Some might say the key to enjoying a Natalie Shapero poem is knowing how to laugh. I would say laughing is only half the story. But I’d also like to say something more decisive about Shapero’s work. Or if I were to pose as Shapero making comments about her own poems, I’d say, “Shapero’s poems are no laughing matter.” We know we’re all thinking “she would so say that in a poem!” We’re also thinking, “Don’t be so presumptuous. She might not.” And that’s because Shapero’s poems specialize on an in between that can be located among a lot of laughing and self-deprecating and milling around wherever they post calls for actors who have a specialty in painting Modernist masterpieces. Shapero is a virtuoso of whatever actions would later be referred to as a laughable matter.
But if you’re really going to laugh with and pleasure with the insides of a Shapero poem, I think you need to be aware that she could never do any of that acting or painting or even waiting for an audition (Sorry if you know her, and you could verify any of this). The one thing Natalie Shapero’s good at is poems. Or maybe what she’s good at is leading a life of the mind that leads to these kinds of poems. Or maybe the only thing she’s good at is chuckling to herself. Because there’s no way she’s writing these poems and not chuckling to herself.
And if you’re still with this review, and you haven’t painted me, the reviewer writer, as some blockhead who thinks nailing down what’s actually funny in Shapero’s book is a worthwhile pursuit for reviewing, then you’ll let me explain that this is what humor is in Shapero’s book. The unpinnable that should totally be pinnable. Right? Funniness is supposed to be resolution-as-concept. That coincidental sweet spot when you discover Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh both worked at the Parker House in Boston, AND both men were born on May 19. Moments like this can reasonably constitute the phrase, “What a coincidence!” But, as Shapero makes clear, push the sharpness of coincidence into a Mark Rothko painting. The blur of the painting set against its contrasting of colors. Let coincidence play harmony to the ridiculousness that facts, any facts, really exist.
What’s going on when Shapero is making you laugh is actually Shapero showing an extreme eagerness. She’s going to prove 2 + 2 could just be equal to 2. That is, if you’re as eager as she is to make this one point about 2, because there’s another point about another version of 2 two lines later, so why not just stick with the 2’s, while they’re there for discussion. Why do you keep trying to add more than that?
Maybe that’s what death is for Shapero. An instance that will be followed by other instances doing the exact same thing. Is death Shapero’s ultimate joke? Is death a concept that’s the equivalent of an insect drowning in an eighth-inch of water, removing itself from the larger population of insects? I read the book, and I’m inclined to believe Shapero literally died and was brought back to life, if only because the poet holds death so close in so many of the poems. But the poet is also unserious about death. There are times when it’s comparable to surrendering a pet to the shelter. I’m puzzled. I’m disturbed. And then I think the poem instructs me to just move on. Is that funny? It’s like reading a story in The New Yorker where the main character’s friends all come by the hospital and ask the same question, “So how was death?” And they think they’re being humorous by framing the question like that. But the main character has had to endure ten people saying the same “funny” thing.
Perhaps I should put an lol after many of these sentences. I’m not as capable as Shapero at making jokes that speed past their punch line while they’re on their way to the next joke. Yes, Shapero’s poems have discovered the great lubricator: humor. Yes, the poems are either flabby with the stylistics that need to communicate their humor to the page (like in the opening poem, “Big deal, the solar system / is replete with rubble…” or in the poem “Great Scaffold” where she keeps letting L shrug his shoulders before he says, “BOSTON.”). Or they’re replete with whatever muscle can be attributed to those little windup robots. They’re so strong when you first wind them up. They’re so eager. They zip over the table. And your aunt’s on the other side to catch it. And you can’t tell how she feels about wind-up robots. She has that vague expression again. That’s the humorous mode Natalie Shapero shoots for. Your aunt might want to take up acting, because that’s what acting is. According to Natalie Shapero.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.
There are some individual poems I think provide especially artful views into what I’ve said in the above review.