In a photograph for Life magazine, David Shapiro is smoking a cigar behind the president’s desk at Columbia University during the 1968 student uprising. He was from Deal, New Jersey, which he used as the title of a book: Poems from Deal (1969). A sequence from Poems for Deal, published in Poetry in 1966, is dedicated to Julie and begins, How wonderful to be in the arms of cerebral creatures. The poem ends: You didn’t appear to be there. A violin prodigy, Shapiro appeared on the radio program the Voice of America when he was five years old. His first poem appeared in Poetry at sixteen. His first book, January, at eighteen. A poet, art historian, and literary critic. In a reading he gave at Dia:Chelsea in 2014, he reads a poem, “I Haven’t,” in the voice of a comedian: Do you have a lion in your house? Do you have a serpent in your house? No, fortunately, I do not have a lion in my house…Do you have a true lie in your house? Before reading his poem “Lateness,” written for his mother, he says, “When my mother died I wanted to write the best poem that I could, though I really knew that what she loved were novels and I was never able to write Sons and Lovers. First of all, it had been written! It had been written…I’ve written a few bad novels…[they’re] in my desk.” He tells a story about his son, how when he was four, he asked, “Are you the boss of God? Are you more famous than angels?” His son said, “I’m the boss of this poem.”
-Morgan English