Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) Poem by Hans Ostrom

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.