Bent Aphorisms
I.
Homage to Leibniz and Stevens
“Leibniz is a philosopher without flash”
A Welsh terrier is a Scottish terrier without flash.
Ice is snow without flash.
A blizzard is a snowstorm with flash.
Leopardi is a pessimist with flash.
Many New York poets are Frank O’Hara without flash.
Love is friendship with flash.
A flashlight by Jasper Johns is a flashlight with flash.
An aphorism may be a sentence with flash.
—David Shapiro, 3/1/03
With Flash
The rose that was red with a black border is ash.
Every rock star in London is Jumping Jack Flash.
The priest is he who says: let us dish.
Thou shalt not eat fish.
Write with brio, with dash.
To write a book is not to be abashed.
The landscape is female: this hill, that bush.
This is the picture I painted without a brush.
Your sins are not stains that will come out in the wash.
—David Lehman, 3/1/03
II.
All Roads
All roads lead to poetry.
Poetry is the opposite of stupidity, not prose.
Poetry is not a game, nor is it a dream.
But poetry is a big dream and full of vertigo.
Poetry…or have I said too much already? Be compact.
Poetry and architecture: Marriage of.
The young aphorism is godlike; the old aphorism gets the young worm.
He was such an Oulipian he would rather make the bed than lie in it. Sleep,
restless grammarians.
—David Shapiro, 3/3/03
Aphoristic Agenda
All poems lead to the highway (my way).
Poetry is to dance as architecture is to romance.
The young poem is a god. The old poem is a goddess.
He was such an Olympian he lifted weights between shots of Maker’s Mark.
Vertigo is a dream that contains the index of forgotten books.
No one compiled the index, no one wrote the books,
yet they exist and in the proper order.
What else is the universe if not a university library
ten minutes before closing time?
—David Lehman, 3/3/03
The Inevitable “But”
But who can paint the snow?
Can you?
My nudes wear snowflake bikinis.
A Barnard grad on skis
asked: may I edit your genius?
(But who can paint the snow?)
A good fact-checker, for such am I,
can collect flaws and correct laws.
(She wore a snowflake bikini.)
You are merry because you saw
The Cherry Orchard and did not cry.
(Did you paint it blue, or did I?)
The aphorisms were decent, the sonnets obscene.
You painted from the body, I from the screen.
(My nudes wear snowflake bikinis.)
Like the grandson of a serf, I work at home
and stare at the sea on the screen.
In my nostrils, the smell of the foam.
(But who can paint the snow?)
—David Lehman and David Shapiro (January 2009)
Poem in a Chinese Form
Do you love sweetness?
Are you ready to take dictation
Now and for the rest of your life?
Into the aurora let a star burst
A star – birth
And thousands of butterflies.
“Have you ever had a good job?”
“Never.”
I cannot see “it” in the sky
Though I conceived it in the sky.
Birds are evil, they say.
What kind of bird am I?
Shelley died
In the quarrel between wind and wave,
But did he know the turbaned Turk
Who watched Olivier play Othello?
In the middle of the performance Desdemona shut up
In the middle of Chinese forms
The dead live in the game of our youth
Like a child’s game, but what are the rules?
I don’t know
An amphitheater of the angels
Fred Dupee told me to beware of “of”
He killed himself
You didn’t know that?
I hear that Les is very sick
I’m afraid Les is worse than very sick
I said an amphitheater of the angels
“May I plagiarize you?”
I wrote to John Ashbery.
“What did he say?” “He said yes.
“John was so noble.”
Parkinson’s is even worse than its name
And it comes in many varieties
Bruce Kawin praised your last book
I wonder what the last book is
“Sisyphus pumps”: is that what you said?
Do you trust him?
Or is he a “man of integrity” in whom
Wretchedness and splendor coexist?
One day I’ll show you my favorite letter
From John he wrote “we both
Seem to be fascinated by cars”
But I didn’t know I was
Maybe we’ll be invited to the White House soon
I’ve been to the Black House
Who lives there?
Good question
Birds are evil, they say
Amorous, angry or enraged
Which bird are you?
I’m the cock that crows at dawn
The lines I liked are
“His mother was an actress”
“Things recur as in Proust”
He liked “urgent masks”
You don’t want to fall down in front of someone
Falling down alone can be enjoyable
If you’re at death’s door and don’t want to knock
When you’re standing on the porch with your psychiatrist
Anne Porter said
We’re built for heaven
There are many universes
But in all of them I’ll find you
—David Lehman and David Shapiro (November 5, 2019)
Notes
On New Year’s Day 2003 David Shapiro suggested that he and I correspond in poetry on a daily basis. We started with haiku in January, went on to couplets in February and aphorisms in March before running out of gas after a week of trading sonnets in April. Shapiro chose the forms, but I am not certain which one of us came up with the title “Bent Aphorisms” for the first few we did in March.
We started writing “The Inevitable ‘But’” without realizing that a loose villanelle would result from our effort, but we found out quickly enough. David S. wrote lines one and three; snow was one of his go-to images.
Our aim in “Poem in a Chinese Form” was to write, by way of a telephone conversation, a poem in a Chinese form David S. called the “four by four.” David L., transcribing the exchange, took this to mean two stanzas of four lines each. Ideally each block of eight lines would make a separate poem. David L. acknowledged his aim was to showcase his friend’s mind in motion.
—David Lehman
David Lehman’s new book of sixty sonnets, Ithaca, was published by Criterion Books in February 2026. His recent nonfiction books include One Hundred Autobiographies and The Mysterious Romance of Murder. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP. Lehman, the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, divides his time between New York City and Ithaca, New York.
David Shapiro was a violin prodigy as a boy. January, his first book of poems, was published in 1965 when he was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Columbia, where he was an associate editor of Columbia Review, and won a Kellett Fellowship for two years of graduate study at Care College, Cambridge, England. It was as students at Columbia that Shapiro met (and mentored) David Lehman, who graduated two years after Shapiro and followed him as a Kellett Felllow in Cambridge. Other books Shapiro published before he turned twenty-five include Poems from Deal, A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel, and The Page-Turner. Among more recent collections are New and Selected Poems (Overlook Press, 2013) and In Memory of an Angel (City Lights, 2017). After earning a PhD at Columbia, Shapiro taught at Columbia, William Paterson University, and The Cooper Union, while producing numerous prose works, including monographs on John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, and Piet Mondrian. Shapiro’s You Are the You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School —introduced by David Lehman and edited by Kate Farrell — appeared from MadHat Press in spring 2024. Prolific, enthusiastic, and indefatigable, Shapiro collaborated on poems with numerous partners. He died in 2025 after a long illness.
