[Wgcp-whc] This Friday David Shapiro, plus news of upcoming readings by WGCP'ers

[Richard Deming]

Friends,



Last week, on Friday, Dec. 3, we met for our first discussion of the  
work of David Shapiro. This Friday, from 3-5 in room 116 of the  
Whitney Humanities Center, the poet himself will join us for a  
conversation about his poetry and about the New York School of both  
art and poetry since Shapiro is one of the key members of the second  
generation of the new York School.  He was a student of Kenneth  
Koch’s, wrote the first monograph study on the work of John Ashbery,  
and edited with Ron Padgett the important collection The Anthology of  
New York Poets (1970).  In many ways, then, Shapiro has helped define  
what the label “the New York School” refers to.



During our discussion last week, a series of questions were developed  
throughout our session that will be forwarded to Shapiro.  These are  
prompts that will shape but not determine our discussion this Friday.   
Below that I will paste an interview with Shapiro from 2002 and I will  
recommend that people take a look at this interview that Shapiro  
recently did with Kent Johnson (himself a poet whose work we discussed  
in our sessions and who visited a few years ago).  We referred to  
Kent’s interview a few times in our recent session, so people  
indicated I should send the link again. Here it ‘tis: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml



Here are the questions, then I’ll post new of two upcoming readings  
featuring WGCP members and then I’ll paste another Shapiro interview.



Until Friday,

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator



Questions for Shapiro

1). Although you have indicated a certain frustration with the term  
“the New York School,” you are in part responsible for drawing  
attention to this set of elective affinities.  What constitutes these  
affinities and why/how does the label perhaps overdetermine or  
underdetermine how such work gets read?  How would characterize



2). Your erudition is immediately evident in you’re your poems, your  
scholarship, and your interviews.  What do you believe the  
responsibility of a reader might be in order to keep up with the  
layers of reference and allusion in your various forms of discourse.



3) In your book on Ashbery and in subsequent interviews, your interest  
in theory, structuralism, and post-structuralism informs (or seems to)  
inform your poetics.  How did this come to be an interest and how do  
you see Jakobson, Derrida, and others impacting your sense of language  
both in the critical mode as well as in your poetry?



4) How has your sense of poetry—especially your own—developed since  
you published your first book.  How do you feel that publishing your  
work so early has played a role in your development as a writer and a  
thinker?



5) What is the role of humor or wit in your poetry?  Is it a conscious  
choice to employ this? Is it a way of playing with and against notions  
of a tradition of “poetic diction”?



6) We are, arguably, in an age of pluralism when it comes to poetry  
and the arts in general.  In that way, the landscape has changed  
greatly from when you began.  In what ways does this openness impact  
poetry in general?  Has it changed your own thinking about poetry you  
or others wrote that seemed to be in response to dominate aesthetic  
ideologies?



7) Given your devotion to poets, writers, painters, and thinkers of  
the generation before yours (those born in the 1920s, say), how do you  
think about questions of literary inheritance, tradition, counter- 
tradition.  This is not a question about anxieties of influence, but  
about filial debt (which is no less Freudian!).



8) Do you still play music?  How has that continued to be a factor in  
your sense of poetry?  What about your sense of how visual art inform  
your poetry?  Or your interest in philosophy?  The questions would be  
revealing in your idea of the connections as well as the differences  
between these arts.



8) In your Ashbery book, you write: “a poem is not merely or primarily  
the consciousness of the author—it is a dynamism, a dissemination, a  
scattering of screens.”  In what ways does this describe your own  
poetry and poetics?  And yet, your poems seem very much to be the  
dynamism of your singular consciousness (and also to be about that  
very thing).



9) How would you describe the differences between yourself and other  
peers of your generation such as the Language poets?  How were those  
differences negotiated in the 70s when you were all coming into your  
own at the same time.  Or do you really think of yourself as belonging  
to a prior generation?





++++++



Readings:



Dec. 11. Poemetry: Readings by Mark Horosky, Nancy Kuhl, and Jasmine  
Dreame Wagner. Curated by Jason Labbe

  Detritus,  located at  71 Orange St. 7-10pm.







