The poetry of lawyers is crime.
That’s not obviously true of Monica Youn, with her poetry of textual sophistication, though she would be a great supreme court justice if poets had a say. And it does not seem true of Wallace Stevens whose poetry is underwritten by the insurance industry and against its boredom. But it is true of the crime novelist George V. Higgins, and to a certain extent, it is true of Natalie Shapero. There are other lawyer-poets and poets with legal training as well, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, already an established poet, became a lawyer. As for boredom, maybe Shapero is bored a lot, too, but she is far from boring herself. Her new book Popular Longing comes at us from a strain of American noir vocabulary and plotting, and even values. The crime here is how we live our lives in conditions of competition and selfishness, blinkered by privilege, triggered by our pains, and uneasy about our own roles in the system as we participate in our own exploitation and environmental degradation.
There is a certain amount of performative ham in all writers and, I suppose, in most lawyers as well, though some of them must go to law school with the idea that they will make their livings initialing financing for real estate transfers. Shapero herself is a graduate of the law school at the University of Chicago. You can hear the poetry of crime even in some of Shapero’s titles which could be Jim Thompson novels like “Lying is Getting,” “Flowers Would Have Killed You,” “The Suggested Face for Sorry,” and so on. You can feel it in her sonnet sequence on the Gardner heist and violent assaults on artworks. But most of all, you can hear it around the noir edges of her language, persona and worldview. Once you realize that her poetry of crime is the granddaughter of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, his short and middle-aged and bald and violent meatball of a hero, you realize her true subject is also a version of Poisonville, a stylized dystopia in its dark and more or less universally accepted view of unfettered capitalism as a force of decay, and its style which is abrupt, unsentimental and entertaining. Moreover, this is the view generally held by the population as well — that the world is getting to be something like Red Harvest, even if a lot of people are saying, “Noooooo. It’s like 25¢ Buffalo wings night at the karaoke bar. It’s like the second novel with the Op, The Dain Curse, the one with a bit more heart.”
Whether Shapero actually reads Hammett or not, as people figure out what the true classics of the last 100 years have been, my guess is that people who write about poetry in the future will have to turn to Red Harvest by Hammett, and poets who derive from Hammett will be a big crew, and this will be a diverse group, sympathetic, and it will be that thing that was so obvious and daily that people studying the matter completely missed it because the influence comes from a different field. And as somebody is talking about, say Charles Simic, Ashbery and Levine and Venetian blinds, or Lynn Emanuel (“Blonde Bombshell”), or Richard Hugo’s Montana towns, or the many voices that constitute C.D. Wright’s One Big Self and her ear for people, or aspects of feminist brass in Wanda Coleman and the liberating clarity of Audre Lorde, or James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys, or the poetry and prose of Dennis Johnson, or Amiri Baraka’s allusions to gangster movies from the thirties in his first book, or the idioms and vernaculars of Dylan who wraps his living nothing often in a bunch of roundabout something and orders himself a couple of hard-boiled eggs, or the decorative quality of language in Star Ledger by Lynda Hull against her nihilism, or the functional and evidentiary aspect of words in Charles Bernstein’s Dark City, poetry-noir lending itself to multiple identities and to many contradictory practices from metaphysical and linguistically extravagant styles to plain ones, the prof or technician or whatever they will call multi-faceted academic gig workers of the future will have the class scroll through the Natalie Shapero file, and read the opening of “Good Share.”
An airport — like a hog farm,
like a landfill, like a graveyard —
And some kid’s disembodied emoticon hand that never took anybody’s public school lunch cake will shoot hand, and in the chat he will write, “CHINATOWN, public works, the waterworks, how is that nostril, kitty cat?” And then there will be a discussion of the poetry of pets, of how some of the poets who were our contemporaries are really disturbingly sentimental about their pets, but the class will consider Shapero’s dog from “Stoop.”
