SOURCE: "Signing the Syllables: The Poetry of Karl Shapiro," in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, Fall, 1981, pp. 109-20.

In the following essay, Jackson analyzes Shapiro's stylistic approach to his work and contends that his most successful poems balances both visceral and metaphorical language.

I

"Life is the nonrepresentable origin of representation"

—Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation"

"The non-translatability of poetic language is not just a pretension of romanticism, but an essential tract of the poetic."

—Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor

"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its context and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable."¹ So writes Susan Sontag in "Against Interpretation," an essay quite sympathetic to Karl Shapiro's perennial combat against the increasing "encroachment of meaning" and "content" into poetry. Shapiro's...