The words

 
David Joel Shapiro (1947-2024) was an American poet, critic and scholar who authored several books of poetry published between 1967 and 2017. Between the dates, one can observe an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive evolution of the poetic language that departs from Symbolism going through the stage of complex Ashberyan assemblages to noble lucidity of relatively simple “farewell poems” in the last volume.

Trained from a very early age as a violinist, recognized for his poetry as a teenager, befriended by de Kooning, Pollock, Ashbery, Warhol, O’Hara, Koch and many others, he succumbed to Parkinson’s disease in May of 2024.

He rose to non-artistic notoriety in 1968 during a six-day campus uprising and protest at Columbia University, New York (where he would later teach), photographed in the dean’s office, sitting at his desk with his cigar. The iconic photograph was published in Life magazine and made the poet both famous and infamous, as Joyce Carol Oats wrote on X after he died.

Literature never seems to be mere biographism, but it cannot be built on antibiographism. Spanned between the two extremes, poetry is a reworking or recycling of personal experiences, reflections, and observations. Followed through years, Shapiro’s poetry presents the evolution of the poetic self of the poet from his teenage years into maturity.

From his early years until maturity, this poetry revolves around language and the limits of description.

My mother said, The worst words in the English language
Are these David - Don’t move.
And what do you think the best words are: Here’s some water

(To An Idea, 67)

As the poet explains, "[My] grandmother wrote poetry and so did my uncle, who would tease me about not rhyming. I started to write when I was nine years old. I imitated poets and could 'speak' their voices - Thomas, Eliot etc. At ten, I tried to memorize 'The Waste Land' (from an interview, 1997).

He was also forced to memorize passages from Rilke, Rimbaud and other poets whom his father considered aesthetically prominent. The lessons in classical literature laid the foundations of both Shapiro's poetic material and method: the passages from the classical works, their scattered extracts, misquotations, reminiscences and flashbacks often contribute to this poetry.

Throughout the years, the poet achieves a highest degree of language consciousness; he focuses more and more on language as a means, on what language conveys and what its limitations are. Along the way, the poet performed a few field studies of a sort: together with his friend Kenneth Koch, he co-wrote poetry with children; he then repeated the exercise on a more personal level when his son Daniel was born and poetic collaborations became possible. Finally, as he was ageing, his last poems reflect on his forgetfulness and being lost for words.

Koch, a teacher at Columbia, created a pedagogical system enabling children to write poetry. He followed the philosophy of the Dadaists, which entailed free expression of ideas by means of poems. Kenneth Koch is the author of a few books dealing with this topie, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970). The fruit of the experimental classes can be found in Shapiro's third volume, A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel Poems "About a Farmer Who Was Just a Little Boy" and "Poem" had very young and inventive co-authors: Renee and Paula. Following this path, Shapiro, as amore mature poet, successfully cooperated with his son.

In a broader sense, this poetry, not eschewing autobiographism and not being narrative, is a life story of its author.