It's been a terrible week for alumni of the legendary
Columbia Review. First, Paul Auster died
against his protest that this would be the wrong end
to the narrative. Then, last night, the 4th of May,
David Shapiro left us. We met in fall 1966
when I was 18, naive, studious, and he,
two classes ahead of mine, took me under
hIs wing and made lists of poets I had to read
and composers to whom I had to listen.
He had already published a book,
and an amazing book it was, January,
month of his birth. Here's a haiku chain
he wrote back in 2008. He and I used to
correspond by haiku and other forms. -- DL
it may be too hard
to think of me as silence
like thirsty flowers
in the Luxembourg
I paused to cry for hours
beside patient friends
I read Thus Spake Z
in a minute or two and
saw my life in clouds
and inside last clouds
I saw my sister hiding
behind the grillework
snakes danced up curtains
and a miserable pink
of which Michaux spoke
Half a century
later I look at tulips
try to see glory
not Lawrence's kind
but the modest buds in Bronx
where diners pop up
thirteen synagogues
and some are shuls the way Saul
Bellow preferred them
Unlike a true Jew
I like to go alone, weep
(kills community)
Today someone writes
as if anyone around
Frank froze him with lies
Generosity
is not a word for critics
but Frank hated pricks
haha the theory
is he was a dead man and
this is false theory
But let's go back to
say l962 or
let's pay attention
involuntary
memory as in Proust is
| more than I can bear
in England I smelled
my mother's glitzy perfume
and I also heard
inside myself the
tune of her blue jewel-box
I still remember
Too tired to forget
too rebellious to count
lonely syllables
well father would say
what's so lonely about them
the one equals one
I want to build that\
with long Icelandic "menhirs"
one plus one is one
for the madness of
my old friend the architect
One monument one
You pushed me into
talking today but really
the best rest is two
but I want to build
one day like white white Legos
one plus one is one
-– David Shapiro
September 8, 2008
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.
Posted by: Darryl Pinckney | May 06, 2024 at 03:46 AM
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.
Posted by: Peter Frank | May 06, 2024 at 06:40 AM
He was my Humanities professor in 1974, my freshman year at Columbia. Impossibly brilliant , my favorite teacher.
Posted by: Gregory Crutcher | May 06, 2024 at 09:28 AM
Sorry for your loss, David. He was an extraordinary poet.
Posted by: Terence Winch | May 06, 2024 at 09:57 AM
Thank you David for posting these. Lovely.
Posted by: Mark Statman | May 06, 2024 at 11:29 AM
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
Posted by: Thornton Davidson | May 06, 2024 at 12:16 PM
David Shapiro as a model for humility? Not saure about that, but he was brilliant and inspiring.
Posted by: Tim Robinet | May 06, 2024 at 12:57 PM
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
Posted by: Tom Mandel | May 06, 2024 at 04:48 PM
Thank you, Tom, Tim, Mark, Terence, Peter and everyone else for writing with such evident love for David Shapiro.
Posted by: David Lehman | May 06, 2024 at 05:49 PM
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.
Posted by: Chris Hawthorne | May 07, 2024 at 12:54 AM
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.
Posted by: Bernard Welt | May 08, 2024 at 09:32 AM
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.
Posted by: Robert Coyne | May 11, 2024 at 08:05 AM
Beautiful poem. Very sorry for your loss.
Posted by: Susan Aizenberg | May 11, 2024 at 09:50 AM
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.
Posted by: Harold Hodes | May 11, 2024 at 08:26 PM