Ordinary Evening Reading Series Presents

Cynthia Zarin and Phillip Lopate

at the Anchor Bar, New Haven

Tuesday, December 14, 7 PM









++++







Pluralist Music:
An Interview with David Shapiro
by Joanna Fuhrman
David Shapiro's ninth book of poetry, A Burning Interior (Overlook  
Press, $24.95) has just been published. He has also published books of  
criticism on John Ashbery, Jim Dime, Jasper Johns, and Mondrian's  
Flowers, and edited the important An Anthology of New York Poets with  
Ron Padgett. All of his writing is simultaneously earnest and  
explosive. To read a David Shapiro poem is to enter a space in which  
"emotion" is as abstract as theory and an "idea" is as visceral and  
tender as the best pop song. Currently a Professor in Art History at  
William Paterson University in New Jersey, Shapiro has taught poetry  
and architectural aesthetics at Cooper Union for the past twenty  
years. This interview was conducted at the café in the Cooper Hewitt  
museum on a sweltering August Monday, drinking decaffeinated diet cola.
Joanna Fuhrman: How has your idea of what poetry can do changed since  
you were young?
David Shapiro: Poetry was very important in my family. My uncle had  
published sonnets in The New York Times. My grandmother was very  
literary. My mother read something like a book a day and loved to read  
to me. One of the great influences on my life was my father constantly  
memorizing Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and he had me do the same, as  
soon as I could speak. Music was also important in my family, so my  
idea was that poetry was this musical/theatrical thing. What a Russian  
called "the articulatory dance of the speech organs," I associated  
with songs. So when I was about nine writing a song with words,  
something about an irradiated man, I realized I just had written a  
poem, and I started to write poetry an hour or two a day, like violin  
playing. One of the things I tended to do was to fall in love with a  
poet-for example I would memorize The Wasteland, 1958 or so, then try  
to write like that. I went through a Beckett period where I wrote a  
lot of bad plays. I fell in love with Theodore Roethke, and if he  
would use the word "tendril," I would use the word "tendril." It got  
to the point where I would memorize their voices - I had a lot of the  
Caedmon records - just like one would a concerto. I kept being  
influenced by different people. The French Symbolists one year were  
very important to me, and then they were important to me forever.
I was about 12 or 13 when the Donald Allen anthology came out and I  
memorized that too. I was called the "Beat Prophet" in eighth grade. I  
would go to parties and recite Howl.
My ideas of poetry changed very rapidly between the ages of 9 and 15  
in the sense that a different poet would be a different universe. I  
liked the big golden voice of Dylan Thomas. Kenneth Koch read my  
poetry to me, when I was fifteen, in a very quiet voice-I liked that.  
I had considered the poem very fortissimo, a little bit like D.H.  
Lawrence but also with Dylan Thomas in mind. When he read it very  
quietly, I liked that. He also showed me new work by John Ashbery, The  
Tennis Court Oath. In was in July or August of 1962, and I thought it  
was fairly ugly: "To employ her / construction ball / Morning fed on  
the / light blue wood / of the mouth," and so on. Then I came upon  
sections which were more melodic, and I had a big conversion to the  
idea that he was floating melody inside static. Lines like: "I must  
say I / suddenly / she left the room, oval tear tonelessly fell" or "I  
moved up // glove / the field. "
And I thought, oh he's using the word "I" like it's any other word in  
the dictionary. That's interesting. It reminded me of a Raushenberg  
collage and suddenly I fell in love with it. I was converted by The  
Tennis Court Oath and I still love Cubo-Futurist style. I liked a lot  
of the lowness and the cheapness of the words. Allen Ginsberg said to  
me, "But can you memorize it," and after I recited a lot of it he  
said, "Oh it's like Alexander Pope." I didn't think it was like Pope,  
but I liked its elegance. I loved lines like: "Over Mount Hymettus /  
And sudden day unbuttoned her blouse" and I know Kenneth liked that  
line too. I liked what was very fresh about it; it seemed to be  
draining all the sentimentality I loved in Theodore Roethke out of  
poetry. It was definitely something new. I feel like I had good taste  
in that sense, for a fifteen year old, but I must say my taste has  
continually changed. The difference between me and other New York  
Poets is that I never gave up my love of what I already loved. I'm  
still a person who can see what is good in Eliot, Stevens, etc. I  
don't feel like I renounced earlier ideas of poetry. I like the idea  
of something synthetic or pluralist. I don't like the idea that one  
style beats another style. Kenneth said to me in 1962, "You'll see  
there's only me, Frank, and John." We were on a hill in Staten Island,  
and I said "What about Martin Buber?" And he said "He's a minor Jewish  
