AFTER RYOKAN
In my bowl
In the thin snow
In front of my window
In the window sky
In the blue distance
In the scattered door
In every quarter of the
evening land
In the pool near your room
In the shadow on the highway—
In the staves of the sky
I seem to hear your voice
–David Shapiro
As a child, David Shapiro, a widely renowned, much-loved poet, teacher and art historian, was a violin and literary prodigy. At 10, he decided to be poet, and within a few years, met Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and the movement now known as the New York School—of which he would, with time, be considered a leading poet, proponent and scribe. He studied with Koch and Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, publishing January, the first of his 11 books of poetry, as an 18-year-old undergraduate. Awarded a Kellett fellowship, he earned an MA at Clare College, Cambridge before returning to Columbia for his PhD. Shapiro also produced numerous works of prose, including seminal monographs on John Ashbery, Jasper Johns and Piet Mondrian. He taught literature at Columbia and Princeton, was a tenured art historian at William Paterson University, and created an interdisciplinary course in aesthetics which he taught for many years at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union.
Portrait of David Shapiro by Chris Felver
The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Four) David Shapiro
Ekphrasis, broadly defined, is the heart of the New York School of Poets. The impulse to speak to, from, and into pre-existing art drove the creativity of the “big four.” John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler were gratefully enthralled and competitively motivated by each other’s work, by poets brought to English (sometimes by them), and by artists of all stripes.
So it is not surprising that David Shapiro chose to respond to a Japanese poet who, as a young man, was a disciple of a Zen master, Kokusen, and after his death embarked on a long pilgrimage. Then Ryōkan became a hermit. It is reported that he never took himself too seriously. He sneaked into the midsummer festivals though monks were enjoined not to attend. Late in life he was cared for by a young nun, and the two grew close, exchanging a series of tender haiku.
David Shapiro’s poem hinges on a notoriously ungainly part of speech: the preposition. It explores inness. As the short poem progresses, we learn it, the sensation of being in. The poem begins in familiarity with “in my bowl”—likely the one piece of crockery owned by the Zen poet—and “In the thin snow”—we are accustomed to speaking of ourselves as “in” weather. “In front of the window” is also normal usage. But the poem’s purview swells till “in” includes the widest of expanses: “In every corner of the / evening land.” We feel ourselves somehow thinned with distance, denatured. And what is “the scattered door”? The poem has abolished the difference between outside and in, between near and far, with “in” so broadly defined that it becomes stunningly impersonal. But wait—
In the pool near your room
In the shadow on the highway—
In the staves of the sky
“In” suddenly connects, as prepositions do, with an all-consuming “you” that in these three lines–the first intimate, the second estranged, the third almost cosmic—pertaining to the harsh structure of the infinite, those mysterious “staves.”
Then David Shapiro’s illuminating, mute poem suddenly throws us into emptiness–but wait—an aural connection appears, compounded of doubt and hope: “I seem to hear your voice.” The ekphrasis the poem achieves is of an entity most complex and most essential, the founder of all festivals. – Angela Ball