Reading Karl Shapiro‘s last book,Coda: Last Poems, pisses me off. Errors galore, half-assed typesetting (a bulbous typeface with too little leading, the last words of long, overrun lines dropped against the left margins as if they were new lines. Shit—Shapiro deserves better! Deserves a Complete Shapiro, for one thing, with tiresome variorum notes and two prefaces, one by a scholar of Ovid (who knew about classical standards and personal rage), and a second by the ghost of Henry Miller writing via Ouija board from some hedonistic paradise. But most of all the book would be proofread by at least a ninth grader and typeset by a professional unafflicted by myopia, laziness, or both. May it yet come to pass! So that Shapiro may find his way back into all the best anthologies and glare from behind the bars of print at any fool who can’t figure out how he came to be there.
*
All day under the hubbub journalists call life
I silently contemplated those counted dead in Japan
and the thousands as yet uncounted, and I thought
long and hard as an unstruck flint about my dead
mother and father and my dead friend Gary John Reilly,
coming to no conclusions, simply feeling it, the ache
of being. And then toward midnight in bed at last,
stretching out flagrantly where peace might find me,
I touched my bare foot tenderly to my wife’s bare foot
and thought: mortal flesh. Then suddenly: no,
no—of course not! Not mortal, those naked feet. No.
And now here I am, writing it all down. Foolish man.
*
What does it mean, this inability to write
aphorisms? A taste for indecision…
[Note: This was a response to my first foray into Róbert Gál‘s Signs & Symptoms, which I started reading this week.]
*
Your face in the silencing-room,
your panic a foot away behind thick glass,
your mouth a twisting slit fish thrown down on the deck,
your eyes locked on mine though the glass on your side is a mirror,
your nightmare the dream I’m peering into,
your name on the pale blue paper clipped to my clipboard,
your name I used to know as well as my own,
though now it escapes me,
now it escapes me.
*
The Ark plunges toward Ararat,
steered by a rawboned, fanatic pilot:
a drifting prison of dialectics.
[Note: In Signs & Symptoms (see entry above),Gál writes: “Dialectic is the intellectual form of the unbalanced mind” (p. 13).]
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
I love that story, Bob. My only landlady (in Vancouver, when I was in grad school) was a very British wisp of a woman with bright gray hair and watery blue eyes. Her name was Marie. We lived in her basement, and she let us sublet the place for the summer between my two years in the program, even though the renter was a biology student who kept a collection of large spiders. We both were quiet
Wow, Joe, I didn't know about those last poems of Shapiro's. That's a damn and damned shame!Here's my Karl anecdote. I was at Iowa when he came (talk about a fish out of water or one out of the frying pan!) to give a talk. "Bourgeois Poet" had just come out and I was delighted in be in the same room. That night there was a party at Mark Strand's and people who couldn
Hey, Anon! I met Nemerov but never Shapiro. I enjoy reading Shapiro more, but Nemerov rewards the sometime slog through cleverness his poems require. Shapiro appeals to my taste for rough-around-the-edges stuff, I guess….
I forgot to mention that <i>Stone Girl E-Pic</i> is by Ed Baker. Geeesh!
I can't say I've followed the Eigner issue, Conrad, but it seeped into my awareness somehow. It seems that Fama is apply vispo concepts and that these do align with Eigner's practice—so it's not an issue of crappy typesetting, but an aesthetic misjudgment. It's funny that a small publisher like Leafe Press could solve the problem for <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/catalog/
Karl Shapiro the Shapiro's from Baltimore… <br />lots of Shapiro's also moved into D.C.<br /><br />Karl, when I was at Hopkins (1971-72) used to frequently drop in mostly as / via being friends with<br />Eliott Coleman<br /> he'd "sit in" on a seminar or do a reading or just hang-out in one of the office…<br /><br />once I came into Eliott&
Joseph,<br /><br />thanks for the introduction to Karl Shapiro (to be added to my reading list) Not a bad idea that for prefaces by Ovid scholar and the ghost of Henry Miller: & if I had a choice, I'd go with Miller anytime!<br /><br />I see the ghost of departed friends/relatives starting to find their way into your own personal "ache/of being". It's the price the poet pays