Life in a State of Sparkle — The Writings of David Shapiro
by Michael Londra
May 23, 2025
You Are The You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School by David Shapiro. Edited by Kate Farrell, Foreword by David Lehman. MadHat Press, 332 pp, $23.95
While David Shapiro’s criticism is audacious, his interviews are self-deprecating and offbeat, filled with surprising reveals.
In On the Road, Jack Kerouac proclaimed that “the only people for me are the mad ones.” Nothing wrong with that; but I dig the sane smarties. Scroll YouTube for Charlie Parker interviews, for instance. You will encounter an intellect capable of parsing the most obscure disciplines. It should be no surprise that Bird’s polymath genius produced revolutionary music that spawned generations of copycats. Whether it’s Jimmy Page gushing over surf guitar or Quentin Tarantino motormouthing about grindhouse flicks — listening to superior artists talk about what they love lights up both their brains and ours. It’s not enough for a ‘creative’ to be sui generis. The best of the best are sui generous — communicating the naïve enthusiasm that generates artmaking and its appreciation. Poetry has its fair share of these charismatic omnivores. David Shapiro — poet, professor, critic, art historian — was one.
His posthumous, newly published collected prose, You Are The You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School, assembles decades of reflections on a diverse range of subjects. Indeed, You Are The You is reminiscent of a career-spanning vinyl box set; there are a ton of grooves to dip into. Wherever you drop the needle, a stimulating thought emerges. And there are plenty of prime tracks. Effusive and uninhibited, Shapiro was never reluctant to express himself. Each of these essays and conversations reveals an eagerness to engage in brash debate. Joanna Fuhrman — who conducted one of the five interviews included here put it: “David Shapiro’s writing is simultaneously “earnest and explosive.” The volume showcases this heartfelt seriousness and take-no-prisoners intensity, a fire that burned inside someone who, at first glance, would seem to be anything but passionate, given the bookishly reserved expression that peers out from the Fairfield Porter oil portrait used for the cover.
This ferocity is never more evident than in Shapiro’s analysis of the New York School Poets, who were his mentors. Shapiro engaged these writers with sensitivity and unflinching honesty. Pulling no punches, Shapiro gives each his due without the blurb-crazed overpraise that often comes when one friend reviews another. The piece “Words in a State of Sparkle,” surveys an entire issue of the legendary magazine “C”: A Journal of Poetry. The probe covers a huge amount of aesthetic territory with dispatch, critiquing flaws and highlighting strengths. Shapiro was able to give Kenneth Koch his due praise in this essay, while silencing the poet’s haters with a ten-word mic drop emblematic of Shapiro’s trademark reviewing style. He wrote this line, according to Farrell’s footnotes, at age seventeen: “[Koch’s] humor has steel wires in it, as does Mozart’s.”
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