RIP David Shapiro (1947-2024): "One Plus One": Haiku by David Shapiro

It's been a terrible week for alumni of the legendary
Columbia Review. First, Paul Auster died
against his protest that this would be the wrong end
to the narrative. Then, last night, the 4th of May,
David Shapiro left us. We met in fall 1966
when I was 18, naive, studious, and he,
two classes ahead of mine, took me under
hIs wing and made lists of poets I had to read
and composers to whom I had to listen.
He had already published a book,
and an amazing book it was, January,
month of his birth. Here's a haiku chain
he wrote back in 2008. He and I used to
correspond by haiku and other forms. -- DL

One Plus One

   it may be too hard
to think of me as silence
    like thirsty flowers

    in the Luxembourg
    I paused to cry for hours
    beside patient friends

    I read Thus Spake Z
    in a minute or two and
    saw my life in clouds

    and inside last clouds
 I saw my sister hiding
    behind the grillework

    snakes danced up curtains
 and a miserable pink
    of which Michaux spoke

    Half a century
   later I look at tulips
    try to see glory

    not Lawrence's kind
 but the modest buds in Bronx
    where diners pop up

    thirteen synagogues
    and some are shuls the way Saul
    Bellow preferred them

    Unlike a true Jew
    I like to go alone, weep
    (kills community)

    Today someone writes
    as if anyone around
    Frank froze him with lies

    Generosity
    is not a word for critics
    but Frank hated pricks

    haha the theory
    is he was a dead man and
    this is false theory

    But let's go back to
   say l962 or
 let's pay attention

    involuntary
    memory as in Proust is
|   more than I can bear

    in England I smelled
   my mother's glitzy perfume
    and I also heard

    inside myself the
    tune of her blue jewel-box
    I still remember   

    Too tired to forget
    too rebellious to count
 lonely syllables

    well father would say
    what's so lonely about them
    the one equals one

    I want to build that\
    with long Icelandic "menhirs"
    one plus one is one

    for the madness of
    my old friend the architect
    One monument one

    You pushed me into
    talking today but really
    the best rest is two

    but I want to build
    one day like white white Legos
    one plus one is one

    -– David Shapiro
    September 8, 2008

from the archive; photo of DS with violin by Chris Felver

Comments

[Darryl Pinckney]

He introduced me to poetry I never knew existed or was possible. I can still hear his voice when he read. He was a marvelous teacher, wild and humane. This is sad news.
Beautiful haiku.

[Peter Frank]

I was another of David's mentees, needing not so much to know what to look for as to where to find it. (For instance, he introduced me to Laurie Anderson at her MFA show.) He also assured me that life through art was every bit as grave and absurd as it seems. I loved his company partly BECAUSE it maddened me. Thank you, dear old friend.

[Gregory Crutcher]

He was my Humanities professor in 1974, my freshman year at Columbia. Impossibly brilliant , my favorite teacher.

[Terence Winch]

Sorry for your loss, David. He was an extraordinary poet.

[Mark Statman]

Thank you David for posting these. Lovely.

[Thornton Davidson]

David Shapiro was only but also more than a poet. He brazenly saw the humility in his enterprise, celebrating the masters of our genre, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, more than he sought deserved recognition for his own work. He had a mind that flew from Meyer Shapiro to Basho to the Devils Trill Sonata (which he played for me) to a passion for his miraculous wife, Lindsay, all in the same breath. It is not too much to say that one of the brilliant lights under the poetic dome - what else is there? - has been extinguished. Please read and re-read his marvellous work. - Thornton Davidson

[Tim Robinet]

David Shapiro as a model for humility? Not saure about that, but he was brilliant and inspiring.

[Tom Mandel]

Somehow I never met David, but I admired his early poetry especially & his translations from the great French poets of the first 1/3 of the 20th C.

Above all, in my mind, David Shapiro instantiated the utter uniqueness of any true poet. Which he so very much was.

tom mandel

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Tom, Tim, Mark, Terence, Peter and everyone else for writing with such evident love for David Shapiro.

[Chris Hawthorne]

David Shapiro was a marvel in so many ways. Incredibly generous with his time, his guidance, and his books - I never left his apartment without a stack of them randomly plucked from his shelves. And his poetry! As TD says, he honored his literary forebears, but you can't write with the kind of exalted playfulness that David did without being utterly sure of yourself and a master of every poetic form since the Nuttall Codex. For months, all of us will be ransacking the word hoard for a metaphor, or a string of metaphors, to describe David Shapiro. We're not going to find it. There was nobody like him.

[Bernard Welt]

This is a great loss for you and so many other people I've seen tributes from, his peers in age and those who learned from him and were moved by his work. The good thing to remember is, with writers, we can keep on learning from them.

[Robert Coyne]

I remember so clearly 45 years ago when David introduced John Ashbery's poem "Crazy Weather" to his poetry writing class on the Math lawn at Columbia one beautiful Fall day. "It's this crazy weather we've been having..." Nothing since would be the same -- I was disoriented and intrigued and inspired. Those words and so many others from David and the inexhaustible sources he channeled have remained a guide stone through these many years. And I know he had a similar effect on any poetic soul who had the good fortune to know him.

[Susan Aizenberg]

Beautiful poem. Very sorry for your loss.

[Harold Hodes]

Very sad news. His poems made a huge impression on me in the late '60s. I never really got to know him beyond the nod-when-passing level when we were undergrads. But since those college days I've felt a surge of "Yay!" whenever I was about to read a new one of his poems.