Interview: David Shapiro

Today in January Magazine, contributing editor Richard Klin interviews the poet David Shapiro, a winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Klin catches Shapiro in a reflective, even pensive, mood. “One shouldn’t think of the future when one is lucky to be alive.” Says Klin:

An erudite sheen runs through the years-long output, an allusive corpus unafraid -- with references to Percy Sledge and Nancy and Sluggo -- to detour into the colloquial. Newark-raised, Shapiro has not shied away from his Garden State roots, (Poems from Deal, its title taken from a Jersey-shore town, came out in 1969) taking his place, along with Ginsberg and Williams, as bards of this much maligned state.

“We are now,” Shapiro says of his poetic peers, “the grandfathers and less hated by the young.”

The interview is here.