Blank Verse for Karl Shapiro

I took classes from the poet and professor Karl Shapiro, at U.C. Davis, in the late 1970s. Karl won the Pulitzer Prize for V-Letter and Other Poems; he went on to publish many volumes of poems; he edited Poetry, the most prestigious poetry magazine in the United States; he wrote a novel and books of essays; and, with Robert Beum, he wrote a splendid book on prosody--the study of verse: The Prosody Handbook: a Guide to Poetic Form. I've always wanted to use the book in a class, but it had never come out in paperback, and it even went out of print for a while, but then Dover Publications brought it out in paperback form, so I'm using it in a poetry class this term, at long last. It was first published 1965 but holds up extremely well. Shapiro himself wrote masterfully in verse-forms before shifting to free verse and, in The Bourgeois Poet, to prose-poems.



So when I decided to write an homage-poem "for" Karl, after he died in 2000, I knew I wanted to use some kind of traditional form, so I chose blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentamter. On page 141 of The Prosody Handbook, Shapiro and Beum write, " Blank verse is undoubtedly the easiest kind of verse to write. One does not have to search for rhymes or move them into the right places, and one does not have to worry about the confines of a stanza. To juxtapose words so that every other syllable receives a stress is not much of a problem. But because it is so easy, and because it is such a spare form, it is one of the hardest to master. The absence of rhyme and stanza form invites prolixity and diffuseness--so easy is it to wander on an on. And blank verse has to be handled in a skillful, ever-attentive way to compensate for such qualities as the musical, architectural, and emphatic properties of rhyme; for the sense of direction one feels within a well-turned stanza; and for the rests that come in stanzas. There are no helps. It is like going into a thick woods in unfamiliar acres."



So I ventured, without "helps," into unfamiliar acres with the following poem:



Karl Shapiro

(1913-2000)


Shapiro was by nature Luddite and
Iconoclast--ironic then that he
So liked to frame his poetry with lines
Laid out like rows of bricks, with stanzas of
Fixed persons, places, things. He played a lot
At saying No but never thunderously—
The Beats embarrassed him. He rather liked
The post-War comforts brought to us by Ike
And Coke and IBM. Mischievously conform—
That’s what he did. A solidarity of one
Appealed to him—bad bourgeois white-haired boy
Who’d hurt a fly but little else, and then
Only with imagery of snot and rage
That scanned. He was a little bored by fame,
By his own poetry, by life on land-
Grant campuses, where doe-eyed kids would turn
In heart-felt free-verse stuff to him.
One hopes that Wystan Hugh was waiting when
Shapiro entered Afterlife’s Drugstore.
Perhaps the two every so often cruise
In a Corvair, smoke cigarettes, quote Yeats
And Keats, mock Eliot, admit they’re glad
That lust for beaus and belles belongs now to
That other life; and prosodize until
Nebraska cows come home—Imperial Wys,
Old Karl Jay, the blue-eyed brightest Beep
From Baltimore. Of course they need not love
Each other, and they died already, so
What’s left is love of words and irony;
Satiric tendencies;--oh, and Eternity.

--Hans Ostrom © 2006 from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006).



In The Prosody Handbook, Shapiro and Beum say that variations on iambic pentameter are expected in blank verse. Such variations include an "inversion"; for example, the line that begins with "Only" starts with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one [ON-ly], so the iamb is inverted. And sometimes it's kosher to let a line run long; for example, in the line with Coke and IBM, I have one extra foot or unit of iambic pentameter, so it's actually hexameter.



Some allusions: One of Shapiro's poems, "The Dome of Sunday," mentions "row-houses and row-lives"--a reference to the sameness of suburbia. . . .One of Shapiro's early volumes was called Person, Place, and Thing [the definition of a noun]--what a great title for a book of poems. . . . ."No, in thunder," comes from a piece of writing by Melville--a letter, I believe. . . . . In class once, Shapiro talked about having met and talked with the famous Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, and it was clear that Karl thought Alan was a little bit "out there.". . . . Shapiro enjoyed the ironies of being what he called "a bourgeois poet," and he shortened the term to The Beep. . . . . One of his most famous, most widely anthologized poems is "Drugstore"--the kind of drugstore that had a "soda-fountain." It was a poem about American youth in the 1950s. . . . . One of Karl's later volumes was called White-Haired Lover; his thick hair had gone all white fairly early. . . . ."Land-grant campuses" refers to the University of Nebraska and the University of California, Davis, two places at which Karl taught. He edited Prairie Schooner at the U. of N. . . ..Karl smoked cigarettes, but at one point, he tried to switch to smoking a pipe. He'd bring the pipe to class, but he wasn't very good at keeping it lit, so sometimes he'd strike match after match. We students used to laugh about it after class. . . . . Shapiro was acquainted with Eliot, but Eliot's somewhat reactionary politics, his pretentiousness, his religious conservatism, and the occasional hint of anti-Semitism made Karl uneasy. . . . Auden was Shapiro's favorite poet. In a poem titled "September 1939," Auden wrote, "We must love each other or die," but he later revised the line out of the poem, saying that we die whether we love each other or not, but of course he was willfully misinterpreting the line, and I think he thought it was just too sentimental. . . .Karl also admired Keats's achievement in formal verse, as well as Yeats's, although I seem to remember Karl's having referred to Yeats's beliefs (the gyres and all that) as "goofy." . . . Karl's full name was Karl Jay Shapiro, and he grew up in Baltimore. . . . . Even after Ralph Nader had attacked the Chevrolet Corvair, Karl kept his and kept driving it around Davis; it was just like Karl to be stubborn--or oblivious?--in that way. The color of the car was silver. Davis was a very small town at that time, so occasionally you'd see Karl parking the thing in the lot next to the big grocery store near campus.



In the 1970s and 1980s, the English Department at U.C. Davis was housed in Sproul Hall, a nine-story office-building revealing no architectural imagination. Karl's poem "Humanities Building," published in the New Yorker, describes that building, which in the poem he calls a "plinth." Nice word, plinth.



So there we have it, some blank verse for an expert on prosody, an independent thinker, and a fine poet, Karl Shapiro.