By HARVEY SHAPIRO [Smartish Pace] – You can’t be a poet and be completely bourgeois; you’re basically leading this insane life, that is, you’re spending your energies creating objects that have no value in the bourgeois world. It can hardly be called bourgeois. It’s not going to get you a dime. I’ve never expected it to get me anything, once I left the teaching life. In the academic world it will get you something. Outside of the academic world it really buys you nothing.
I wandered into the world of editing. I was a poet. I became an editor because I’d been teaching. I had taught at Cornell and I left Cornell and came down to the city and I was teaching at Queens at night. I worked for the Village Voice during the day when it started up. I was writing poems just on Jewish themes and publishing only in Commentary and Midstream. One of the editors of Commentary, Robert Warshow, was interested in my work. He asked me one day what I was doing, what my plans were. He could see that I was quite at sea in the city, didn’t know what I was going to do. He suggested that I try some editing for them and gave me some piecework. He was very young but died very suddenly. I was given his desk. and that’s how I became an editor. Happenstance. I don’t think one could say I chose a career, but that’s how I’ve made my living for many years.
Interviewed by Norman Finkelstein and continued at Smartish Pace | More Chronicle & Notices.
