Karl Shapiro Quotations

My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.

Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.

The doctor punched my vein, the captain called me Cain, upon my belly sat the sow of fear.

Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

In the tight belly of the dead, Burrow with hungry head, And inlay maggots like a jewel.

Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name.

The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?

But this invites the occult mind, Cancels our physics with a sneer, And spatters all we knew of denouement,Across the expedient and wicked stones.

Give me the free and poor inheritance, Of our own kind, not furniture, Of education, or the prophet's pose, The general cause of words, the hero's stance, The ambitions incommensurable with flesh.

We too are ashes as we watch and hear The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise, Of one whose promised thoughts of other days, Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed, The service record of his youth wiped out, His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.

We are deranged, walking among the cops, Who sweep glass and are large and composed.

There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war. Cervantes Every war has its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.

To girls and wives always alive and fated; To men and scholars always dead like Greek And always mistranslated.

I see slip to the curb the long machines, Out of whose warm and windowed rooms pirouette, Shellacked with silk and light, The hard legs of our women.

O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes.

Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air, Sees down the street, And in the camera of my eye depicts, Row-houses and row-lives: Glass after glass, door after door the same.

Oh, it is I, Incredibly skinny, stooped, and neat as pie, Ignorant as dirt, erotic as an ape, Dreamy as puberty - with dirty hair!

However others calculate the cost, To us the final aggregate is one, One with a name, one transferred to the blest; And though another stoops and takes the gun, We cannot add the second to the first.

And in a comic mood, In mid-air take to bed a wife.

The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.

Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems.

The good poet sticks to his real loves, to see within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

A man's house is his stage. Others walk on to play their bit parts. Now and again a soliloquy, a birth, an adultery.

Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil's had the final say.

Every war is its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.

Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, tending to make man shallow or insane.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

The proverbist knows nothing of the two sides of a question. He knows only the roundness of answers.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

Poetry is not a way of saying things; it's a way of seeing things.