to desk in the picture's wake.
Look at it, she'd order us in a hoarse whisper,
you no better than a piece of wood
unless you look at it: a piece of wood.
White bodies, they were all piled up in stacks
beside a ditch, and the ditch was bible black,
a dirt absence blackening down as far
as the white bodies were neatly stacked up high —
like hay bales on top of hay bales made of breasts
crushed down on backs, on faces, legs between
legs opening or closing on a glimpse
of awful hair, of all the hidden parts
unhidden, but somehow made all right to look at
by being so meticulously bulked
and scrambled up together that any part
of one could have belonged to any other;
all sense of a real he or she with clothes on
buried, it seemed, by all the nakedness
around it, as if nakedness could be
something somebody else could do to you,
to hide you, cover you up with like a ditch
that made the ditch beside the bodies almost
beside the point. I couldn't look at them
or look away, I wanted to be nothing else
except the clothes I wore. I placed my hand
over them all and sat there till Mrs. Dubrow
put her dry hand on mine and moved it back
and forth and up and down so gently
she might have thought it was the scrambled up
alphabet of cheek, thigh, ankle, arm, or crotch
that moved the planchette of my hand across
the picture for the secret messages
the dead were passing back and forth from part
to hidden part about the bodies ours
would be, and what they'd touch and who would touch
them, where and how, inside some other picture
that her hand kept on deciphering through my hand.
The Hiawatha Recitation
All along the schoolyard
blown out basement windows
of a warehouse
like a row of black mouths
seemed to suck our errant
kickballs past the white lines
of the game into the cellar
dark beyond our seeing,
lightless as the black pitch-water
stretching away inside the poem
we had spent the morning learning
to recite. Here we were crouching
on the lip of nothing looking
down into a dark so
damp with rot we
could have leaned against it,
leaning over some new unseen
dying there below us, like a
dare we couldn't stomach, peering
down at it, a solemn row of
little Hiawathas
all pretending any moment
any one of us might venture
to the bottom of the pit to
find the ball and bring it up out
of the mold of ages
back into the daylight,
savior of the lost game.
But as always when the bell rang,
we filed back into the classroom
to our row, our desk, our
primer opened to the same page —
where we now would read in
unison about the triumph and the
honor that for us existed
nowhere off the page, and even
on it now was crossed with
something shameful, something
unseen we could sense there
at the bottom of it,
always dying while along the
shore of Gitchee Gumee
of the shining Big-Sea-Water
all our voices went on
chanting out the
unrelenting march of
Hiawatha the avenger,
vanquisher of he who
sends the fever of the marshes
and the pestilential vapors,
and disease and death among us,
from the black pitch-water
and the white fog of the fen lands.
The Look
I saw it without knowing
I had seen it
until I saw it again
years later in Plutarch's
Parallel Lives, the look
(I have to think)
not unassailable,
but not uncertain
either, and so, my father,
to discipline both
his urge to do and not
do what needed doing,
no matter how or
what he may have felt
about it, sought
asylum in the savage
un-anger of a look
of piety untempered
by anything but
piety, his face annealed
with it, as if the pain
he beat into the boy
my brother was —
because he what? had
shit himself? again?
or wet the bed? — was
not inflicted so
much by the father
that he was as by
the look or principle
the look upheld,
on which all hope
of being civilized
depends.
As if he turned
just then into not
a father but a founding father
looking through the father
looking on as the sentence
in Plutarch's sentences
is carried out
right there before
the hushed assembly
upon the bodies of his two
sons, sons no longer,
but traitors now, mere
enemies of the tyrant-
hating new republic,
stripped by virtue, beaten
to death by piety, their then
beheaded heads staked
to the senate wall
as an example. The parallel
lives, the look, the
generation-stalking-
sacrificial-let-
this-be-a-lesson-to-you
look that is, as
Plutarch writes, so
god-like and so
brutish and thus so
very hard to praise
or blame too much.
