A Momentary Glory. Harvey Shapiro

       EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

      In his author’s note to The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems (2006), Harvey Shapiro tells us that “the poems included here constitute the body of my work as I now see it. I count myself a lucky survivor and am pleased, as I hope readers will be, with what I’ve done with my time.” Harvey carried on, still a lucky survivor, for another seven years. He passed away on January 7, 2013, just a few weeks before his eighty-ninth birthday, after being hospitalized for a number of months. Harvey had appointed me his literary executor in 2002, a couple of years after we had met. I was deeply moved, and a little overwhelmed, by the trust he put in me, coming in, as it were, rather late in the story. But he was pleased by what I had written about him, a long essay on the Jewish dimension of his work that first appeared in Religion and Literature and later was revised for my book on Jewish American poetry, Not One of Them in Place. (The title, not incidentally, comes from Harvey’s poem “The Six Hundred Thousand Letters.”) In the spring of 2002, he and his partner, Galen Williams, visited us in Cincinnati, and he gave a wonderful reading at Xavier. Otherwise, I would see Harvey on my trips to New York, and we would speak by phone regularly. Though he would tell me how his work was coming along, especially during that period when he was assembling The Sights Along the Harbor, he did not usually share his new poems with me. About twenty pages of new poetry appears in Sights; after its publication, I knew he was continuing to write at a leisurely pace, and he would casually mention poems forthcoming in one publication or another. My impression, therefore, when I went to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights a week after his death to look over his papers, was that I would find only a handful of poems beyond the ones that he had published since Sights had appeared.

      As it turns out, I was utterly mistaken. Harvey had left behind a mass of manuscript pages in two file folders. I found drafts of the dozen or so poems that had appeared in periodicals, but they were mixed together with close to a hundred pages of new work. These pages, apparently printed from Harvey’s laptop, were undated, but from internal evidence, I could tell that most of the poems had been written in the last six years. I realized quickly that there was a book here that needed to be shaped, and that Harvey was probably looking toward such a book before he entered the hospital for the last time. I spent two days on Montague Street. There on the thirty-third floor, with the apartment’s magnificent views looking south across Brooklyn and west across lower Manhattan and the harbor, I sorted through the files, keeping most of the work and setting aside only those pages that seemed unfinished or still in the process of revision. Most of the pages were either completely clean or very lightly emended in Harvey’s hand. A word might be cut or a line break altered, and in each case it struck me as just the right decision. I returned to Cincinnati, and a week later, Galen mailed me photocopies of the poems.

      Organizing the manuscript proved relatively straightforward. In these poems, Harvey’s overlapping subjects and themes remain the same as in the past, as readers familiar with his work will quickly see. There are poems about the places where – he spent his last years, wry observations of city life, and of the Hamptons, and of the Florida Keys. There are poems based on his service in World War II (in 2003, the Library of America published the anthology that Harvey edited, Poets of World War II). There are love poems — Harvey is one of our great erotic poets. There are poems concerning some of the poets who meant the most to him, and of the writing life. And there are many poems of the sort that I consider an updated version of wisdom literature, suffused with Jewish irony and compassion, often anecdotal and bordering on the parabolic. But in all of the poems in this book, to an even greater extent than the work in How Charlie Shavers Died (2001) and the new poems section in Sights Along the Harbor, there is an intensity, an urgency, and a deep, meditative awareness that I find quietly astonishing.

      These last poems constitute a sustained act of inspired writing, the passionate outpouring of a brilliantly gifted poet in the face of age, illness, and mortality. Their language is charged with unprecedented gravitas. Yet the work is as edgy as ever, and Harvey never abandons the supple, even jazzy wit that is central to his style. The verbal economy, the razor-sharp lineation, the perfectly timed presentation of detail that are his trademarks — all are subtly at work here, never flashy, still in the service of a poetic sensibility in search of what Harvey always called “the way.” Rabbi Nachman’s vision of the world as a narrow bridge, about which Harvey first wrote many years ago, appears one last time. Yet the fear of crossing that bridge is all but gone, and a great calm and acceptance of the world and its “momentary glory” prevails. And not only of the world, but of its Author. As Harvey declares in “Psalm,”

      … before you

      close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,

      remember that I always praised your world

      and your splendor and that my tongue

      tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.

      Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

      Here then is Harvey Shapiro’s Book of Life, his Sefer Hachayim.

       Norman Finkelstein

       Cincinnati, Ohio

       May 2013

      A Momentary Glory