philosopher." And I said, "Sometimes it's better to be a minor Jewish  
philosopher than a dogmatic poet."
My idea of poetry now is pretty endless. I know people who just like  
Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, they just like one kind of thing. Particularly  
because of music I tend to not think in that way. I like John Cage and  
I like Eliot Carter. They don't like each other. I once said to Eliot  
Carter, "What do you think of John Cage?" He said, "No I don't really  
think so." And the same thing happened when I asked Cage, "Don't you  
like Carter?" "No." " What about the 'Polyrhythms'?" "Not really."  
They both hated each other, but I think poetry can combine these  
different things. I like a sonnet and I like shattering a sonnet. I  
like The Tennis Court Oath, but I also like Some Trees. This puts me  
in a bad position because you might say I therefore lack certain  
purities.
JH: What about your own work-how do you think it has changed?
DS: When I was young, my work was very expressionistic, sort of like  
my brain. Obsessive and expressionistic. Like anyone else I felt like  
I had to drain that. Ron Padgett once mocked me-I had written a poem  
when I was fourteen called "We are gentle" and he said, "We are  
gentiles," and Ted Berrigan called it, "We are jungles."
Ted once said to my sister, "The difference between your brother and  
me is that he writes, 'I am on a beach,' and I write 'I am on a beach  
ball,'" but that doesn't seem to be very fair. The truth is that like  
everyone else I wanted my poetry to be as tough as this table top [he  
taps on it]-I wanted it to be cold and tough like Formica. When I was  
seventeen Marianne Moore said about my poetry, "He is not stark  
enoughÉ He is an accomplished man and artist, but he is not stark  
enough. I too lack dynamite." They used some of that blurb, but I used  
to brood on "adequate starkness." I liked the severity of Jasper  
Johns's newspaperese period. On the other hand, I wrote books like Man  
Holding an Acoustic Panel in a science/hardware kind of interrupted  
style. I constantly was changing from one style to another. One thing  
I liked was the melancholy of Johns's smallest light bulbs. I wanted a  
poetry, and I think I still do, that would be as melancholy, dense,  
and severe as that. I wanted a poem that would somehow emit that kind  
of darkness. I also wanted poems that would go from one tempo to  
another. I loved Mozart's divertimenti and I liked the fact there  
would be one movement, another movement, another movement, but they  
would form a unity.
I like the poems of Ashbery like "The Skaters" and "Europe" that you  
might say have one style but are also very multiple. My best poems  
attempt that. I also wanted a poem that was more Lucretian, that would  
explain. What I loved about "The Skaters" was that it seemed so vast.  
I asked Kenneth what "The Skaters" was about before I had read it, and  
he said it was not about anything, it was a whole philosophy of life.
Still, I also love writing smaller poems that are like watercolors. I  
like the immediacy of Cézanne going out with just red, blue and green.  
I recently wrote a poem where I just used a Ryokan index of first  
lines and changed the nouns-it's like a little watercolor. And  
sometimes I feel I am really getting someplace in my collages. I hope  
they lead to a new impersonality, but not Eliotic. I am not a  
confessional poet, but there's enough in me of Jewish guilt to make a  
lot of my poems more naturalistic than what other people might find.  
Someone once said there was very little sex in my poems and I said,  
"What else is there?"
When I am writing a long poem I think about how not to merely  
intimate. I want something more like an epic, but I found I'm not as  
good at that. Kenneth Koch once said "Write an epic poem about the  
history of music"-I haven't been able to. That generation was very  
good at the long poem: Kenneth, John, Frank. My best long poems are  
sequences, and I actually get sad when people ask, "Why hasn't he  
written a long poem?" I really do regard my sequences as a long poem.  
I've keyed them so that one part follows the next like a divertimento.  
Or I think of them as panels of paintings that go together. But people  
don't always read it like that. I think that's a problem with my work.  
I sometimes print them as separate poems so people just see them as  
separate poems. Eliot did that with the Four Quartets, but no one  
thinks of them like that. If the seams show, maybe that is a problem.  
I love the idea of Keats's that you wander in a very long poem, and I  
wanted an entire book like To an Idea to be one suicidal fairly  
depressed poem-though in it there are different kinds of things.
When I give poetry readings it is very hard because I tend to see them  
as little encore pieces and don't play the concerto. Or I am very  
worried about boring people with an adagio. Charles Bernstein said,  
"What's wrong with boring people?" But as a violinist, I hate to see  
the woman in furs yawning, as I once saw when I was giving a concert  
