David Shapiro (born January 2, 1947) is an American
poet,
literary critic, and
art historian. He has written some twenty volumes of poetry, literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of thirteen, and his first book was published when he was eighteen.
Education and teaching
Born in
Newark, New Jersey,[1] Shapiro grew up in Newark and attended
Weequahic High School before matriculating at the age of 17½ at
Columbia University, from which he holds a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1973) in English. Already a musician of professional competence as a youth, from 1963 he was a violinist with the New Jersey Symphony and the American Symphony, among others.[2] Between 1968 and 1970, he studied at the
University of Cambridge on a
Kellett Fellowship, from which he holds an M.A. with honors.[3] Having previously taught at Columbia (in the Department of English and Comparative Literature),
Princeton University, and
Brooklyn College, Shapiro teaches poetry and literature at
Cooper Union and is currently the William Paterson professor of art history at
William Paterson University.
He achieved brief notoriety during the
1968 student uprising at Columbia, when he was photographed sitting behind the desk of President
Grayson L. Kirk wearing dark glasses and smoking a cigar; Shapiro later described the cigar as "horrible".[4][5]
Человек без книги (A Man Without a Book; Selected poems translated into Russian by Gali-Dana Zinger) - Literature without borders (Latvia), 2017.
ISBN9789934856891[8]
^Klin, Richard.
"David's Harp", January Magazine, July 2007. Accessed September 22, 2008. "Newark-raised, Shapiro has not shied away from his Garden State roots, (Poems from Deal, its title taken from a Jersey-shore town, came out in 1969) taking his place, along with Ginsberg and Williams, as bards of this much maligned state."
^Staff.
"Columbia Offers Laurels to a Band of Poets", The New York Times, September 23, 1990. Accessed September 22, 2008. "In the widely circulated photo, a young Mr. Shapiro - not yet a professor - is in the student-occupied office of the university President, Grayson Kirk. Wearing a pair of sunglasses, he is sitting comfortably on President Kirk's chair with his feet up, puffing away on one of the president's cigars. That cigar was horrible, Professor Shapiro told the dinner guests."
^Morrow, Lance.
"Lance Morrow: Why the flag is not a burning issue", CNN, March 29, 2000. Accessed September 22, 2000. "For one thing, flag burning (even though it occurs rarely) originated as one of the vivid, button-pushing ur-outrages committed during the great '60s deconstruction of American authority (which some boomers consider to be the beginning of the world) and engraved on the
national memory by photographs of the time – merging with black-and-white shots of an Abbie Hoffman type giving the finger to "Amerika," or of the student radical Mark Rudd smirking and smoking a cigar with his feet up on the desk of the president of Columbia University."
Thomas Fink, The Poetry of David Shapiro, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison & Teaneck, NJ, 1993;
ISBN0-8386-3495-8
Thomas Fink & Joseph Lease, Burning Interiors: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison & Teaneck, NJ, 2007;
ISBN978-0-8386-4155-2. Includes essays by
Paul Hoover, Joanna Fuhrman, Stephen Paul Miller, Denise Duhamel,
Noah Eli Gordon,
Ron Silliman, Tim Peterson, Timothy Liu, more.
New York Quarterly, Issue 65, has an extensive interview with David Shapiro.
Jacket Magazine, issue 23 this issue includes a David Shapiro Feature, with numerous links to essays, reviews, poems (6 poems from A Burning Interior), and an interview of Shapiro conducted by
John Tranter
The Terror of the Poet David Shapiro in conversation with Kent Johnson, an interview by email conducted in 2009