'The Everyday Dignity of Our Town'

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.” As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly before I turned thirteen. I’d been a reader all along, certainly more so than my family and kids I knew at school. But books were strictly entertainment, a natural alternative to television. But that year, after reading his obituary, I discovered T.S. Eliot. I have no idea why he so quickly meant so much to me, why I personalized him as though he were my uncle. Soon I discovered Updike, Kafka and, among other things, the poetry anthologies of Oscar Williams. In one of them I found the poem “Scyros” by Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), fell for it, heavily, and proceeded to read everything by him I could find. At first I concentrated on the poems he wrote while serving with the Army in the Pacific. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written while he was stationed in New Guinea. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year and he went on to…