You Are The You

"Poetry is magic after Rimbaud," Shapiro writes at 17 in the prescient piece that opens the volume-then goes on in the works that follow to dis- seminate the magic. His bent is artistic and pluralistic; a sui generis mix of lightness and depth, of wide-minded, many-angled, improvisatory verve and great freshness of thought and language. Sympathetic insight into the aesthetic processes of others is his forte. He invokes William James: love discerns more than "blinding objectivity." He relates the discontinuities of John Ashbery to the Uncertainty Principle and notes that Frank Lima's use of "the disjunctive poetics of the New York School" is an art of "welding disparate worlds" together. It's an art innate to Shapiro's prose, where voic- es and ideas from multiple perspectives combine to shed light on a work, amplify a discussion, deepen a context. Likewise, the interviews are rivet- ing partly because of the candor and camaraderie with which he brings the words and views of other thinkers into his replies ... As for the New York School, thanks in part to David Shapiro's remarkable elucidations, it's a movement that has expanded the sayable for innumerable poets and read- ers and remains a liberating, poetry-wide force.

The volume fairly vibrates with erudition and esprit. In his prose, as in his poetry, Shapiro enchants.

-Ange Mlinko, winner of the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism

The prose assembled in You Are The You, an invaluable complement to Da- vid's poetry, is a master class in the aesthetics of the New York School and the Avant Garde in general.

-David Lehman

All of David Shapiro's writing is simultaneously earnest and explosive.

-Joanna Fuhrman, author of Data Mind and co-editor of Hanging Loose Press