THE ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD : Karl Shapiro on a Poem by Karl Shapiro

If the courts-martial had pointed a rifle at his head and demanded to know what he did believe in, he would have said poetry and would probably be shot at point-blank; for to assert a belief in poetry, with or without quotes, is to say that you believe in all beliefs, that you belong to the Church of Negative Capability. And this is a slap in the face to practically everybody who passes for reasonable in the serious world. Keats hit the nail on the head when he drove that point home; and he countersunk it when he added about poetical character that it has no character but lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated, and has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. Today he knew that in his world the foul predominates, and there was no help for that except somehow to make the foul fair, make the poem a thing of beauty no matter what the ingredients. His was a time when the conflict of emotions waged war in the heart and mind, and the poem could hold the foul ingredients in suspension until the work emerged a whole. All that was left was the dignity of the poem, the proof that it was worth doing after all; and even the unworthiness of one’s own feelings and sensations could be transmuted into a vision, however dark.

It was the way he wrote about the American place he thought the most beautiful, the university that Thomas Jefferson had designed and built in the mountains west of Richmond, and which he had attended for a semester before he quit. He wrote his bitter poem in a formal stanza he made up, the first one describing the place, the second the students, the third the aristocratic faculty, the fourth their “ancestors”--the hillbilly moonshiners who live in the mountains above the town and whose daughters supply the students with prostitutes--and the fifth “the nobleman” Jefferson asleep on his private mountain amidst, the poem said, his dying dream. What sparks a poem, its etiology, its inspiration (depending on the climate of the age) is usually something so remote, trivial or irrelevant that it never appears in the poem proper, and the little incident that arced like a tiny electric charge suddenly fused into the poem. He wanted to call it “University of Virginia,” but his brother suggested quietly that it would be better to call it just “University,” since the poem defined the particular place, anyway, and the full title would amount to an insult, especially as the brother had recently graduated from there with the highest honors and both of them held a deep love for the place.

The incident that sparked the poem was possibly very minor, maybe even an error of imagination. It didn’t matter, when he sat down to write the poem, aware that the deeper charge of feeling had to do with a slight, a personal snub that he extrapolated into a stern and colorful condemnation of the famous school. He was walking from class up the colonnade of the exquisite lawn with its simple Italianate style when he saw two students coming toward him, his best friends in the Norfolk high school, upper-class Jews, German Jews who belonged to the German-Jewish fraternity, the Zeebs they were called. The friends looked at him without recognition and walked on. At least he remembered it as without recognition, and he was stunned. They had been together like brothers at the high school when they were seniors, had been in one another’s houses. He had gone with them to their country club to play golf, been picked up by their chauffeur, had gone to their beach houses, and they were lifelong friends, he thought--until the snub.

He remembered how it worked in the South with white and black children who were allowed to, were encouraged to play together until a certain point, the cutoff point, when social intercourse was banned once and for all. Now he was the black boy cut off by the superior German Jews who at college age could no longer befriend a Russian Jew, as he was called, a lower order of Jew according to the hierarchy. The entire University of Virginia was a social hierarchy, beginning with the FFV’s, the First Families of Virginia, and ending with the blacks, who were not of course allowed to attend the university at all and whose slave quarters still stood behind the students’ rooms from the day when the Virginia gentleman student brought his personal slave with him to Mr. Jefferson’s famous university. But Jews could be admitted. The Virginia and in fact all the Southern aristocracy would not tolerate common anti-Semitism; that was ungentlemanly. The poet remembered how once he had been introduced at a Virginia party by the hostess as “this nice Hebrew gentleman.” So that’s what I am, he thought, not knowing whether to be insulted or not. As he brooded on the poem after he got home to his third-floor porch, it became clearer and clearer that he was writing about Virginia, and himself as rejected suitor, rejected even by the upper-class German Jews whose great-grandfathers had fought in the Confederacy for the Stars and Bars, while his ancestors were still being pillaged and murdered in Russian-Polish villages and ghettos. He wondered if his ex-friends had ever heard of Hitler, who was already in power and beginning to move against the German Jews.

He had written what he thought was the final draft of the poem, when he felt that something was wrong, out of place. He had decided to end the poem with a kind of dynamite charge which said in summary that

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew

Is the curriculum.

He saw that this accusation should come first and stand as the opening lines of the poem. He then rearranged the lines to fit this opening and the poem was done. He sent it to the famous poetry magazine, which accepted it immediately, and to his surprise it was not long before it was being reprinted in the University of Virginia’s student magazine. It was popular with students apparently and would remain so for a long time to come. He never had any regrets about the poem and it did not seem to damage his reputation at the school, even among the faculty.

The chances of a poem turning out successfully are, on the whole, somewhat minimal, but the poet must keep at it and take the failure with the losses or half-losses. Sometimes when he is working toward a style or a form, he pushes the poem to its extreme and ends up with an example of himself practicing preciosity, but this is as necessary to him as the successes. He cannot know his own limits until he has been there at the edges.

From “The Younger Son,” Volume I of “Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1988); Parts II and III are forthcoming.