"I wanted to start Ex Nihilo"
Dear all,
this is a blog that serves as a repository of content that was used at a conference entitled 'Lifelines and Lifespan' that took place on December 11-12, 2025 in Namur (Belgium) at Namur University. Below the essentials from my paper that I called '“The words that reach but do not touch": the evolution of the poetic language of David Shapiro'.
If you want more, please visit another page I set up for an earlier project this year:
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David Shapiro started writing poetry at the age of 9 as a by-product of writing songs. He published his first poems early. His poetry was called many things including “intense, rarefied verse” (Klin 2007), which is somewhat oxymoronic, but reaches the point.
Over to the poet:
'Poetry was very important in my family. My uncle had published sonnets in The New York Times. My grandmother was very literary. My mother read something like a book a day and loved to read to me. One of the great influences of my life was my father costantly memorizing Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and he had me do the same, as soon as I could speak. Music was also important in my family, so my idea was that poetry was a musical/theatrical thing. [...] So when I was about nine writing a song with words, something about an irradiated man, I realized I just had written a poem, and I started to write poetry an hour or two a day, like violin practice (Shapiro 2025: 193).
And: 'Music is my first language; language was my second language. Since my childhood, I liked to tear up language and put things back together like a broken ashtray'.(See here)