All I can think, when I catch my dog out by the stoop
with a rat in her mouth, is I THOUGHT IT WOULD
NEVER HAPPEN TO ME —
When Shapero thinks about the environment, she also thinks in terms of local corruption, almost the way Stephen Dobyns would in Black Dog, Red Dog or Cemetery Nights:
… The councilman announces he’s sorry
for taking advantage of the district’s trust,
or the paper issues the mother
of all retractions, and I’m right there at the window
readying myself for the knock and the spray
of larkspur and tea rose. You shouldn’t have.
Here, the poet admits her anti-puritanical love of mayhem and scandal, shared by the Puritans, even as she is showing the wide net of personal complacencies and individual corruptions that constitute all human systems. Good writing always destabilizes notions of purity, I heard Fred Moten say in a lecture, riffing on Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. In another Shapero poem, the dog eats a rat, does not get sick, and the poet can only feel envy: why can’t I do that, too?
An aspect of noir clarity — the mark of modern writing based on living speech and a range of awareness of events and other people that derives from Whitman, according to Raymond Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder” — is a useful style for calling attention to the privileges and possible exploitations of writing or any other activity that involves success in this culture, and the way our intelligence and humor and irony and desires for safety end up making us perfect corporate tools. When we see the Nike swoop, we have to compete, root or form alliances like siblings or cousins. The poem “Lying Is Getting” is not a poem about local corruption, but a confession about moving uneasily through the credentialed hustle of institutions and corporations in the service of maintaining a desirable middle-class or slightly better level of healthy prosperity:
… The party line
is getting me good. I keep turning
my face to the flashbulb in an effort to seem like someone
with no secrets, and now when I see other people
framed and beaming, I want to know what they’re keeping
All those holiday moments, tacked
to the fridge or strung up with wire and eyelets. All that sin —
Maybe the model for all righteous heroes in hard-boiled fiction is Hawthorne’s Endicott in “The Maypole at Merry Mount,” as long as we realize his other name is Morton, but we have a different capitalism now. In “Good Description,” Shapero echoes the party trick of the grandiose and homicidal rich-boy Bruno in Chandler and Hitchcock’s version of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train:
Lord I am such a narcissist — I couldn’t
even give a good
description, having been thinking only
of myself and what
in my body was breaking and how unmendable
the break, thinking only of
myself and with what archaic charge
was I complying, crying over and over NO,
as though to reduce confusion
as to whether I’d given permission,
when nobody, for that, would give
permission — I mean only
a true narcissist would expect to be faithfully
obeyed, and Lord I
am such a narcissist — I think I am so
charming, so kittenish and cultured,
uproarious at parties,
enlivening controversies with my extensive
knowledge of strangling,
how pressure around a person’s neck
will cause a contact lens to dislodge from the iris,
making it hard to see, but that’s not funny,
not funny to anyone
except the company that slices
and sells the lenses —
The sense that no matter what smart things we think or do, our best and most subversive efforts are liable to serve the interests of corporations, a star system, the accumulation of trappings to the already wealthy and ribboned — poetry in its public relations guise itself a perfect example of the Little Tax Code and the Large, the richly and already rewarded getting richer, something like appointments carrying retainer fees to corporate boards for selves and pals, with noble intentions — ah, doctor professor poet monocles cause frozen raising of singular eyebrows and dropping of hardcover James Merrill (“The arras / Also of evening drawn / We light up between/Earth and Venus / On the courthouse lawn”) on one’s big toe, yow — here the contact lens manufacturer, corporatized vision — is one of the things that links Shapero’s lyric poetry, which has aspects of performance poetry, to the gallows humor of recent and not-so recent graduates who experience their achieving and stressed selves as performative, which, lucky for us, leaves us with a lyric poet who writes with her own style and against it in the valleys of their making. The noir element in a poet can destabilize some aspects of performance poetry in its friendlier versions, namely the feedback loop between a poet showing off and their admiring audience in search of communal love. By the way, if you can, go hear Natalie Shapero. She recites her short, colloquial poems by memory, with impeccable timing, which captures part of them.