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was playing "Gypsy Airs," by  
Sarasate, and it's very hard and very flashy and the woman in furs was  
yawning and I thought, "Ok, I am giving up music." But I haven't given  
up music because poetry is music, and I don't care about parts of the  
audience falling asleep.
But I always liked the idea that poetry doesn't need to be performed;  
my greatest moments in poetry have been quietly reading. Like when I  
had the forty pages of "The Skaters," when I was 16-it was written on  
crinkly paper from Paris, and every page seemed more beautiful than  
the last. Every line seemed up to the level of the last. When I was  
finished with that experience, I really felt very great poetry had  
been written in our time.
JH: You mentioned the Donald Allen anthology. How do you think the  
state of American poetry has changed since that moment?
DS: I was saying to my wife, it's canonic to praise that anthology and  
I've committed an anthology too, as they say. But it is interesting.  
One thing I liked about the Allen anthology is it gave a lot of  
information that was hard to find. I had heard of John Ashbery because  
I was reading things like the Partisan Review. Kenneth had a very  
bizarre early essay putting down a lot of minor poets which ended by  
quoting and praising a section of "Europe."
But I will say, Kenneth wasn't very well represented in that  
anthology. Frank O'Hara was. One of the reasons I wanted to attend the  
Wagner Writer's Conference when I was fourteen and fifteen was I  
wanted to meet Frank O'Hara. I knew his poems by heart. I loved "Ode  
to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births)." It was a very great  
poem. The beat generation was sort of known already. I fell under the  
spell of Charles Olson for awhile-I loved "The Kingfishers." I really  
loved his variations on Rimbaud. Also there were people in there who  
weren't such great poets and that was very useful to see too. It was  
very clear that Olson and Duncan were better than x, y, and z. It was  
clear "Howl" really did something compared to others. It was harder to  
say how good Jimmy Schuyler was, but there were some very beautiful  
poems: "Their scallop shell of quiet / is the S.S. United States / It  
is not so quiet and they / are a medium-size couple / who when they  
fold each other up / well, thrill. That's their story." I remember  
memorizing that. It's a very pretty little piece, and John's poem "How  
much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher / Of life,  
my great love?" So, that was a very good anthology because it contains  
differences; people like Frank did not like Charles Olson very much. I  
think that's been one of the best anthologies because Donald Allen was  
not dogmatically inclined toward one.
The weaknesses of anthologies are obvious. I know an Italian scholar  
who said his father would never have an encyclopedia in their house.  
But then there's Diderot's great encyclopedia. The eleventh edition of  
the Encyclopedia Britannica is so beautiful. It has (Donald) Tovey's  
articles on music, Whitehead on math. My father used to buy them all  
the time and I would give them away just for the illustrations. There  
are moments when a good anthology is useful. The bible is an  
anthology. But I am always impressed by how many people were lit up by  
the Donald Allen anthology. I think that's because it has these four  
swathes. It's funny that it didn't connect them. It did connect them  
against a certain kind of poetry. It was very clear to people like my  
friend John Ciardi, who I knew in youth, that they were not in it.  
Likewise Richard Wilbur, who is a terrific translator of Moliere in  
rhyme, represented a version of gentility that was not included.  
Though I love tennis, I remember an anthology with a picture of him  
playing tennis and it said, "What does a poet look like? He could look  
like this," and I thought "Oh, no."
JH: So what about the state of poetry now?
DS: The hardest thing for me was feeling that the Language school had,  
as a group, somehow "disappeared" certain New York poets. I put it  
this way once to Charles Bernstein, which my son thought was too  
turbulent a way to put it and he made me call Charles up to apologize,  
which I did. But I still sometimes feel that a lot of us get no credit  
for what we did between '62 and '80 .
For example, an academic who will remain nameless once told me she'd  
never seen 'C' magazine and had never read Joseph Ceravolo's poetry,  
and this was after she praised people who were using the same  
techniques but much later. In art history, we don't praise you if you  
do a drip painting today because we have a sense Jackson Pollock did  
it in the winter of '47.
I thought someone like Joe Ceravolo never really was given his due. Or  
someone like Dick Gallup, who had an amazing poem in 'C' magazine  
called "Life in Darkness." Now if it was published, people might say  
"Very interesting poem in the style of, let's say, Bruce Andrews," but  
