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Harvey Shapiro wrote the following essay for David Ignatow, who died at the age of 83 on November 17, 1997. Ignatow was also a past President of the PSA.

"Every man to his kind of welcome in the world" is how David Ignatow begins "The Gentle Weight Lifter," the title poem of his second book, published in 1955. The gentle weight lifter was a city worker. "As the pattern is rigged, he must / get love and honor lifting barrels." The image in the poem overlays my first image of David, for I met him just before the publication of that book. He was a laborer in the city, working for his father's book bindery, living deep in Brooklyn with his wife Rose and son David, who was then about to go to City College.

I was recently out of Yale, school-trained on Eliotic dicta, immersing myself in New York, and David's welcome in the world was an important part of how I then saw the city. Here was a man, not out of the universities, maybe as lost as I was: "fixed in his form / save a hand reach from outside to pick him bodily up." His ambition was clear: to write his way out of Brooklyn and into a better life. The need to free himself from his father's domination, to earn money by his pen, to raise himself socially, gave pungency and reality to his poetry from the start. I remember his early manuscripts and can't recall ever seeing a poem that came out of someone else's book, that came out of literature.

"We are the life and the way," he concluded a poem to his wife Rose. And they seemed the life and the way to me then, that out of the struggle and the mess of daily living--their marriage was filled with scandalous scenes and explosions--one could find a kind of revelation and peace.

David's poetry finally did change his life. Wendell Berry offered David his position at the University of Kentucky while he was away, so David went out there to start his academic career. The change in status meant a lot to him, as did the release from running the city streets to earn a buck (after his father died, David sold the bindery and began selling paper to printers, and then went on to other jobs). Of course, many of his poems come out of those pre-academic years and it is that experience--shared by so many--of hustling for a buck, dealing with the boss, selling to people, which gives his poetry such wide appeal.

When he began teaching, he brought with him his energy and vision, as well as the city streets. This is how he described his approach to teaching when he first started, in a letter to me from Lexington, Kentucky, in September of 1965:

"[....] Some of the kids have qualities I very much want to encourage in them. They're not scared or naïve. They're really fighting their way out of the womb and want to kick hard at things. If I were a doctor, I'd say these are well-formed babies who will stand up in the world. I doubt though that I'll be able to do more than give them the encouragement they want. I've said to them that they'll do their best writing outside of school, if they write at all then, and that all I can do for them is show them a way and perhaps not the right way either, but at any rate they will know that they did have someone to encourage them briefly. No absentees so far[....]"

David was a confessional poet, but his life is in his lines. His son, soon after entering City College, became a schizophrenic and never recovered. David used to visit him in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. He transcribed one of those visits:

        Sunday at the State Hospital

        I am sitting across the table
        eating my visit sandwich.
        The one I brought him stays suspended
        near his mouth; his eyes focus
        on the table and seem to think,
        his shoulders hunched forward.
        I chew methodically,
        pretending to take him
        as a matter of course.
        The sandwich tastes mad
        and I keep chewing.
        My past is sitting in front of me
        filled with itself
        and trying with almost no success
        to bring the present to its mouth.

--Harvey Shapiro

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Bare Feet for David Ignatow The vulnerable, bare feet of old men protrude from sheets on gurneys in white halls-- my father's long since buried to bone, now this elder poet's uncalloused as his soul. I offer daisies or a perfumed rose to hold his eye against the hospital's blank walls of terror, then leave into August's sun sticky, thick as a white pull of taffy. I don't mourn death, but what my father's rage and blame could never give which this man yields abundantly. Gifts simple as a daisy's eye, a breath of rose, are replied to with a "Thank you," a kiss on hand or cheek, as at the far end of life's long corridor he exits, blowing kisses. Emptiness is bearable but filling it brings tears. --Karen Swenson