Tag Archives: collaborative poetry

David Lehman & David Shapiro

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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.

Ann Pedone

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from: The Monogamist

Then I was at the embassy.
Then I was picking up
chunks of ice a truck had
dumped off by the side
of the freeway.

Then I was in my car
listening to the radio.
A guy going on about the
history of European
socialism and this very
specific way men had
of jacking off during
the long fifteenth century.

Hic, haec, hoc won’t stop fucking me

I’ve run out of sugar to stop it.

 

When I was twelve or thirteen I lived for a
summer next to a cold creek. Back then that
was what was known as the politics of “long
distance women”, or forgetting to hold your
pocketbook close to your chest. Let’s get to
work! And all the husbands in line at
Safeway do their very best to remain unpainted,
although some are still slightly bruised. I still
remember that morning when I had the rare
luxury of moving the entire prehistory of my sex
life counter-clockwise. Smaller than usual atoms
are always the most fertile. And it calms me. Like
a brand new estrogen patch. Or pouring someone
else’s hot soup all the way down the drain.

 

Your cock looked a little dogwood the first time
you took it out. Had you left it inside another
language for too long? Or was it late to pick up
its prescription? Every hour more rescuers are
needed in the flood zone. More lines of cable
desperately have to be lain. What makes a line
in a poem? In a body? That so many migrant
boats are at the very bottom of the Mediterr
anean. Let me tell you what history teaches,
said mother Gertrude Stein. History teaches.

 

The Byzantine Empire is a sensation.
Like going in for a full bikini wax but
deciding instead to stop eating meat.
I know you had a pretty decent childhood.
And I admire you for that.
Which makes it even more strange that you
felt the need to write me a list of all your
sexual sticking points.

Since this morning I’ve taken a shower
three times execution style.
And now whenever someone says the
word “poem” I always hear “she really
wanted to do it but her prolapsed uterus kept getting in the way.”

 

What is rightly sucked.
What is left barren during all the long
summer months.
What happens to a man’s erection when you
tell him that Western Literature started
when a bunch of Greek guys tried to
fuck another man’s wife.

I stand or fall with the very thickness of this.

These pieces come from a project I’ve been working on called “The Monogamist.” In the work we follow a woman who’s doing something that I think we’ve all done-she’s trying to figure out the relationship she’s currently in-and in so doing, she thinks about language, the body, what it means to be a woman who is very loud about her own horniness-which my phone just auto-corrected to “hormones,” which, I suppose, makes sense since she is going through menopause.

This is what the project wants to be. What it refuses to be is yet another Madame Bovary story of a woman who suffers because of whom or how she loves. And it refuses to depict a woman’s body as solely a site of trauma, or of male desire. Instead, I wanted to blow these two things up and find a way to tell a different sort of story-while at the same time, always acknowledging and grappling with the fact that trauma and the male gaze are very real and ever-present.

Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53) and Liz (forthcoming from Tofu Arts Press) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Texas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, the Dialogist, Barrow Street, 2River and Tupelo Quarterly. She graduated from Bard College with a degree in English Literature, and has a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley. She is the founder and editor in chief of the journal and small press, αntiphony.

Maureen Seaton & Denise Duhamel

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12 Lines about Gender (Florida-Style)

I looked to the sky, a UFO above me, or was it a gender
rolling over and over in that big sky like a female
orgasm, delirious with flashing lights? Intercoastal intersex
is so lovely with its salt water and its fresh: true Two-Spirit
brackishness. I mistook a manatee for an androgynous
goddess of rising sea and sinking city, gender-fluid
silver ripples along her back. I spied an omega male
kayaking quietly through musky mangroves, all genderqueer
with their gorgeous underwater roots, their agenda agender
and big love (the nursery of the world!). One transgender
spaceship (or was it a cloud?) was tired of cisgender
sand hogs and sea bullies and wrote across the sky: Bye, Gender!

12 Lines about Gender (the Cosmos)

I believe there is no one on the planet luckier than a bi-gender,
who, like a hipster trickster, lives above the fray, unidentifiable
in their lovely/lanky/stunning/staggering way beyond cisgenders
and their scripts. Monday I’m a femme, Tuesday, androgynous
as a moon pouring light in a cosmos that’s so gender-fluid
it holds Castor, Pollux (twin boys) and Venus (so female,
she’s star of both morning and evening, leading the sun, male,
and earthly Gillette to name a razor in her honor). Agender
ex-planet, Pluto, boasts 5 moons of mythical transgendered
radiance. Astronomists spy on Nix, its interstellar intersex
moonstruck self, as they fly by Pluto to confirm its two-spirit
orbit. The Hubble zooms in on each lovely sphere, genderqueer.

A former proud contributor to Posit Journal, Maureen Seaton has authored twenty-one poetry collections, both solo and collaborative — most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry Press, 2019). Her awards include the Lambda Literary Award, an NEA, and two Pushcarts. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many fine literary journals and anthologies. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin, 2008, 2018), also garnered a “Lammy.” Seaton is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009); Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orhisis, 1997). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). With David Trinidad, they edited Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull, 2007).