As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been reaching into my poetry shelves to take out poets I haven’t read in decades. Most recently it was a poet perhaps not familiar to you: Karl Shapiro. But Shapiro was a leading poet of his time: winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1946-1947, editor of Poetry magazine from 1950 to 1954. And he was included in the 1956 anthology Fifteen Modern American Poets, along with poets like Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Theodore Roethke.

Who today knows what a V-letter was? V-mail (standing for “Victory Mail”) was a World War Two phenomenon: a procedure for sending mail safely and cheaply to and from on-duty soldiers. Shapiro was stationed in the Pacific during the war, and his poem “V-Letter” was addressed to his future wife, Evalyn Katz. It begins:

I love you first because your face is fair,
           Because your eyes Jewish and blue,
Set sweetly with the touch of foreignness
Above the cheekbones, stare rather than dream.

And after six stanzas, it ends:

              I love you first because your years
Lead to my matter-of-fact and simple death
                     Or to our open marriage,
And I pray nothing for my safety back,
Not even luck, because our love is whole
                     Whether I live or fail.

The move from confident love to wartime uncertainty (that final word “fail” stands in for “die”) captures what war does to that most basic of human relationships, love. Other poems in this collection evoke war’s horrors, as in “The Leg,” which begins:

Among the iodoform, in twilight-sleep,
What have I lost? he first inquires,
Peers in the middle distance where a pain,
Ghost of a nurse, hazily moves…

One day beside some flowers near his nose
He will be thinking, When will I look at it?
And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply,
At what? And he will know it’s gone…

Shapiro published thirteen poetry collections during his lifetime—and a fourteenth was published by his wife after his death—so I can’t possibly touch on them all. But I want to look at Poems of a Jew (1958), because many of its poems address what it’s like to be a Jew in a Christian society. Take, for instance, these lines from “The Crucifix in the Filing Cabinet.”

Out of the drawer that rolls on hidden wheels
I drew a crucifix with beaded chain,
Still new and frightened-looking and absurd.
I picked it up as one picks up a bird

And placed it on my palm. It formed a pile
Like a small mound of stones on which there stand
A tree crazy with age, and on the tree
Some ancient teacher hanging by his hands.

Thus Shapiro images Jesus on the cross. And then—

I found a velvet bag sewn by the Jews
For holy shawls and frontlets and soft thongs
That bind the arm at morning for great wrongs
Done in Pharoah’s time. The crucifix

I dropped down in the darkness of this pouch…

And so the key Christian symbol is wrapped snugly in a Jewish bag.

I want to note, too, the prosody of this poem: its rhymed iambic pentameter, following the (unrhymed) iambic pentameter of “V-Letter” and “The Leg.” Indeed, Shapiro’s first seven collections rely mostly on iambic tetrameter or pentameter, sometimes rhymed, sometimes not. I mention this because when I open his next book, The Bourgeois Poet (1964), what I see is utterly different: an entire volume of prose poems.

Some critics at the time were dismayed by Shapiro’s dropping of meter and rhyme. But he’s clearly having a wonderful time in these new (all untitled) poems. What might count as the title poem begins: “The bourgeois poet closes the door of his study and lights his pipe. Why am I in this box, he / says to himself (although it is exactly as he planned).…”  But to me the most fun poem in this collection is the one that begins “I am an atheist who says his prayers.” Its verses (each usually a single sentence) mostly begin “I am…”:

I am an atheist who says his prayers.

I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.

I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.

I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.

…

I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin.…

…

Wherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough…

And on to the final verse:

For the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.

I enjoy the Whitmanesque verve of this poem: its playful identification with a range of not always respectable beings.

Shapiro’s next collection, White Haired Lover (1968), includes both prose poems and rhymed/metered ones. He continued churning out new poetry collections, though critics generally agreed they weren’t up to his earlier standards—which led to his self-mocking poem “My Fame’s Not Feeling Well” in Adult Bookstore (1976):

My fame’s not feeling well;
Maybe I should get it a Fulbright
To Luxembourg or Mexico,
Or maybe send it to a doctor-critic:
The doctor will say: “It should join a committee
Or win a national prize
Or judge a contest or apologize
For something, or just crawl out of its shell.
There’s really nothing I can recommend.”

Then, teasingly, the poem shifts into rhymed iambic pentameter, as if that will heal his fame:

On the other hand I’d rather let it ail,
Being quite certain that it cannot fail
And simply come to an oblivious end.
Maybe it only needs a famous friend.

Shapiro’s new published volumes continued: New & Selected Poems in 1987 and his final collection, The Old Horsefly in 1992—which includes the satirical humor of “Creative Writing” (a new college English Department course):

English was in its autumn when this weed
Sprang up on every quad.
The Humanities had long since gone to seed.
Grammar and prosody were as dead as Aztec.
Everyone was antsy except the Deans
Who smelled Innovation, Creativity!
Even athletes could take Creative Writing:
No books, no test, best grades guaranteed…
No schedule, no syllabus, no curriculum,
No more reading (knowledge has gone elsewhere).…

Maybe I’m drawn especially to Karl Shapiro’s humorous poems because in person, too, he was very funny. I should know: Uncle Karl was my mother’s brother.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.