Background

On 29 May, 2025, in Słupsk, I conducted a workshop devoted to the poetry of David Joel Shapiro. My intention was to introduce the students of Pomeranian University to the oeuvre of the late poet as well as to explore with them three poems, each representing one specific streak of Shapiro’s poetic diction.

The three poems of my choice reflected the three domains of my research, that is the study of the simile, the I – you relations, and the problem of musicality.

Poetry does not have to be analyzed; it can be felt, read, digested, meditated upon, and simply enjoyed. But I wanted to go deeper than the surface of what is esthetically pleasing or linguistically challenging, hence the division of Shapiro's work into the three pillars.

I saw nothing like a soul

The first category is about the simile, which looks very simplistic - at least at first sight. Some critics treat it as a less demanding metaphor. I approach it differently - if an intellectual poet like Shapiro used such a non-complicated figure of speech so often, he must have had a good reason for doing so.

Your fingers were our cathedral

The I-you relations underpin many of Shapiro's poems. These relations are reflected in little dialogs, or pseudodialogs, as some critics see them, where we can see how the position of the speaker changes several times throughout a poem, and as a result the reader can detect more than one character speaking. Such poems sometimes read as little dramas.

Forget, forget!

Musicality seems pretty obvious as a topic because Shapiro had begun as a musician - a child prodigy aged five. Then, at fifteen, he turned to literature and soon abandoned music. He could no longer combine poetry with practising violin for hours every day. But what about music in this poetry? Again, at first sight, melody and rhythm are not easy to find in the poems written in free verse. But if you look again, you will find there instances of anaphora, alliteration, obsessive repetitions, incantation...

David Shapiro is associated with the second generation of the New York School of Poets. "The School" was a loosely defined group of poets whose work was to a large extent inspired by painting and the visual arts. In the introduction to the anthology of the movement that David Shapiro and Ron Padgett co-wrote, you can find the following description of the poetry contained therein (p. xxxv):

We will content ourselves by saying that you might find any kind of poem in this anthology; that is, there never has been any kind of hard and fast notion of how a person ought to write. If he wanted to write a sonnet he could do so without feeling that someone  might look at him sideways, even if his sonnet did have fifteen lines, or fifteen thousand lines. The freedom to work with traditional forms and syntax, and the freedom to work with them freely, to use them as the Muse dictated, or to ignore them altogether, is one of the most cheerful things about these poets; with them, the idea of opposing the tradition of the old to the tradition of the new is positively ludicrous.

The above paragraph implies that the NYS poets had little in common in terms of poetic form and diction. Looking for a common denominator, we might point to the geographical factor: New York as their place of residence and poetic activity. The above statements also bring an accurate characteristic of Shapiro’s own approach to poetry, including to poetry-writing: a non-orthodox literary syncretism or inclusiveness. Reading the poems of the NYS authors, we can see how diverse and differentiated they appear.

Among the first generation NYS poets, we can find John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler. The second generation (and this ordinal number does not mean they were epigones or imitators - they were simply younger) included Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, David Shapiro. The poets were friends with visual artists including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning... Some call the interaction that occurred between the painters and the poets "cross-pollination" because they drew inspiration from each other.

It is worth mentioning that in its inclusiveness the NYSoP was an LGBT friendly movement.

Interested? You will find more here