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Just as Anonymous is the most prolific writer in English, so Open appears at more poetry performances than any other reading....
Bob Holman
“A Poet Named Open”
We make mistakes
For example, I’m reading
The NYC Poetry Calendar
for April on this
metropolitan spring afternoon
And I read that today Cookie Mueller
whom I slightly know from an
argument with another poet
and also a review she did of
my Melancholy show
and Bernadette and Phillip Good
plus Open will be reading
I don’t know Open
I think it’s not Oppen who’s dead
and unfairly objectified
I guess it’s a young graffiti
Poet, perhaps taking a single
name, in 19th Century excess
They’re reading at the Anarchist Cellar
It’s a perfect name for a young
perhaps slightly jejune ethical anarchist
Then I see on the 16th Open is reading
again, this time with my friend Joe
Ceravolo and my former student Joe
Lewis
Now I’m really intrigued
It seems like a blitz, an Open blitz
perhaps he’s publishing his first
fundamentally daring volume
I think of my translation of
Baudelaire’s Luxe calme et volupé
Rich calm and open
Why haven’t I thought of a decent
nom de plume like Open
Why settle down with four David
Shapiros
another living just a few blocks away
another painting in a style not mine
Perhaps this Open is the new
Rimbaud and uses my poems for
toilet paper, or perhaps we could
be friends, friends with Open
Again he appears at the Manhattan Public
Library
this time in lower case letters
and than again at Maxwell’s for $3
But my brain adjusts itself to the light
It’s simply an open reading that’s implied
This poet does not exist, though he should
Open a young poet I should have invented
as when I thought all of conceptual art
would have been decent as one short story
by B
Oh, Open, you whom I would have read,
and you who would have read me!
David Shapiro
Born in l947, David Shapiro was a violinist in his youth. His grandfather was the great Jewish cantor and composer Berele Chagy, many of records dating from l9l3 are still available. David received his degrees from Columbia and Cambridge Universities, but before he was fifteen he had put together many privately printed volumnes of poetry. At fifteen he met Frank O'Hara, corresponded with John Ashbery, and was collaborating with Kenneth Koch and many painters of the so-called New York School.
David is a tenured art historian at William Paterson University. He has written over twenty volumes of poetry and prose, including the first book on Ashbery, the first book on Jim Dine's painting, the first book on Johns' drawings (the last two from Abrams) and the first study of Mondrian's much tabooed flower studies. He has translated books from French and Spanish and recently edited a book on aesthetics: Uncontrollable Beauty, ranked second among the best 1998 books on art by Amazon.com.
Each of Shapiro's books has collaborations with children, including his son, with whom he is currently writing a book and who has often read with him at St. Mark's Church and elsewhere. He is working on a new book of poetry, and a selected poems and a selected essays. He is tenured as an art historian and teaches architects poetry and the idea of the city in French literature at Cooper Union.
His political activities show up in his play with Laurie Anderson and Stephen Paul Miller, Harrisburg Mon Amour, an anti-nuclear play written for one actor playing two boys on a bus heading toward a nuclear meltdown. That was performed at The Kitchen by Taylor Mead with sets by Linda Francis. He edited An Anthology of New York Poets from 1964 on to bring attention to the work of certain neglected poets. He believes that poetry shoiuld not be reduced by any dogmas. His last books include Lateness, To an Idea, House (Blown Apart) and After a Lost Original, which he regards as a kind of string quartet for unaccompanied voice (all published by Overlook).
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