Author: Shapiro, Karl (1913- 2000)
Title: Three Sonnets from the Place of Love. First Edition of the Published Broadside
Description: Washington, DC: The Black Sun Press, 1945. Letterpress. 31 x 40.5cm. As published in Portfolio One , edited by Caresse Crosby.. Critics applauded Shapiro’s early books, including Person, Place and Thing (1942), poems of which had received the Levinson Prize when first published in Poetry. Directly confronting subjects such as love, the history of the South in which Shapiro grew up an outsider, or the war in the South Pacific in which he served as a medical corps clerk, the poems were received as palpable “attacks.” His most frequent target in the poems, related Ross Labrie in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, was the “dehumanized technocracies” that fostered urban decadence and sent men and women to war without regard for their worth as persons. In a Poetry review of a much later book, Love & War, Art & God (1984), David Wojahn commented that social criticism has always been part of Shapiro’s work. Wojahn wrote, “From the very beginning, Shapiro identified himself as an iconoclast, and his outsider’s role extended beyond his attacks on social injustice. At a time before it was fashionable to do so, he proudly proclaimed his Jewishness and set himself against the main trends of Modernism.”... Coming of age in the United States had much to do with Shapiro’s development as an iconoclast. In his introduction to The Poems of a Jew (1958), Shapiro wrote, “As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families.” In a Paris Review interview, Shapiro explained how being both a Jew and a poet also partly accounts for his point of view as an “outsider”: “I’ve always had this feeling—I’ve heard other Jews say—that when you can’t find any other explanation for the Jews, you say, ‘Well, they are poets.’ [-] The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or a troublemaker - I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive—you have to at least pretend that you are ‘seriously’ in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all.” Wojahn pointed out that Shapiro’s stance as a social critic does not make the poems cynical. “For all his stridency, Shapiro could be a wonderfully tender poet - This side - materializes in empathic portraits like ‘The Leg’ and ‘The Figurehead,’ as well as in the poems that focus on Shapiro’s experience in the military during World War II.”... Shapiro published the Pulitzer prize-winning volume V-Letter and Other Poems in 1944 while serving with the US Army in New Guinea. V-letters were letters written by American soldiers and microfilmed by censors before delivery to the United States. The poems recreate the tension between the intensity of wartime experiences and a sense of detachment from events that many soldiers felt while trying to conduct their personal lives over the obstacles of distance and the added obstacle of the censors. Though he appreciated what the award would do to establish his career as a writer, Shapiro felt more honored when he found out that copies of V-Letter and Other Poems had been placed in all US Navy ship libraries... I. .
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See more books from our catalog: Ephemera
Title: Three Sonnets from the Place of Love. First Edition of the Published Broadside
Description: Washington, DC: The Black Sun Press, 1945. Letterpress. 31 x 40.5cm. As published in Portfolio One , edited by Caresse Crosby.. Critics applauded Shapiro’s early books, including Person, Place and Thing (1942), poems of which had received the Levinson Prize when first published in Poetry. Directly confronting subjects such as love, the history of the South in which Shapiro grew up an outsider, or the war in the South Pacific in which he served as a medical corps clerk, the poems were received as palpable “attacks.” His most frequent target in the poems, related Ross Labrie in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, was the “dehumanized technocracies” that fostered urban decadence and sent men and women to war without regard for their worth as persons. In a Poetry review of a much later book, Love & War, Art & God (1984), David Wojahn commented that social criticism has always been part of Shapiro’s work. Wojahn wrote, “From the very beginning, Shapiro identified himself as an iconoclast, and his outsider’s role extended beyond his attacks on social injustice. At a time before it was fashionable to do so, he proudly proclaimed his Jewishness and set himself against the main trends of Modernism.”... Coming of age in the United States had much to do with Shapiro’s development as an iconoclast. In his introduction to The Poems of a Jew (1958), Shapiro wrote, “As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families.” In a Paris Review interview, Shapiro explained how being both a Jew and a poet also partly accounts for his point of view as an “outsider”: “I’ve always had this feeling—I’ve heard other Jews say—that when you can’t find any other explanation for the Jews, you say, ‘Well, they are poets.’ [-] The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or a troublemaker - I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive—you have to at least pretend that you are ‘seriously’ in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all.” Wojahn pointed out that Shapiro’s stance as a social critic does not make the poems cynical. “For all his stridency, Shapiro could be a wonderfully tender poet - This side - materializes in empathic portraits like ‘The Leg’ and ‘The Figurehead,’ as well as in the poems that focus on Shapiro’s experience in the military during World War II.”... Shapiro published the Pulitzer prize-winning volume V-Letter and Other Poems in 1944 while serving with the US Army in New Guinea. V-letters were letters written by American soldiers and microfilmed by censors before delivery to the United States. The poems recreate the tension between the intensity of wartime experiences and a sense of detachment from events that many soldiers felt while trying to conduct their personal lives over the obstacles of distance and the added obstacle of the censors. Though he appreciated what the award would do to establish his career as a writer, Shapiro felt more honored when he found out that copies of V-Letter and Other Poems had been placed in all US Navy ship libraries... I. .
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Price: US$ 100.00 Seller: Wittenborn Art Books
- Book number: 16-5851
- Book number: 16-5851
See more books from our catalog: Ephemera