Wednesday, May 24, T961
The Nebraskan
Page 5
A
Sixteen years have passed since Karl
Shapiro won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize in
poetry for his "V-L e 1 1 e r and Other
Poems.'
Shapiro at the time was with the Army
ia New Gainea. "V-Letter" was only his
second hook of poems. Other than hook
he had had privately printed la 1935
("Poems"), which he says by bow be
would hardly recognize as ever having
beea his own, his first hook was "Person,
Place and Thing," also published la his
absence with the Army, in 1942, by a New
York firm, Reynal & Hitchcock.
In both books, Shapiro combined poten
tiality with a native and simple regard for
reality. The one, "V-Letter," was a deep
ening and mellowing of the frank detail
and bitter-and-sweet lyric of the other,
"V-Letter" reinforced the actual so clean
ly celebrated in "Person, Place and
Thing." In both, simile and metaphor were
seen as standing for some sharp, if small,
particular of the fullest potential of the
actual thing. The language was simple,
concise, and Shapiro's.
- It is this latter point that makes "V
Letter" especially good reading today,
and which has established the book and
Shapiro in American letters.
Shapiro has said that what poetry today
needs is creative non-conformity, the dar
ing to be different of a Blake, Shelley
er Frost. He hacks op these beliefs with
his work. His books of poems are a build
ing op of accceptances and rejections and
loves and hates as is found in the daring
and inevitability of a single poem, line,
or word.
For instance, in "The Fly," a poem out '
of "Person, Place and Thing," Shapiro sits
in on the feeling of the situation with his
words. He creates, out of the periphery
of a single word, a whole world. One such
word in the poem is "promontory, a
noun Shapiro uses to say "nose". The
poem is full of such one-word worlds, and
simply placed statements, as the horse
which switches "the hurricane of his
heavy tail" at the annoying fly:
THE FLY
O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes.
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man's nose,
Climb with the fine leg of a Dunean-Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife .
Riding and riding with your filth of hair
On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,
Hot front the compost and green sweet
decay,
Sounding your buzzer like aa urchin toy
Yea dot all whiteness with diminutive
tool,
la the tight belly of the dead
Borrow with hungry head
And inlay maggots Eke a jewel.
Study
Of
Shapiro
By ROY SCHEELE
At year approach the great hers stomps
and paws
Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail;
Shod la disease you dare to kiss my hand
Which sweeps against you like an angry
flail;
Still you return, return, trusting your
wing
To draw you from the hunter's reach
That learns to kill to teach
Disorder to the tinier thing.
My peace Is year disaster. For your death
Children like spiders cup their pretty
hands
And wives resort to chemistry ef war.
; y tsWi.
pmmmmm
la fens of sticky paper and quicksands
You glue yourself to death. Where you are
stack
You struggle hideously and beg
You amputate your leg
Imbedded in the amber much.
But I, a man, must swat you with my hate,
Slap you across the air and crush your
flight,
Must mangle with my shoe and smear
your blood,
Expose your little guts pasty and white,
Knock your head sidewise like a drunk
ard's hat,
Pin your wings under like a crow's,
Tear off your flimsy clothes
And beat you as one beats a rat
Then like Gargantua I stride among
The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust,
The broken bodies of the narrow dead
That catch the throat with fingers of dis
gust. I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls
. And stunned, stone blind, and deaf
Buzzes its frightful F
And dies between three cannibals.
Poetry Eke this is more than says.
And so it is in "V-Letter." As Shapiro
"wrote, in the introduction to the book,
most of the poems were written "under
the peculiarly enlivening circumstances
of soldiering." But these were not war
. poems in the' traditional sense, nor was
Shapiro a happily fat "war poet" writing
only of suffering in wartime. He said:
There is no need to discuss the private
psychological tragedy of a soldier. It Is not
the commonplace of suffering or the plati
tudinous comparison with the peace, or
the focus on the future that should occu
py us; but the spiritual progress or retro
gression of the man ia war, the Increase
r decrease la his knowledge ef beauty,
government and religion." What wanted
saying was the private psychological trag
edy of Man.
The title poem of the book is a letter
. from the poet to his wife and is a tribute
to her, but investigates side causes with
in the circle of their marriage, and then
" holds back to their love at the end, like a
returning letter "reduced in size but not
in meaning."
The poem shows a fastiduous knowledge
of something that has come over love and
confirmed it. And Shapiro's cryptic bring
ing to bear on his subject does not con
ceal a great deal of tender intensity for
it, just as hard laughter often brings out
tears.
In another poem, "New Guinea," Shapiro
most readily demonstrates a concern for
form that lies under all his poems. Mid
way through the poem in loose iambics,
Shapiro introduces a verse in hendeca
syllabics, a classical Greek line of eleven
metrical syllables:
" "Morning I arise and marvel at the laden
Lush abandoned branch and brush of
soaked
Laocoons of trees in throes of ser-
Pent-tightening tendrils and air clamber
ing roots.";
then swiftly returns to iambics:
"Awake, the largest snowiest butterfly
Floating with eyes of lavender between
The men strung heavily like weighted bats
And finishing, from tree to tree,
their rest"
Such a changing in midf orm is done so
metrically sound that the reader is not
aware.
(Continued page 7)