We see the tough, unsentimental style and her writing against her own performance when Shapero handles the issue of not popular culture but high culture, museums and the fundraising junk mail from organizations like the Boston Symphony Orchestra. These poems feel unstable in some ways, as if Shapero is pulled in two directions, a populist direction that sees museums and symphonies essentially as sellers of tote bags to aging upper-middle class people with some disposable income and as fronts to corporate sponsors, as storehouses of grotesque and gentrifying values, and then a part of her that is appalled at the sheer stupidity, the self-referential and self-catering spirit of people as consumers who fashion their images into products themselves. In the book’s proem, “Man at His Bath,” which may introduce a crime scene to be discerned if not a mystery to be solved, she bitterly mocks the gazillions of dollars the Museum of Fine Arts Boston spent on the painting Man at His Bath and its status as an icon of cultural capital, an emblem of patriarchal competition that gives her a feeling of self-loathing as well as anger and loathing of hipness that causes her to direct the language of misogyny at herself.
Six years ago, the big museum sold eight famous paintings
to purchase, for unspecified millions,
Gustave Caillebotte’s MAN AT HIS BATH.
Now it’s hip to have a print of it,
and whenever I see one hung for decoration,
I’m almost certain that this is what Caillebotte
had in mind when he broke out the oils
in 1884: some twenty-first century bitch in Boston
catching a glimpse of a framed reproduction,
recollecting a study about how washing oneself may induce
a sense of culpability. What I remember …
It is kind of spooky and reminiscent of the new ax-throwing bars, this beefy image getting so popular, but the poet goes on to remember an ambiguous encounter with a man who combines treacly next-worldly brutishness that is enough to fill an atheist with fear of eternal life because of who you would run into, patriarchal sexism, and what sounds much worse:
… he insisted I clean before leaving. That, and he was
trying to be dreamlike. He took my jaw in his hand
and said IN THE NEXT LIFE, WE’LL BE REALLY TOGETHER,
and the clamp in his voice made me almost
certain he knew something I did not …
Part of why we feel this man as sinister bulk is the resistance he inspires, even if the problem is something more intangible, like his belief in his own soul being desirable. “Now I eat right, train hard, get my shots. This life — I’m angling / to remain in this life as long as I can, being almost / certain, as I am, what’s after —” The sense of menace and injury here are cast as noir, the disturbing reality of the situation and the disturbing and selfish personality of an antagonist remaining expressionistic, suggestive, far more tangible as resulting trauma and rage, purely corrosive for the speaker, whose absolute privacy and primacy seem honored by the poem’s selective reticence which, noir-like, makes the reader wonder about the speaker, who she is, what is her story. At the same time, the fitness regime — staying in shape, getting shots, staying alive as long as possible — seems to argue that for this person prosaic and slippery middle-class wisdom about self-care and conventional behavior have a furious core.
There seem to be varying degrees of rhetorical distance between the poet and the voice of the poems in Popular Longing, and this balancing distance is accentuated by Shapero placing the first poem outside the frame of the rest of her book. In the next poem, “My Hair Is My Thing,” which is the first one in the book proper, the speaker of the poem, who must have really great hair, starts off by railing at the symphony for shilling and then goes really over the top and literal about a character in a novel being awful:
The symphony’s out of funding again, and no
wonder: all those violins, the twisted strands
and sponges — who could not think
of torture? Last week I read a novel about a man
so awful that when he died I wept
because he was fiction. I wanted it to be real
so I could watch him really die.
And then the speaker goes on from this to remembering the addressee of the poem, a person so bad that you wonder what this person could possibly have done to her, and then she pans out to take into a whole culture of petty materialism. That or the speaker is amazingly petty. Both options are on the table.
I wanted you to die also, and to be feted
with a lengthy, organza-filled funeral,
so that I could make a big show
of blowing it off. I decided to go out
and get a tattoo of your funeral with me not there,
but apparently it’s illegal here to tattoo
a person who’s crying. The trend now
is to be interred with beloved possessions:
pearl-trimmed gun, gold watch,
whatever you’ve got. Some people recoil
at the waste of it, but not me. These contused little
objects of wealth — they’re disgusting. I just
pray we have enough earth and shovels enough. I pray
we have bodies enough to bury them all.