Trajan's Column
Among the crammed-together tiny figures on a lower panel
of the frieze of figures coiling up the hundred-foot-high marble column
like a flowering vine of butchery and triumph, there's one figure
among the vanquished who, half naked, in profile slumps
against a wall — his face expressing nothing even while
he holds his arms out in hopeless supplication to the victor
towering over him with sword in mid-swing at its peak:
the killer's face too just as blank, mechanical, as if
it hardly had to do with him, whatever force it was
or law whose necessities he served, that played itself out
through this moment before it moved on to the next and the next
in a tumultuous unreadable sleepwalk through the hacking and
being hacked, spiraling up and away from us beyond what we can see.
The height of the column is the height of the great hill
the emperor razed to the ground, or his slaves did, shovelful by shovelful,
to build the tower to memorialize the glory, which the emperor himself was
really nothing but the humble servant of. Under the brick arch
of the concrete entranceway to the downtown factory where I worked
one summer there was this drunk, a woman, whose face, buried
in a mess of scarves, I never saw, whose body I had to step across
to get into the building, holding my breath against the almost solid
force field of stink around her, as if it were
my punishment for being not the one stepped over but
the one, head turned away, who got to do the stepping.
And I did it, and got used to it in no time really,
I admit it, my face blank, unreadable, and hard
as the concrete entranceway I entered by,
so that it came to seem simply the nature of the place,
an aspect of the job itself, the shrieking riveters and pressers I became
so good at running I could half doze as I stood there
hour after hour, day in day out, feeding them
the many different kinds of leather they obediently
would then shit out as many different kinds of belts
that women all over the city and the state would wear
while the belts were still in style, then donate to the poor when not.
Maybe, who knows, the drunk wore one of the belts we made.
But I didn't think about that then. Coming and going,
every moment of the day I didn't think of anything
till the summer ended and I returned to school,
as expected, then went beyond school, as expected too.
And not once did I ever think about that time and place, that woman;
not once till now, till my writing this about the lower panel
of a machine-like slaughtering that's only one of thousands
twisting up serenely to the very top of the column where
a statue of the good emperor used to stand, and now
a statue of St. Peter does, looking down triumphantly
on all that famous rubble at his feet.
The factory was shut down long ago.
And in its place colossal towers made entirely of glass rise up
so high that all you see now overhead are the rippling images
of buildings inside buildings, like a line of columns carved
from giant waves caught at the very moment they're about to break.
Moon Landing, 1969
I don't remember now the names of anyone there,
or if I ever knew them, or even where there was,
maybe a friend's friend's apartment whose mother
if there was a mother might have been a single mom
who worked nights and wouldn't be around to hassle us.
What I remember mostly was the awful smell,
and the diffuse unease I moved in all that summer.
The lottery was coming soon; the lottery would surely
send me to the war I didn't think I'd have the guts to go to
or run from. All I wanted was to slow time down the way
a fast stream riffles over coarse grain, almost stopping
while it rushes forward never stopping, like me going party
to party to where what hadn't happened yet would never
happen even as it neared. The semicircle of the couch we
sat in, stupefied, facing the TV, was ripped and frayed, grayish
cotton batting under the weight of leg or arm
oozing out and then subsiding only to ooze out elsewhere
when any of us shifted, the carpet sticky, reeking of wet dog
crossed with cat piss though there was no cat or dog, the smell
unbearable until the smoke at last suppressed it,
until a cloud hung between us and the peace sign
of the antenna of the small TV whose screen carved from the dark
a little cave of gray-blue haze through which we watched
the seas of the moon rise slowly up to meet the lunar module
just as slowly coming down.