that's not really fair. There are a lot of ways in which the last  
twenty years created a labeling, or "branding"-horrible word-of  
certain formal innovations that weren't really innovations. A  
tremendous amount had been done by John and Frank and Kenneth, yes,  
but also by Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan and others, and somehow there  
was an inclination to overlook it. When I mention this to some of the  
"Language" poets, they say they felt like we were already known, so  
they had to start their own team. At any rate, language and experiment  
are not magazines or precincts. No one owns language.
So when you say what's happening now in 2002É I still think it is a  
useful period. You can feel in your generation that people are not  
willing to buy a party line. I guess Americans really don't like  
popes. And the New York School really had a tremendous sense of being  
a male team, though with some women in it. I am still apologetic for  
having left out Barbara Guest from the anthology-a turbulent decision- 
but I am happy that there are twenty poets who had hardly been  
published before.
This is a much looser period. Maybe like the '70s in art. It's much  
harder to write minor imitations of Clark Coolidge and call it an  
innovation, and so there are less claims that lines like "Clump Peach  
Ounce" are dazzling. Clark's geology is so singular: each word a stone.
I might seem like an embittered poet. Maybe Zukosfsky felt like this  
at the end of this life. But I think there would be a lot of  
information out if people had, for example, all of Ted Berrigan's 'C'  
magazine printed together. It's really amazing that people have gotten  
away with an ahistorical take in an American culture that fetishizes  
history. It's not because of a war of style, it's simply that in a  
mood of generosity I wouldn't want to overlook the gifts of certain  
people. I still feel like people don't know what Ashbery's Tennis  
Court Oath is, or Ceravolo's poetry or Clark Coolidge's. I think a lot  
of things are buried that are very good.
But it is always a good time to be alive. It's good the way someone  
like Barbara Guest can be partially rescued by younger poets who saw  
what she was doing with stained language and syntactical disruption.  
But still, why wasn't Joe Ceravolo's book [The Green Lake Is Awake, a  
selected poems published in 1994] launched with greater flair? Joe was  
remarkable for a flawless Reverdy thing, and though he was a student  
of Koch, he went beyond that in many ways. We edited only a partial  
aspect of his work, because Kenneth wanted a perfect book. I wanted  
everything. It would have been better if Joe had been represented by a  
500 page book. We still really need that to know his range.
The other thing is I think almost anyone like me who wasn't making a  
claim to a certain kind of technical problematic was disappeared by a  
kind of taboo against certain subjects. And I think we lost a lot  
because Frank O'Hara was much more of a pluralistic acceptor. He liked  
my poetry, Frank Lima's poetry. He said to me about his "Ode to James  
Dean," "Don't you think it's sentimental? Kenneth thinks so." And I  
said "No, I love it." But then, we entered a period in which poetry  
became less and less. I once asked Meyer Schapiro why neo- 
expressionism was catching on and he said "People want more meat." And  
he didn't mean it just as a put down. And it's true poetry can be  
lovely in its reductionsÉ Ron Padgett could make the finest candies,  
like a Robert Herrick. On the other hand, he himself will sometimes  
write a very different kind of composition. It's very important to  
realize that poetry can be like a honey that's sweeter, richer, but  
also a protein. Kenneth Burke called it "equipment for living." I love  
Clark Coolidge not just for his smaller poems, but for the whole  
Crystal Text. So, you can like a rock or a water color, but you can  
also like a whole geological strata or a mountain.
Here I am using a kind of short hand. All of these assertions would  
have to be made very particular.
I do want to say though it is impossible to get away from the idea of  
groups. We are either alone or not alone. I didn't invent the English  
language. "Even your dreams are social," as Meyer Schapiro suggested,  
critiquing the surrealists. And I understand that. It is wrong for me  
to put down any group of poets who push themselves forward in  
different waysÉ that's just what young people do in a jungle.
But I think there should be more of the joys of influence than the  
anxieties of influence. The saddest thing in poetry is where you have  
what I regard as male competition. Neo-Nietzschean noble rivalry is  
one thing, but it becomes very male, in which one person wins and one  
loses. Tennis: which is not poetry. Then there's the Swedenborgian  
"the more angels the more room." Meyer Schapiro, if he praised Jackson  
Pollock, would praise someone doing an equal and opposite kind of  
work. He liked the underdog. Sometimes I think there's an  
irresponsibility which certain scientists know-if a scientist doesn't  
