Tracing David Shapiro's "The Seasons"

Abstract

n a three-decade career, David Shapiro, who turns fifty in 1997, has published eight highly experimental and absorbingly meditative books of poetry, as well as a good deal of art criticism. Unfortunately, Shapiro has received little critical attention. With the appearance of After a Lost Original (1994), which contains Shapiro's finest work to date, the time has come for a serious reevaluation of his place in contemporary poetry. Being considered a junior member of a poetic can often be as harmful to a poet's reputation in the long run as it is helpful in the short run. As a high school student, David Shapiro was discovered by Kenneth Koch, who, then, along with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara-two other central figures in the New York school of poetry-enabled Shapiro's work to be placed in magazines and facilitated the publication of January (1965), before his matriculation as a Columbia undergraduate. Five years later, he co-edited An Anthology of New York Poets with Ron Padgett. In 1974, Shapiro authored the first doctoral dissertation on John Ashbery, and the revised version, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (1979), became the first full-length treatment of the famously difficult poet. In the Ashbery book, Shapiro-like many subsequent critics of Ashbery (and O'Hara)-confirms the existence of the New York school as a historical fact while disputing its value as a touchstone for the interpretation of its members ' poetry and poetics. He acknowledges, if parenthetically, that . . . Ashbery's own intellectual music is associated journalistically with Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch and cites their pragmatic stance against poets of a