Then they were out in it,
first one and then another astronaut, clumsy in baggy white suits,
leap frogging like children underwater, little puffs of silt exploding
in slow motion at their feet. The flag flew straight out
as if made of hammered steel, stiff in a stiff wind, never rippling
or wrinkling, and lit up as by a spotlight someone said
must be the earth, and someone else said if it were the earth
then that must mean that from the moon the earth was the moon,
the moon's moon, someone else said, and we all laughed,
not knowing why.
Then we fell silent as the astronauts stopped
goofing around, the sugar high of that first small step that
giant leap withdrawing till they looked like clowns
forlornly standing at mock attention in the tranquil sea
that wasn't tranquil or a sea, while the president thanked them,
promised to bring peace and tranquility to the very earth
that seemed just then to burn in the rigid flag, in the black glass
of the helmets, in the very specter of our own reflections
looking at ourselves look back across two hundred thousand
miles as the doobie like a shooting star inched over
the screen and through the Ort cloud of the swirling planetesimals
of our desolate tranquility breathing in and out.
Ghost of the Old Arcade
Under the giant chandeliers, in the sunless dazzle,
the objects of desire traded places with desire,
so that to stand there in the middle of that marble
avenue between the plate glass windows
of the shops was to be looked at by our own reflections,
looked at and imagined by them, as if our bodies,
the very matter of us, had been hallucinations all along,
airy specters of a gawking we had to see through
to see what it was we saw. We were always in the way
of what we wanted. Beyond the windows there were only
other windows, smaller windows, reflecting smaller versions
of our faces looking back at us as through the wrong
end of a telescope, adrift on glass vitrines, on the
jeweled surfaces inside them that we couldn't touch:
the diamond facets of a pin, or falling fixed
inside a frozen waterfall of rings and necklaces.
There was glassware too and cookware, glossy
leather bags and cases all backlit and glittering
as if forged of light by light that promised nothing
but perpetual brightening. And so
to pull away at last from the magnetic
weightlessness of all that showroom dreaming;
to tear ourselves from the untouched,
unsullied, the before we had it
having of it, was to trade reflection
for reflection, to see inside the giant prism
of that hall how with our bags and parcels
the body's shadow — shapeless as a sponge —
wiped clean all traces of us from the marble floor
that shone a little brighter for our having gone.
Let Me Hear You
I am the disappearing point of an inverted pyramid
made from the two
before me, and the four before them
whom I know only as names
and snapshots, and farther back not even that, a
total namelessness fans out
without face or fact, no date,
no single anecdote or artifact,
barely a hundred years away
the family slate wiped back
into a clean abyss, a cenotaph
of lives only my body remembers
in ways I can't know about
even as I pass them
through me to my children
who through them will pass them on
to theirs, and theirs,
while I sink further down into no longer being known —
as if what even now I can't help think of
as the stately name-emblazoned
marble manor house of self
had all along been nothing but
a hut made not from mud or
even straw but
bits of ever-changing
string which
self is just the precious puppet of
no puppeteer is pulling,
blown about in planetary winds
no one can feel.
Outside is inside now.
The pyramid whose point
we are is weightless
and invisible
and has become itself the night
in which alone
together
on a high plateau
we go on shouting
out whatever name
those winds keep blowing back
into the mouth that's shouting it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life Pig by Alan Shapiro. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Life PigONE
The Hebrew Ouija Board
The Hiawatha Recitation
The Look
Trajan’s Column
Moon Landing, 1969
Ghost of the Old Arcade
Let Me Hear You
Thanks for Nothing
TWO
Vantage
The Killing
Low Tide
Green Thought
Toward Language
Stele
Frieze
Dog Heart
Scat
On the Greenway behind My Old House
In the Hotel Room
Present
THREE
On the Beach
Her Closet
Dressing Table
The Bedroom
The Pig
Heavy Snow
Goodness and Mercy
Sweetness and Night
Accident
Mother Palinode
The Weeper
The Last Outing
Archimedes
The Sibyl’s Nursing Home
Terminal Restlessness
Enough
Visitation
CODA
Death Hog Notes