This poem ends in desiring a bloodbath, metaphorically, in her dreams, on the level of the ending of Red Harvest: a pox on practically everybody, including the bassoonists. But the text purposefully invites a number of readings in tensions with each other, equally supportable ones, not unlike laws, actually. On one hand, this is a kicky and hilarious poem, and hearing Shapero recite it at the Somerville Library a few blocks from the Charlestown section of Boston, it felt like a visceral expression of the anger most poetry-lovers felt the last four years, as if the poet were opposing voluminous and wonderful hair against the dick culture of firearms, and what a pleasure it is to find a poem that moves in such surprising ways. Alternately, this poem illustrates Freud’s sense of the narcissist as a person who, when all is said and done, hates the world. “My hair is my thing.” Could we use some more baldness? Anybody who teaches has experienced the sublime self-righteousness of a literal-minded reader. In another reading, the hair poem becomes something like an update of “Mending Wall” for readers who completely accept the self-involvement of the contemporary poetry of competence and the precious self and never wonder if this might be part of the problem. And there are discordant notes to gum up any of these readings. Look at how strangely sympathetic the small word contused becomes about the poem’s lethal and tyrannical gewgaws, the guns and watches.
When Shapero, who apparently is allergic to ekphrasis and does not seem too interested in the entirely intact Titian Room, turns to a literal art-crime-cultural sites, the empty frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Pieta at the Vatican, in her sonnet sequence “Don’t Spend It All In One Place,” there is a similar dynamic of ambivalence about the place of culture, but also the sense that the abusive and the abused are one. People like the abuse narrative so much they add to value and distract from other qualities and complications like seeing something that is actually there. Shapero follows Rankine in exploring something like Fred Wilson’s interventions into museums to see what they reveal about us. Rankine might be a noir-influenced writer herself in some ways, with her famous second-person technique maybe an adaptation of the second person camerawork from Dark Passage, the movie where you never see Humphrey Bogart’s face at first until the bandages come off, but only look through his eyes until he runs into the crime-world plastic surgeon telling “you” that if he does not “like you” that he could make you wake up and look like “a bulldog or a chicken,” and just put that $500 right there, on the table. Just on the level of pacing, there is something bracingly alive with healthy aggression in the pacing of Shapero’s poems. Her brisk poems don’t waste time. They are associative, a suddenly rarer quality involving the risk of revealing inner-workings, and they don’t waste time with the competence of narrative setup that dull readers often value and which will be with us as long as we have dull readers. In Hard Child, her second book, she looked at the crossing of the personal dramas of expecting a child and the long awful traumas of history, Shapero takes on curated history museums in general, which would range, I guess from the Bunker Hill Monument to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Somebody in her thirties knows “every form of human repugnance” and “only a child has anything to learn there.” That book is Holocaust-haunted and shaded by specters of sexual assault. “Anything can happen,” as Seamus Heaney said, anytime. Shapero knows that violence is real and traumatic, historically and personally and in common with other people, and she is very much concerned with what happens next.
Like risk-adverse justifiable formalism or a belief in narrative competence and the interestingness of the sensitive poet as a figure with great hair, shabby surroundings and disenchanted tone and outrageous griping can be artistically habit-forming in a system of rewards, but I think Shapero is writing about places where people can get stuck socially and by style and the economic system, as in her poem about being good at strangling as party trick. Truthfully, Boston and the cities surrounding it, like other culturally interesting but expensive towns with expensive museums, are full of 35-year old graduates of local universities, not necessarily people trying to make it as artists or rise from the ranks of contingent academic labor as so many liberal arts departments shrink and falter or even as office temps and caterers but even ones with fulltime jobs like teachers sharing apartments, sometimes in buildings that give them electric shocks if they touch the walls, a condition that particularly afflicts the unmarried who are unable to consolidate their individual insufficient incomes into shared mortgage or rent payments. There are black plastic bait stations for rats everywhere lately. In a poem like “Say It to My Face,” Shapero is particularly good at condensing this sort of discontented sensibility and sense that all that is left is crust, potentially upwardly mobile for a few years, but taking a risk, while at the same time standing outside of the experience, perhaps because really she is doing quite well, and the poem is not just talking back to backbiters but exploring the speaker’s motivating egoism, something that an inattentive reader could miss:
In this age of nostalgia, all I really have
is how, speeding by the salt-bitten building
where I used to live, I don’t point it out.
