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May 05, 2024

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He introduced me to poetry I never knew existed or was possible. I can still hear his voice when he read. He was a marvelous teacher, wild and humane. This is sad news.
Beautiful haiku.

I was another of David's mentees, needing not so much to know what to look for as to where to find it. (For instance, he introduced me to Laurie Anderson at her MFA show.) He also assured me that life through art was every bit as grave and absurd as it seems. I loved his company partly BECAUSE it maddened me. Thank you, dear old friend.

He was my Humanities professor in 1974, my freshman year at Columbia. Impossibly brilliant , my favorite teacher.

Sorry for your loss, David. He was an extraordinary poet.

Thank you David for posting these. Lovely.

David Shapiro was only but also more than a poet. He brazenly saw the humility in his enterprise, celebrating the masters of our genre, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, more than he sought deserved recognition for his own work. He had a mind that flew from Meyer Shapiro to Basho to the Devils Trill Sonata (which he played for me) to a passion for his miraculous wife, Lindsay, all in the same breath. It is not too much to say that one of the brilliant lights under the poetic dome - what else is there? - has been extinguished. Please read and re-read his marvellous work. - Thornton Davidson

David Shapiro as a model for humility? Not saure about that, but he was brilliant and inspiring.

Somehow I never met David, but I admired his early poetry especially & his translations from the great French poets of the first 1/3 of the 20th C.

Above all, in my mind, David Shapiro instantiated the utter uniqueness of any true poet. Which he so very much was.

tom mandel

Thank you, Tom, Tim, Mark, Terence, Peter and everyone else for writing with such evident love for David Shapiro.

David Shapiro was a marvel in so many ways. Incredibly generous with his time, his guidance, and his books - I never left his apartment without a stack of them randomly plucked from his shelves. And his poetry! As TD says, he honored his literary forebears, but you can't write with the kind of exalted playfulness that David did without being utterly sure of yourself and a master of every poetic form since the Nuttall Codex. For months, all of us will be ransacking the word hoard for a metaphor, or a string of metaphors, to describe David Shapiro. We're not going to find it. There was nobody like him.

This is a great loss for you and so many other people I've seen tributes from, his peers in age and those who learned from him and were moved by his work. The good thing to remember is, with writers, we can keep on learning from them.

I remember so clearly 45 years ago when David introduced John Ashbery's poem "Crazy Weather" to his poetry writing class on the Math lawn at Columbia one beautiful Fall day. "It's this crazy weather we've been having..." Nothing since would be the same -- I was disoriented and intrigued and inspired. Those words and so many others from David and the inexhaustible sources he channeled have remained a guide stone through these many years. And I know he had a similar effect on any poetic soul who had the good fortune to know him.

Beautiful poem. Very sorry for your loss.

Very sad news. His poems made a huge impression on me in the late '60s. I never really got to know him beyond the nod-when-passing level when we were undergrads. But since those college days I've felt a surge of "Yay!" whenever I was about to read a new one of his poems.

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That Ship Has Sailed
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"Lively and affectionate" Publishers Weekly

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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