Harvey Shapiro: Poet And Editor
Harvey Shapiro has been an editor at The New York Times for 40 years. He first landed there in 1957, after serving in World War II as a gunner in a B-17, attending Yale and Columbia Universities, and teaching for a few years at Cornell.
That he became an editor was an accidental felicity; he hadn't planned on it. When Robert Warshow, the editor of Commentary, died unexpectedly, Mr. Shapiro, who had been doing part-time editing for the magazine, was given his job. After a year he joined The New Yorker, before moving on to become an assistant editor at The New York Times Magazine.
The New Yorker lived up to its eccentric reputation, according to Mr. Shapiro.
The Pencil Man
"In the morning, a guy would come in wearing a smock, with a tray of pencils," he said, "and you would pick your pencils for the day. It was an austere place; you hardly ever saw anyone in the hall."
"The guy with the pencils might be the only person you saw, except for messengers bringing manuscripts. There were no meetings. William Shawn, the editor, told me not to be surprised if no one spoke to me. He said that he had passed people in the halls for years, and that they didn't say hello because they had no idea who he was."
What many people may not know about Mr. Shapiro is that he is a widely published and respected poet. His eighth volume, "Selected Poems," was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. The novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick has called him "the American urban poet."
After working as an assistant editor at the Times Magzine, he became the editor of The New York Times Book Review, from 1975 to 1983. In 1984 he returned to the Magazine as a deputy editor; since 1995, he has been senior consulting editor there.
Mr. Shapiro, who received a bachelor's degree from Yale and a master's from Columbia, received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his wartime service. He first visited the North Fork in the early 1950s, and had a house in Amagansett for many years. Today, he is a frequent visitor to East Hampton.
On a recent gloomy gray warmish day, Mr. Shapiro visited The Star office for a chat. He is an affable, relaxed man with an easy manner and a quick laugh.
Poetry As Work
Mr. Shapiro, who grew up in Brooklyn, went to school on the G.I. Bill. "I wanted to further my education, of course, which is why I went for my master's at Columbia. But also, I didn't have a clue as to what I wanted to do."
"The year after I got my degree, I went up to Cambridge for a year, living on G.I. self-employment funds. The Government would support you. You had to report to the Veterans Administration office once a month and tell them what you were doing, and they would supplement your earnings."
"I was writing poetry, and one of my friends said that in New York the V.A. wouldn't consider writing poetry as a serious occupation, but that in Cambridge they had no problem with it at all," he said, laughing.
Turned To Teaching
When the year came to an end, Mr. Shapiro realized he'd have to find something to do, so he wrote to a number of colleges and universities, getting their addresses from the back of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
As it turned out, Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Oregon were interested, and he took a job at Cornell, teaching there for a few years.
"In those days, it was impossible to have a real career as an academic unless you earned your Ph.D. There was some pressure on me at first to get the degree, but I wasn't interested in that. It's clearly the career to pursue these days as a poet, because reputations are made in the academy, not outside of it."
Back To New York
"But, looking back, although I've always enjoyed the process of teaching, I felt that it wasn't good for me to be inside a university - it was affecting my poetry. It was becoming too literary. So I left."
Mr. Shapiro came back to New York "with nothing much in mind." He taught some classes at Queens College and joined The Village Voice when it first started up, both selling advertising and acting as poetry editor. He also did commissioned writing for synagogues - choral plays and masques.
"Then, I fell into editing." Mr. Warshow of Commentary gave him a part-time job "putting articles by sociologists and academics into English."
When he joined The Times, "I had never had a job for more than a year or two. I was a Depression kid, and I was always worried about how I was going to support my family." Mr. Shapiro, who is divorced, has two grown sons.
"The Times was the first union shop. The union was quite strong in those days. I felt a kind of security there for the first time. You went through a six-month probationary period, and then, if they hired you, you were really hired - you were in. You didn't have to bargain about salaries."
"When I was at The New Yorker, I worked for Katharine White - E.B. White's wife and Roger Angell's mother. Salary discussions with her would begin with her saying, 'Well, Harvey, how little money do you need to live on?' The Times was quite different, thanks to the union."
Tricky Position
In 1975, Mr. Shapiro succeeded John Leonard as editor of the Book Review. With several published books of poetry to his credit and an established reputation, Mr. Shapiro was, it could be argued, in a tricky position: Many of his friends were writers, and everyone wants to see their work reviewed.
