David Shapiro (1947–2024)

The poet David Shapiro has died at the age of seventy-seven. The New York Times (gift link) has an obituary.

I met David by telephone in 1995. I had written a review of his After a Lost Original, and he (somehow) looked me up and called me at home one night to thank me. That was a wildly exhilarating call, maybe an hour long, with me listening to a rapid-fire discourse of endless quotation and reference and putting in an occasional comment. Lucy Sante’s description of David’s talking (in the Times obituary) is exactly right.

I met David in person in 2002 at the Museum of American Folk Art, where he was introducing a reading by John Ashbery and A.N. Homes (an event tied to an enormous Henry Darger exhibit). David introduced me to his wife Lindsay like so: “He’s a poet, journalist, professor, and bon vivant. He has a wife and two kids.” How did he know that I have two kids? I have no idea.

Here are a handful of lines from “The Foot Speaks,” in New and Selected Poems (1965–2006):

Quoth the raven: I am language.
I am language,
And nothing in language is strange, to me.