Alan Shapiro told Contemporary Authors: "When I was writing the poems in my first two books, After the Digging and The Courtesy, most American poetry was committed to free verse lyric of some kind, and most poets and critics of poetry assumed that formal verse was old-fashioned and mechanical, incapable of responding to the urgencies of the contemporary world. Poets as different as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Galway Kinnell, and Adrienne Rich claimed that only free verse and its improvised rhythms could render faithfully the contours of immediate experience, and that the business of the poet was not to traffic in ideas or statements but to present and juxtapose images and feelings with as much concreteness and intensity as possible. There was, moreover, almost exclusive attention to the poem as self-expression, and to form as the transparent medium of personality. Although my first two books differ greatly in style and subject, they share the ambition to go against the grain of many of these assumptions and tendencies and to attempt to win back some of the territory given up to prose.

" After the Digging comprises two suites of historical narratives, one devoted to the potato famine in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, and the other to the seventeenth-century American Puritans. My intention was to enter into lives foreign to my own as imaginatively and accurately as I could, so as to better understand the historical and cultural circumstances out of which arose the Irish famine on the one hand, and the Salem witch trials on the other.

" The Courtesy deals with more contemporary experience: the problems of familial and religious continuities in a secular and mobile culture, and the tensions between desire and circumstance in the context of love. Most of these poems are in rhyme and meter, yet the style is plain and idiomatic. Although The Courtesy is primarily a book of lyric poems concerned with personal experience, I am less interested in autobiography or confessional self-exposure than in distilling from personal experience some sort of understanding that can clarify, if not resolve, emotional and psychological complexity.

"In a way . . . Happy Hour, attempts to combine the best qualities of After the Digging and The Courtesy. All these poems are grounded in contemporary life, yet most of them are narrative, not lyrics, and are therefore only indirectly personal. I am still working in a plain style but there is greater attention to circumstance and detail, not quite so much exposition, and there is also a wider range of forms—a variety of free verse lines as well as some traditional measures. The concerns of Happy Hour are similar to those of The Courtesy, but in the best poems they are treated more inclusively, more dramatically.

"It is difficult to say exactly where my new work is going. One proceeds intuitively, from line to line, and poem to poem, and it is only in retrospect that one can see how the work developed. What I hope is that the poems I am writing now continue to cultivate the same inclusive tendency begun in Happy Hour. I want to write poems that can speak to individual experience without restricting themselves to private mood and feeling, the staples of the lyric mode.

"During the late 1970s and early 1980s I began to write essays and reviews on contemporary poetry, and since then criticism has become a vital aspect of my intellectual and artistic life. The criticism, however, is very much a poet's, not a scholar's. It is highly polemical, preoccupied with principles of judgment and evaluation, and eager to challenge the assumptions many poets of my generation have uncritically accepted, assumptions that I believe have a limiting effect on the practice and understanding of the art. Perhaps a less fancy way of putting this would be to say that like all poet-critics, I write criticism to create an audience for the poetry I am struggling to write and the poetry by others I admire. I want to stress, too, that the criticism follows from the poetry, not the other way around. My conception of what poetry is or can be changes as my own work develops and evolves. Thus, just as I find it difficult to forecast the poems I may go on to write, so also I find it difficult to say what direction my criticism will take in the future."

The critical essays of which Shapiro spoke were collected for a 1993 volume, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination: Essays, 1980-1991. He then wrote two acclaimed volumes of memoirs. The Last Happy Occasion was nominated for a 1996 National Book Critics Circle award and recounts incidents in his life—skipping synagogue services in order attend an automobile show, the Woodstock music festival, a girlfriend and their contentious relationship, the birth of his son—and anchors each with a poem from another writer, among them Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, and Elizabeth Bishop. "Shapiro uses poetry and its 'transformative power' as the basis for his fascinating perceptions about a relatively ordinary life," remarked a Publishers Weekly writer, who designated it a book of unusual interest and merit. New York Times Book Review critic Emily Barton also commended Shapiro's effort, calling it "touching and intelligent, emotionally satisfying and eloquent testimony to the power of poetry to instruct, heal and inspire."

A tragic family loss incited Shapiro to pen his second volume of memoir, 1997's Vigil. It recounts the period of time he spent at the bedside of his sister, Beth, at a hospice in Texas, before her death of breast cancer at the age of forty-nine. Shapiro's chapters chronicle more than her final moments, however: Beth was a radical who been a founding member of the famous Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. She married an African-American man, and there were some years of strife in the family that only her illness would heal. Progressive writer Anne-Marie Cusac called Vigil "an elegiac book—celebratory and grieving. Shapiro lets us see his passionate sister and her rich life. . . . And, with Shapiro and the other family members who make their awkward, tender amends, we watch Beth die." Steven Harvey, who reviewed it for Brightleaf, also praised Shapiro's effort. "At times the book is lyrical, especially passages about the ugliness of dying," he observed. "There is the description of the last time Beth walked—it is to go to the bathroom. In the struggle to do so on her own, she summons her last reserves of modesty and dignity." Harvey praised the literary gift that Shapiro brought to such a wrenching topic. "The poet is in control, too, when, near the end of the ordeal, Shapiro has a surreal vision of his sister's soul escaping from her body. He imagines her as a Rockette with a Cheshire cat smile." A Publishers Weekly reviewer also commended his talents: "Once again, Shapiro's perfect pitch lacks sentimentality but brims with the truest of emotions and observations."

Shapiro has continued to publish other volumes of poetry after Happy Hour, which a 1987 New York Times Book Review from J.D. McClatchy extolled for its new direction. "Shapiro has cultivated a new generosity of detail and insight," noted McClatchy, and found some of the longer works "more like versified short stories than poems, but their skill and force are moving." Volumes following this include Covenant, published in 1991, and Mixed Company, which appeared in 1996. In The Dead Alive and Busy, published in 2000, the death of his sister continues to preoccupy Shapiro and his work. The aging of his parents also shapes some of the verse, such as "The Bath," about helping his father. "His poetry is a theater of disease; it makes illness hold stage center and demands an unflinching audience," noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor of this volume. Classical and biblical themes concerning insurmountable tasks or misery—particularly the figures of Sisyphus and Job—crop up throughout the volume. Its title refers to Shapiro's conviction that the dead continue to be a presence for the living. New York Times writer Michael Hainey likened Shapiro to a medium whose poetry traverses both worlds, the dead and the undead, "and, in the process, gives those of us on this side of the great divide a new way of seeing. His unblinking gaze yields unforgettable images."

In 2002, Shapiro published Song and Dance, a volume of poems centered around the tragic loss of his brother, David, to brain cancer. This occurred only three years after his sister's death from breast cancer. The poems celebrate his brother's life, as well as the emotions surrounding his sickness during his last painful months.

Shapiro, who left Northwestern University to accept a professorship at the University of North Carolina, has read his work at the White House as a guest of the Clintons and Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress, Robert Pinsky. On that occasion, he delivered "On Men Weeping," a poem in part about Michael Jordan and one of his NBA championships.

Related poems

Related authors