The Bourgeois Poet

This is Karl Shapiro's firs volume of poetry since Poems of a Jew (1958). All of these new poems are in a form Mr. Shapiro experimented with occasionally years ago (there are two examples in Trial of a Poet, 1947) and which he has been using more frequently in recent years- a form in which he eschews not only rhyme but verification as well. It is his belief that these two traditional attributes of poetry are nonessential and artificial impediments to the poetic process.