Mimesis or antimimesis?
Shapiro harvested inspiration from three domains: music, literature, and visual arts (through the New York School of Poets), to which he subsequently added architecture - through his wife Lindsay Stamm and the long-lasting friendship with John Hejduk. On architecture: 'I saw [the students of architecture] as structuralists of imagination. I taught them not just to write a sestina, but then to build a house in the form of a sestina (...)' (Shapiro 2025: 202).
Throughout his writing career, Shapiro was preoccupied with the topic of representation. He explored the issues of rendering, depicting, mapping, representing the internal/external as well as translating visual arts into poetry (including ekphrasis - art into words - which replaces the narrative as after Ashbery, Shapiro's poetry avoids story-telling).
When the body is being depicted by Shapiro's speaker, one may often realize it does not pertain to the human body, but its artistic representation, 'a copy of a copy' or an artefact (here bordering on a parody):
The representation of the body is reported to be imperfect, broken, or blown apart:
This uncertainty, incompleteness of what is represented additionally shows elements of political criticism (the 1980s).
But what happened to the nude?
A large portion of Shapiro’s poetry illustrates his reflections on referentiality and representation: testing the possibility of achieving these, he concludes that he (at least partly) fails at both. At the very best, his 'words can reach and not touch' (Shapiro 2017: 31). But we should not forget that in order to touch something one needs a body.
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