What a lowly source of pride — the refusal
to inflict on one’s carpool companions
a past address. LOOK AT ME, NOT MAKING
IT ABOUT ME. But what would anyone
have to say, except OH? They never
were there. They didn’t know the insolent
kitchen. They can’t still smell the skewers
in the foil tin, or the sink of shots
at a late hour, when guests had mostly gone.
That must have been J’s fortieth.
Or maybe the vigil for T? This is why
we shouldn’t have occasions. Same crowd,
same food, same room — it runs together.
A scene in my mind seems buoyant, and then
I realize. But even worse is the other
way around. Why is it that any time I half-
ascend this heap of pain, I get cut down?
What does this speaker want, a medal for no longer living in a dump and knowing people? The poem answers its own question, and part of Shapero’s technique is to leave herself open to these kinds of criticism. We live in an era where people are afraid of criticism, of approbation, so it can feel strange to explicate how a poet who is for a certain kind of toughness conducts herself. If you are ascending, doing well, living in some places is just passing through, gentrifying, or slumming. One of the features for how the class system works in America is that the good luck enjoyed by teenagers ascending to elite institutions makes their stays in shabby circumstances matters of choice or fortunate transience, and this is certainly true of a lot of poets and has been for, oh, forever (“Game seems up, Dutch, so hand over that social capital r e a l s l o w”). The noir strain in poetry, various and flexible as its best, is something of a corrective. J. turning 40 sounds rough, but will this cat make it to 70? You know where that guy is now? DEAD IN THE MARKET. I am making this up, of course, but the atmosphere is gloomy with vigils. A note about description as opposed to imagery for a friend who bemoans certain qualities today and who has great ideas about imagery and rhetoric: poets today are increasingly moved to make a lot of statements, and being rhetorical, there is a tendency to confuse the rhetorical mode of description with the flightier and more wayward quality of imagery that draws on the less governable waters of the unconscious, evoking exterior worlds at the same time as interior worlds. Shapero makes a lot of seemingly straight-forward statements — some of her poems could be called catalogues of complaining on the level of their basic entertainment value, an ability she could easily coast on — but as we see, she has excellent images as well, many of them drawn from hardscrabble neighborhoods and apartments in particular that are lovingly observed. A Bachelard of old stoves and kitchen magnets, a humanitarian, more abstract than she appears, the poet does not just see laundry lines and rats, lovingly evoked as real-life squeaking dog toys. “Unusual rain of late, and a new weed / that resembles concertina wire / is threading itself through the dirt.” She’s not describing some messed up weed here; she’s looking at a form of music.
We are living not just in a new gilded age that is demonstrably ruining the planet and threatening stable democracies, but one that thinks and disagrees a lot about privilege, its varieties, intersections, its levels of urgencies to address, or not to address, a target topic for sophistry and intellectual seriousness, also a natural for spotters of irony, disparity itself. Moreover, considering the festivals of bullying racism and misogyny and transphobia and xenophobia and greed that can win the American day, this feels like urgent business and can be deadly. Shapero is, not surprisingly for a graduate of a law school or contemporary poet, a poet with a sense of justice as well as accuracy. She is not simply concerned with, for instance, privilege, but looking at how privilege and prosperity are relative, contextual, guilt-inducing and blinkering. For instance, the speaker of “Weekend” describes talking to her miserable and unhappily married neighbor who hates doing the wash while they both hang their laundry up, but the speaker loves it as one of the pleasures of bodily life along with sex, though they both live in the same garbage-strewn neighborhood. The unspoken commentary is that happiness and hope and bodily happiness, a prolonged sense of youth, are attendant privileges to other privileges. I think Shapero writing against precious self-regard intends us to find the speaker of this poem a little smug, and also to be on the side of wayward happiness, which she also puts in the balance. It depends on where you stand or sit. For instance, there are those who figuratively fly over our houses with corporate wealth or power or fame, one level of privilege in a poem whose title is its first line, “The Lone Acceptable Application of Daylight”
is in the expression PUT A LITTLE
DAYLIGHT between you and what’s
troubling, set out moving,
distance yourself from the pharaonic
shade of the household names and the power
couples. The quality of cloud in one locale
or another, solace of the contrail
noon — who cares? Why even
look up, when we see is people
looking down? Their grapefruit juice
on the balcony. Their news. Their delight
at the sight of us. We entertain them.
