David Shapiro (poet)

For others with this name, see David Shapiro (disambiguation).
David Shapiro
Born January 2, 1947 (1947-01-02) (age 65)
Occupation Poet
Nationality American

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 just eighteen.

Contents

Education and teaching

Born in Newark, New Jersey,[1] Shapiro grew up in Newark and attended Weequahic High School then Columbia University, from which he holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. in English. He subsequently studied at the University of Cambridge, from which he holds degrees with honors.[2]

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".[3][4]

Works

Shapiro wrote the first monograph on John Ashbery, the first book on Jim Dine’s paintings, the first book on Piet Mondrian’s flower studies, and the first book on Jasper Johns’ drawings. He has translated Rafael Alberti’s poems on Pablo Picasso, and the writings of the Sonia and Robert Delaunay.

His sonnets on the death of Socrates are the basis for Unwritten, a song cycle by Mohammed Fairouz.

List of works

Awards

Shapiro has won National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, been nominated for a National Book Award, and been the recipient of numerous grants for his work.

List of fellowships, honors, awards and grants

Personal life

Shapiro lives in Riverdale, The Bronx, New York City, with his wife and son.[2]

References

  1. ^ 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."
  2. ^ a b Parhizkar, Maryam. "David Shapiro ’68: Four Decades of Poems", Columbia College Today, May/June 2007. Accessed May 4, 2008.
  3. ^ 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."
  4. ^ 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."

Sources

Further reading

External links

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