KARL SHAPIRO
Born in Baltimore, Maryland (1913), the son of a businessman, he entered the University of Virginia in 1932 but left after a year; in his poem "University", he asserted the "curriculum" was to "hurt the Negro & avoid the Jew". In Shapiro's case he was shunned by both the WASP and the German-Jewish students, who looked down on Jews of Eastern European ancestry (his ancestors were Russian). He also notice that there were no Jewish names in the Oxford Book of English Verse and felt it would be hard to get published without an Anglo-Saxon name. He kept Shapiro anyway, but changed the original Carl, and later said "that decision made me 'Jewish' ".
Although he attended two universities and taught at several more, Shapiro never took a degree. He served as Clerk in the Medical Corps in the South Pacific for the duration, and managed to produce four volumes of poetry. The Place of Love and Person, Place and Thing, appeared in 1942. V-Letter and Other Poems was published in 1944 and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Without access to a library, Shapiro also wrote the remarkable Essay on Rime (1944), a bold critique in verse of all he found wrong with Pound and Eliot (especially Eliot's notion of impersonality), the strictures of the New Criticism, and the narrowness of academic poetry of the time. Preferring the immediacy, openness, and personal voice of William Carlos Williams, he continued to attack what he felt was the over intellectualizing of poetry; his controversial essays were eventually gathered in In Defense of Ignorance (1960).
In 1948 Shapiro began teaching at Johns Hopkins. He did not care for the job and accepted the position of editor of Poetry in 1950. After several positions at Berkeley and University of Nebraska he ended his teaching career at the University of California, Davis, in 1985.
Shapiro's later books, notably Poems of a Jew (1958) and The Bourgeois Poet (1964), were written in freer modes but were no less forceful in subject matter and attitude. Their open-mindedness reflected his affinity to Beat poetry and harkened back to Whitman's declarative style. Shapiro's Selected Poems and White-Haired Lover (1968) shared the 1969 Bollinger Prize with John Berryman. Considering the ironies of his iconoclastic career, Shapiro quipped: "I have a special status around English Departments �I'm not really a professor, but sort of a mad guest." In 1994 he moved to New York with his third wife; he died in Manhattan May 14, 2000.
THE ALPHABET
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Unsacrifices the bled son of man
Yet plaits his crown of thorns.
Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman
Past synagogues of patient time,
Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose,
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women
Past the almost natural crime,
Past the still speaking embers of ghettos,
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.
These are the letters that all men refuse
And will refuse until the king arrives
And will refuse until the death of time
And all is ruled back in the book of days.
Bibliography:
Joseph Reino (1981): Karl Shapiro. New York: Gale.
Webliography:
