David Shapiro (USA)
1947
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Throughout the 1960s, Shapiro published in numerous literary magazines, receiving numerous literary awards and fellowships including the Gotham Book Mart Award (1962), New York Poets Foundation award (1967), and the Book-of-the-Month Club Fellowship (1968). In 1970 he and Ron Padgett edited An Anthology of New York Poets, which helped to define that group in its early poetic activities
More recently, Shapiro has written several books on art and poetry, including a monograph on the poet John Ashbery and on the artist Jim Dine.
In 1977 he was a recipient of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Morton Dauwen Zabel Award. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Shapiro has taught literature at Columbia University and Brooklyn College and has taught art history and aesthetics at William Paterson College, the Cooper Union, and Princeton University.
BOOKS OF POETRY
January: A Book of Poems (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965)); Poems from Deal(New York: Dutton, 1969); A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel (New York: Dutton, 1971); The Page-Turner (New York: Liveright, 1973): Lateness(Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1977); To an Idea (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1983); House (Blown Apart) (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1988); After a Lost Original (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1994); The Burning Interior (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2002); Out of My Depths (Tokyo, Japan: Kadensha, 2002); Rabbit Duck (with Richard Hell) (Repair, 2005); New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2007); In Memory of an Angel (San Francisco: City Lights, 2017)
╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
Song for an Envelope
If I were your patient
And you were my
healer
All day you would
heal me
And I would be patient
You tease me Don’t
worry
My act could be fetching
You’d cook me quinoa
And I would eat slowly
Together we’d live
reduced
in a shoe made of
plaster blessings
in a wall house of
rammed earth
in Holland
watery subway
I’d teach you the
cloudy chords
You’d sing
the empty words
Full tigers would calm us
You’d hypnotize the tides
For you the horizon lies
For you green seaglass shines
As a child loves turquoise
shameless songs
end surprisingly
We would heal finally
Fold screens and scientific
fruit
You’d heal me with your hair
your harp
I’d be our first patient always
All day my lucky wounds
would heal
in you bandages
of blue sea algae
Your solar mill would sigh like smoke
our City melt in the friendly suns
You’d offer me those
useless herbs
I’d analyze
even Paradise
You’d heal me
with water not poison
my medicine would be
a cheap accordion
____
Reprinted from No: A Journal of the Arts, no. 4 (2005). Copyright ©2005 by David Shapiro.