“Suddenly you are course with limitation, / gruff before flowers, your own poems lumpy, indelicate. The / it-ness of trees! And Emily too?” Karl Shapiro attended college only briefly; he wrote a poem of complaint titled “University.” While serving in World War II, he sent poems to his fiancée Evelyn Katz—poems that would become the book V-Letter and Other Poems and win the Pulitzer. In a Paris Review interview: “The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or a troublemaker…” He stayed off to the side, on the outside, from the beginning. In an interview in The Paris Review: “I had never met a poet in my life before winning the Pulitzer in 1945.” In the 1970s, the National Medical Association mistakenly put him on a list of writers who had committed suicide. Why such a list, anyway? Then, in 1978 he became a New York Times crossword clue: “late U.S. poet,” decades before his death. This premature death in print for the man who wrote, in 1962: What kind of notation is in my Time file for my life, especially / for my death? Will they say I died, O God? If they don’t say I died, / how can I die?
-Morgan English