"Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name." -- Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro (10 November 1913, Baltimore, Maryland — 14 May 2000, New York City) was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
"Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?""But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.""In the tight belly of the dead, Burrow with hungry head, And inlay maggots like a jewel.""Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.""My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.""Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.""The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?""The doctor punched my vein, the captain called me Cain, upon my belly sat the sow of fear.""The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.""To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other."
Karl Shapiro attended the University of Virginia before World War II, and immortalized it in a scathing poem called "University," which noted that "to hate the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum." He did not return after his military service.
Karl Shapiro wrote poetry in the Pacific Theater while he served there during World War II. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems, written while Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, while Shapiro was still in the military. Shapiro was American Poet Laureate in 1946 and 1947. (At the time this title was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress which was changed by Congress in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.)
Poems from his earlier books display a mastery of formal verse with a modern sensibility that viewed such topics as automobiles, house flies, and drug stores as worthy of attention. Later work experimented with more open forms, beginning with The Bourgeois Poet (1964) and continuing with White-Haired Lover (1968). The influence of Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams is evident in his work.
Shapiro's interest in formal verse and prosody led to his writing a long poem about the subjects, Essay on Rime (1945); A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (1948); and, with Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (1965; reissued 2006).
Selected Poems appeared in 1968, and Shapiro published one novel, Edsel (1971) and a three-part autobiography, "Poet" (1988-1990).
Shapiro edited the prestigious magazine, Poetry (see Poetry Magazine) for several years, and he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he edited Prairie Schooner, and at the University of California, Davis, from which he retired in the mid-1980s.
His other works include Person, Place and Thing (1942), (with Ernst Lert) the libretto to Hugo Weisgall's opera The Tenor (1950), To Abolish Children (1968), and The Old Horsefly (1993). Shapiro received the 1969 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, sharing the award that year with John Berryman.
He died in New York City, aged 86, on May 14, 2000.
More recent editions of his work include The Wild Card: Selected Poems Early and Late (1998) and Selected Poems (2003).
Shapiro's last work, Coda: Last Poems, (2008) was recently published in a collected volume post-mortem by editor Robert Phillips. The poems, divided into three sections according to love poems to his last wife, poems concerning roses, and other various poems, were discovered in the drawers of Shapiro's desk by his wife two years after his death.