We kiss and spit and strike. We’re always
changing. They like when
we fight: I’LL KNOCK THE LIVING —
Shapero’s poem “Sunshower” is a great sendup of sexist but seemingly righteous men, but she is also sending up the lack of balance with which criminal forms of misogyny, like wife-beating, get equated with behaviors that might more accurately called “being assholes.” The poem lets a lot in, but with a proportional sense of justice that does not equate feelings or states of mind (the Devil is “doubling down on an overall/ attitude of entitlement/ towards the body of his wife”) that might require ending a relationship or counseling or healthy conversation with actually malevolent and gender-specific crimes against people, and here we might go back and look again at the book’s first poem and see if the poem really is about what we think it is about, an unsolvable puzzle if you ask the wrong questions. There is a streak of Sarah Schulman’s justice book Conflict Is Not Abuse here, in this poem and the book around it, not in terms of ideas about restorative justice, but in the overall account of imperfect human behavior presenting problems that need solutions that are not rotten with self-righteousness even as they are rooted in ideals and recognition of real pain. Shapero is such a good lawyer poet that she can prosecute and defend at the same time. The Devil? Who do we think is on the line here, Pope Benedict? No way. Another poem honors both sides in an argument between campus feminists about a production of Lysistrata, offering an imaginative solution, fierce-sounding but maybe just outdoorsy, one that would probably satisfy neither group of her friends, neither of which is disowned.
The virtue-signaling Devil in “Sunshine” has multiple advanced degrees and claims to be “a luminous autodidact.” Compared to the other “crimes” enumerated earlier in this poem, this stray comic detail, a basically dopey denial of economic privilege in the form of higher education and the class system that education and jargon implies, is hardly limited to patriarchal villains or even a matter of bad intentions, and talk may be powerful, healing or toxic or holy, but it is also cheap as it is free. The enumeration of ideas and feelings in the poem’s ending contain a blithe note as well. Breaking the poem’s anaphora about the devil, Shapero is insisting on a more complete and complicated picture in the poem’s turn:
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.
Contused is the word for the entire world of these poems. The dark glass world of Popular Longing is a country conditioned by over twenty years of brutal warfare that have not been much in the news the longer the wars have gone on however we get the news, wars fought mainly by highly diverse teenagers and slightly older people, with consequences that remain abstract or invisible to most people, even as we are now the result, a context she makes clear via references to ongoing war in several poems. Hammett’s Red Harvest makes no mention of the brutality of World War One, but there is a chapter called “The Peace Conference,” and that peace is a gangster peace, and also a clown’s peace. ” Look at those last four sunny lines again. Is the sun the son? Is a festive fair anything like fairness? If so, that is bad news for everybody. A fair, affair? Who is having an affair? Nobody does that sort of mean thing. The boomers ate all the affairs. All there is in the crummy bread bag is some crust and a heel. Here is a washcloth. Love, the Sun. Didn’t John Donne go to some sort of law school? Shapero is always in her poems treating her semi-detachable moods clinically, responsibly, comically, reliving their rage and traumas at times, but also just acceptingly, and she is not going to fit into a paradigm of style like wisecracking noir, which could constrain her ultimate gift for emotional precision, all the more moving because she is not interested in niceness. She prefers a really good insect to a horse after all. Just as Hammett’s Red Harvest ends with the head of the Continental Detective Agency giving his loyal, fat, balding, devious, improvisational, violent operative “merry hell” for falsifying his report to make everything fit for the sake of bookkeeping, there is no Devil here, not even one with many faces, only our popular longings, a whole world with consequences that one way or another we make together.