'Dubious Enterprises Flourish Here'

I remember standing in front of a wire rack in James Books, leafing through one of Oscar Williams’ poetry anthologies, and reading Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) for the first time. I was twelve or thirteen. The bookstore was on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio, about a two-mile bike ride from where we lived. The owner was Lennie James, who was tall, had pale red hair, wore wire-rimmed glasses and an unbuttoned dress shirt over his t-shirt. He looked like an off-duty accountant. Mr. James sold books and was a bookie, forever in trouble with the cops, which added an exotic tartness to our visits to his shop. He talked from the side of his mouth like a Hollywood tough guy. It was rumored that he sold pornographic magazines in a back room but we never saw that. There, on the cusp of puberty, I first discovered English-language poetry, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and Samuel Beckett.

What attracted me to Shapiro was the attention he paid to the commonplace American Scene, what Henry James called in his book of the same title “the hungry, triumphant actual.” He wrote about car wrecks, drugstores, Buicks, getting a haircut, honkytonks, Thomas Jefferson and a waitress, as well as combat in the South Pacific. What better way to discover America and American poetry? In the title poem of his 1978 collection, Adult Bookstore, Shapiro writes:

 

“Dubious enterprises flourish here,

The massage parlor, the adult bookstore.”

 

It concludes:

 

“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is sold forever to the single stag

Who takes it home in a brown paper bag.”

 

In 1984, when, as a newspaper reporter I accompanied police officers on their raid of an adult bookstore in Richmond, Ind., naturally I thought of Shapiro and his poem.