1. Introduction

David Shapiro (1947-2024) was a New York-based poet, critic, and historian of art who authored several books of poetry as well as critical essays. Born in Newark (New Jersey), he spent most of his life in New York. He became, in the 1970s, a co-anthologist of the so-called New York School of Poets.

In his attempts at mimesis, instead of describing natural beauty, the poet resorted to metaphors and similes deriving from images associated with various arts, including architecture and music. It would be useful though to consider Ricoeur’s opinion claiming that the 'metaphor is a quasi-bodily externalization' (Fink and Lease 150); the poetic interior is thus externalized through metaphors and similes, and we must not forget that the body has the crucial role in perception as the senses and the body’s journey through time and space allow us to experience the world around us. This poetic phenomenology permeates a significant portion of Shapiro’s poetry.

I propose that we look at the ways in which the body and its parts are represented in Shapiro’s poetry. We will see that – dispersed but present – are references to lips, fingers, hair, archaic torsos... Also, notably, the poetry invites sensual vocabulary like 'naked devices' (meaning figures of speech) and recycles the motif of nude.