"In running the Book Review, I was putting together two parts of my life. I'd always tried very hard to keep them separate." When Mr. Shapiro had first come out of the Air Force and returned to college, his intention had been to do something for a living that was completely different from poetry, perhaps as a manual laborer.
He tried to get into the merchant marine as a radio operator, but there were no openings. That he became an editor was pure accident.
Not The Same
"Newspaper work is very different from writing poetry. To someone on the outside, they may seem to be similar pursuits. But there's really no similarity at all," Mr. Shapiro said.
"Running the Book Review, though, was something of a problem. Although I didn't write reviews of books by poets, some poets tended to hold me responsible for what was written about them."
"I ran the Book Review keeping the interests of the general public in mind, but also working out of my own interests. In order to be a good editor, you must keep your own interests in mind. I tried to cover books that were news to the public, but also books that were news to me."
Good, Clean Work
"It was a hard, but interesting job. I tried to read all of the significant books that came out. My days were filled with editing and I read every night."
In 1983, when Mr. Shapiro left the Book Review, The Times asked him to be a book reviewer for the daily edition. "But that would have been the end of my poetry," he said, explaining that the kind of concerns one brings to book reviewing are similar to those one brings to poetry. So he chose to return to the magazine.
"Editing is good, clean work. It's satisfying to help to shape and focus an article, or an issue of the magazine. And writing captions, writing headlines - all of these things are very satisfying," he said.
Shaped By War
Mr. Shapiro is particularly proud of a special issue of the magazine that he edited in 1995, commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II.
That war shaped him and his contemporaries, and it was when he came home from overseas service that he realized that he was a poet.
"I wrote some fiction and poems before then, even when I was a kid. But when I was 19 or 20, and coming back from the war, I realized that this was something I would be taking seriously. It was a serious decision. No matter what else I've done in my life, I've always written poetry. Even if I'm going through stretches when I'm not producing a lot of work, the impulse is still there."
Keeps Going Back
"Public experiences have a different resonance than private experiences. The fact that you've shared something with an enormous number of people enables you to reach out more. You feel that you're dealing with something larger than yourself."
"The two experiences that shaped me - other than specific things that have happened in my own private life - were the war and being the child of immigrants. They are the two things that help to explain a lot of things for me, in my life. And they are experiences that you keep trying to figure out. I keep going back to them in my writing."
Mr. Shapiro's poems, like those of his friend the late David Ignatow, are straightforward and clear. It's an artful way of writing, to make it seem as if the poem has somehow appeared on the page effortlessly. Yet he has a taste "for the Elizabethans, for Hart Crane, for the complexities of rhetoric." Some of his early poems hearken back to the dense works of Crane.
Staying Power
"It seems miraculous to me that you can place words on the page and that they stay there for centuries," he said, referring to the work of poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt. "It's always meant a lot to me that the voice can remain, so clearly, for so long."
Among Mr. Shapiro's other influences were his friends Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen, poets whose work is often noted for its strong images.
"Is this really a coherent body of work?" he asked rhetorically of his own "Selected Poems," which includes poems written over a period of 50 years. "I used to worry about that when I was younger. I don't anymore. The subjects of the poems change, the style may change, but the same themes are always there."
New York Note
Caught on a side street
in heavy traffic, I said
to the cabbie, I should
have walked. He replied,
I should have been a doctor.
One of Mr. Shapiro's most often anthologized poems, "National Cold Storage Company," written in the late 1960s, takes a building in New York and transforms it into a haunting metaphor. Characteristically, the poem uses everyday imagery in a startling way:
National Cold Storage Company
The National Cold Storage Company contains
More things than you can dream of.
Hard by the Brooklyn Bridge it stands
In a litter of freight cars,
Tugs to one side; the other, the traffic
Of the Long Island Expressway.
I myself have dropped into it in seven years
Midnight tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.
Add this to the national total -
Grant's Tomb, the Civil War, Arlington,
The young President dead.
Above the warehouse and beneath the stars
The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge.
But see,
They fall into the National Cold Storage Company
One by one. The wind off the river is too cold,
Or the times too rough, or the Bridge
Is not a harp at all. Or maybe
A monstrous birth inside the warehouse
Must be fed by everything - ships, poems,
Stars, all the years of our lives.