'The Everyday Dignity of Our Town'

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.” 

As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly before I turned thirteen. I’d been a reader all along, certainly more so than my family and kids I knew at school. But books were strictly entertainment, a natural alternative to television. But that year, after reading his obituary, I discovered T.S. Eliot. I have no idea why he so quickly meant so much to me, why I personalized him as though he were my uncle. Soon I discovered Updike, Kafka and, among other things, the poetry anthologies of Oscar Williams.

 

In one of them I found the poem “Scyros” by Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), fell for it, heavily, and proceeded to read everything by him I could find. At first I concentrated on the poems he wrote while serving with the Army in the Pacific. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written while he was stationed in New Guinea. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year and he went on to serve as editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner. I lost interest in “Scyros” and came to admire the most characteristic portion of Shapiro’s poems. I think of them as his “American Scene” work, including “Buick,” “Pharmacy,” “Hospital,” “Haircut,” “Girls Working in Banks,” “Manhole Covers.”

 

Shapiro could be silly. He underwent a midlife hipster crisis. He praised Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams. He abandoned meter and rhyme and had good things to say about the Beats. His sole novel, Edsel, is unreadable.

 

Shapiro came to disappoint me, which is ridiculous. He gave us a handful of the best American poems and he helped initiate me into literature. Today, he appears to be virtually forgotten. The lines at the top of this post are from “Poet in Eclipse,” written by Louis D. Rubin Jr., published in the Fall 1991 issue of The Sewanee Review and dedicated to Shapiro. That’s nine years before Shapiro’s death. We all know that the literary industry is driven by fashion, which by definition is fickle and unfair. The entire first stanza of Rubin’s poem:

 

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter

About him at cocktail parties.

Critics do not debate his latest heresies.

The turncoat anthologists have dropped him

From the canon of those who matter.

There is apathy when his books come out.

It has been years since anyone asked him

Why modern poetry is so difficult.

His own clear translation of the everyday

Has long since given way

To more convolute and crepuscular

Enactments of postmodernist despair.

Elaborate candelabra now flare

Where he was once the Muse's bright day-star.”

 

In the third stanza, Rubin celebrates the “American Scene” poems:

 

“Still, there are those who see the lucence

Of what he wrote in much we now possess:

He found the language that could bring alive

The everyday dignity of our town,

Learned to make the astounding adjective

Infuse the colorless, neutral noun

And called into luminous elegance

What all had thought drab hitherto.

He claimed our untitled circumstance

For poetry, fixed its impress

Equally for high romance

As any ivied castle, campus, salon,

Requiring no prelate nor Helicon

Nor claim to privileged view.”