The first thing poet David Shapiro told his Russell House audience Thursday night was that he hoped he wouldn’t bore anyone. On the other hand, he added, quoting the poet Charles Bernstein – the first of several older poets and artists he would invoke –“What’s so bad about boring people?”
If the intensely concentrated expressions of audience members were any indication, Shapiro had nothing to worry about. He read poems from a number of his collections, mused out loud about the genesis of those poems, quoted everyone from Jasper Johns to John Cage, and riffed on everything from geology to Kant—often all at the same time.
At the end of the reading, Shapiro invited Andrew Inchiosa ’07 up to read a poem of his own. Inchiosa, who has read at Russell House before as a Wesleyan Student Poet, is also Shapiro’s nephew. Thursday marked the first time the two had read in public together.
“I had a fantastic time participating in the reading,” Inchiosa said. “I remember reading David’s poetry closely for the first time in high school, and I think that experience led to my own interest in writing poetry. It was a terrific honor to read with him, especially to do so at Wesleyan.”
Shapiro, who comes from a long line of musicians and who says his “first language” was violin, got an early start in poetry as well. He first attended the Wagner Writer’s Conference at fourteen alongside already established poets like Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. In 1965 at age eighteen, he published his first collection of poems, “January.” Since then, Shapiro has published a number of other collections as well as criticism on art and poetry, anthologies and collaborations with writers like Jaques Derrida. He teaches poetry, art history and architectural aesthetics —and combinations thereof — at Cooper Union and other universities in the New York area.
Shapiro, a polyglot’s polyglot, referred to a wide variety of influences on his writing and artwork that span beyond the horizons of the New York School poets and artists among whom he came of age. At a reception after the reading, Shapiro captivated a smaller group of audience members with stories about his grandfather, a celebrated cantor; Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he became friends when the writer was an old man; and Chinese art. A student who had met Shapiro earlier in the day in a poetry class showed the poet a t-shirt decorated with Chinese characters. Shapiro expressed so much enthusiasm over the shirt that the student offered it to him. Shapiro insisted that they make a fair trade, digging through his bag for poetry books and collages to exchange for the shirt.
Rachel Kiel ’07, another student in the poetry class, said that seeing Shapiro in person changed her mind about his poetry, which she had read earlier in the week.
“At first I have to say that I found the poetry really difficult—it was really different from what I usually like,” Kiel said. “But seeing him was really incredible because he had this enormous personality. It was like getting to sit for an hour and listening to someone’s thought process. You wouldn’t let your mind wander because it wasn’t half as interesting as listening to his mind wander.”
Like the reading at Russell House, Shapiro’s class visit was notable for more than his poetry itself.
“Some poets read like its an afterthought for promoting their poetry, but he seems like he really enjoys performing,” Kiel said. “He started pointing at people randomly and asking us if we were in a flood in New Orleans, what would we save. Or he would point at some random person in the room and use them as part of a dramatic or comedic monologue. At first I couldn’t see the sense of humor in his poetry in it but once I saw him I understood it better.”
Sara Rowe ’08, who had read a few Shapiro poems online prior to seeing him at Russell House, agreed that the poet’s personality cast his work in a new light.
“I thought [the reading] was incredible,” she said. “His poetry did not read off the screen anywhere near the way he delivered it. The things he spoke about were really interesting and as we hung around afterwards his stories got much cooler.”
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