footnote a work on penicillin it's considered a lack of generosity.  
Meyer Schapiro said the love of footnotes was a love of generosity.
JH: How did you meet Kenneth Koch?
DS: When I was a kid, I was probably over-professionalized; I was  
sending out my poems to bad magazines and loving that. And I had heard  
that Frank O'Hara was coming as a guest to the Wagner's Writing  
Conference. One of my ninth grade teachers said, "You are really not  
old enough for this, but I heard you liked poetry." My sister's friend  
said, "This is ridiculous. The conference is supposed to be for  
teachers." But I thought well, you never know. So I sent them poems,  
and William Moss accepted me, saying "there will also be this Puerto  
Rican juvenile delinquent who is nineteen and just out of jail, who  
has written poems like, "I am going to beat you out of your lunch  
money again for my drugs and evening fix."
When I went to Wagner, I met Kenneth. I hadn't liked his poems that  
much in the Allen anthology, except for "Fresh Air," but I didn't tell  
him that. He was dressed in a white suit. Very seductively, he said,  
"Oh, I see you like Rilke and you also like the form of questions." Of  
course, I immediately liked him a great deal. I realized he wasn't  
just a satirist. We got along. Then I met the 'Puerto Rican jailbird'  
Frank Lima who became almost within a second one of my best friends  
for life. We still talk to each other about once a day, and I just  
edited his selected poems. He was just out of jail, but he was very  
gentle and very brave. He was a boxer, very disciplined. He loved  
language. He became a very close friend of Frank O'Hara. Lima still  
impresses me everyday.
Joe Ceravolo was there also, and he was little depressive and a little  
older. He loved to talk about the poetics of engineering. That moment  
was like the Donald Allen anthology. Edward Albee was there too.  
Kenneth said to me, "If you don't beat that guy in tennis, I'll flunk  
you." I said "Why don't you like that guy?" And he said, "Oh, he's the  
kind of guy who knows what the weather is going to be like the next  
day."
I met a lot of different people. There was a whole swatch of academic  
people there who would say, "But Professor Koch, Frank Lima's poems  
are disgusting." And Kenneth defended them wonderfully, saying  
"Perhaps, but after having read them, I can no longer think of English  
literature without them." Kenneth could be wonderfully brave. In the  
hospital, I lied and told him he wasn't missing much when he wanted to  
go out and get some fresh air and he said "Oh yes, I am."
JH: For twenty years you have taught at Cooper Union. Could we end by  
talking a little about your experiences there?
DS: I was very lucky. This mad dean, John Hejduk, my best friend for  
twenty years, believed architects should be thinkers, not greedy  
connivers, and that they should learn from poetry. So bizarrely  
enough, though I have always taught children and believed in it long  
before other people did, I began to teach young architects. I saw them  
as structuralists of the imagination. I taught them not just to write  
sestina, but then to build a house in the form of a sestina, or to  
build a house in the conditions of a villanelle, or to build a pantoum  
house.
Teaching architects at Cooper has been very important to me. It was  
the first completely drenching experience I had after teaching with  
Kenneth at Columbia, but Cooper was more widely open. When you went  
into Cooper Union, you might meet a doctor, a surgeon, a poet, an  
anthropologist. I invited Israeli novelists and French philosophers.  
We were all interested in analogies-to see if you could get some  
immortal energy from these different fields and make your architecture  
as fresh as a surgical cut or your poetry as fresh as a spare cage.
So for many years John Hedjuk was scorned. It was hard to get through  
the accreditation processes. He had to make the school very strong in  
practical ways so they could do this other thing. Most architecture  
said we destroyed architecture. A lot of people felt like it was a  
wonderland: enter here and give up everything but the imagination.  
John felt a drawing was just as great as a building. He gave Emily  
Dickinson's poetry as the best thing ever done to the president of  
Romania.
It is very unusual for a non-mediocrity to land on top, for a genius  
of creativity to be able to do the bureaucratic work of creating a  
school where the faculty and the students could meet at a place of  
thought. He used to say he'd done better than Black Mountain; there's  
just person after person who after this experience has changed the  
vocabulary of architecture. Now architecture with literature is taught  
all over the world.
I wrote a poem that has a line "Blessed is the school," and people  
asked, "What school are you talking about. Is that David Shapiro's mad  
academicism?" But actually, its kind of anti-academic. To me school  
became Cooper Union, a very special place of freedom and thought.
  
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