Born today (January 2), David Shapiro on the phone

In October 2018 I had a phone conversation with David Shapiro. Some Highlights:

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In Ashbery's collages the juxtaposition of images is like the two-person collision in boxing. And you can quote me on that.

Everything is adagio. And you can quote me on that, too.

Looking at the ocean Fairfield Porter once said to me, very slowly, "it's very hard to paint a good painting."

"A dog's obeyed in office. That was my father's favorite line."
"From King Lear."
"Very good. If they were good enough, we know them by heart, the poems we love. Do you love Walter de la Mare? "Here lies a most beautiful lady, / Light of step and heart was she; / I think she was the most beautiful lady / That ever was in the West Country."

I now understand "frozen speech, frozen language." 

Psychiatrists say it's sweet to abandon your life and go anywhere but I'm too timid to do that.

Someone wants me to write a libretto [for an opera] on the death of Eichmann. Isn't that crazy?

Listen to Barber's violin concerto.

When I met E. M. Forster I told him I had decided to give up music. He said, "I fail to see how anyone can give up music." I've never used that phrase since.

"O wild chocolate is difficult to find." That's my best line in the last day or two.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen. So let's hope for glory.

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As an addendum let me quote the rest of Shakespeare’s sonnet thirty-three. -- DL

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth

Comments

[Kent Johnson]

David Shapiro is one of the greatest American poets living. One of the few remaining from the days of the original NY School. He knew Frank O'Hara intimately, also Koch and Schuyler. Barbara Guest. And on. His genius work is totally underappreciated and in coming years sure to be seen as treasure of U.S. poetry. I call it here. Not that others haven't.

Hello? Where is everyone sleeping, when it comes to David Shapiro? Sleeping on the wing, as it were.

[Thornton Davidson]

David Shapiro has long been the conscience of the New York School of poets. He has written its history through his playful, elegiac poems and spirited art criticism. Now in his 70s, Shapiro, like his mentor and equal John Ashbery, is entering a period in his career when we should listen not for bright chords of his youth but the aching, mysterious music of his best work to come.