Karl Shapiro - An Influence on Ted Kooser

Karl Shapiro

Ted Kooser has named several poets from the past century who have influenced his works, though one of the most prominent of those poets that he mentions is Karl Shapiro. Kooser studied under Shapiro in his college years, so it is no surprise that Kooser has cited Shapiro as one of his major influences. Kooser jokingly admits that he was almost more excited to be in the presence of Shapiro than to learn from him.

Karl Jay Shapiro was born in 1913. He was the 5^th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and started his term in 1946. Shapiro attended the University of Virginia before World War II, then left to serve in the war. While he served, Shapiro continued to compose poetry and in fact won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for V-Letter and Other Poems while stationed in New Guinea. Shapiro was later an English professor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln where Ted Kooser would later study under him. Shapiro retired in the 1980s and has since passed away in the year 2000.

The following poems, Manhole Covers and The Piano Tuner’s Wife, are two poems I discovered by Shapiro that struck me as interesting. Kooser’s works make heavy usage of imagery and diction, and Shapiro’s Manhole Covers uses both to a significant degree.

Read the following two poems by Shapiro:

Manhole Covers

The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).
This rustproof artifact of my street,
Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,
Bitten at the edges,
Strong with its cryptic American,
Its dated beauty.

The Piano Tuner’s Wife

That note comes clear, like water running clear,
Then the next higher note, and up and up
And more and more, with now and then a chord,
The highest notes like tapping a tile with a hammer,
Now and again an arpeggio, a theme
As if the keyboard spoke to the one key,
Saying, No interval is exactly true,
And the note whines slightly and then truly sings.

She sits on the sofa reading a book she has brought,
A ray of sunlight on her white hair.
She is here because he is blind. She drives.
It is almost a platitude to say
That she leads him from piano to piano.
And this continues for about an hour,
Building bridges from both sides of the void,
Coasting the chasms of the harmonies.

And in conclusion,
When there is no more audible dissent,
He plays his comprehensive keyboard song,
The loud proud paradigm,
The one work of art without content. 

I liked Manhole Covers for its seemingly mundane topic, though in fact I found it quite profound. Shapiro uses a great amount of detail to highlight the “notched and whelked and pocked and smashed” manholes that we are so used to seeing in the United States. When he regards manhole covers as “rustproof artifact[s],” Shapiro seems to be noting the prosaic nature of the United States. The only things we will have to show for our history in years to come will be “iron-old” manhole covers.

Likewise, Shapiro’s The Piano Tuner’s Wife makes heavy usage of imagery, much like Kooser. He describes the notes as sounding like “water running clear” and the chords as sounding like “tapping a tile with a hammer.” He includes somewhat extraneous details about the couple, mentioning that “she drives” and leads her husband, the piano tuner, from “piano to piano.”