“Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise.”

—  Karl Shapiro

Paris Review interview (1986)
Context: Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise. For very real reasons. Not only had I been out of the country when my first two books were published, but I have always been “out of the country” in the sense that I never had what ordinarily is thought of as a literary life, or been part of a literary group. What psychiatrists nowadays call a support system. I never had any of that and still don’t.

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Karl Shapiro 15
Poet, essayist 1913–2000

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