David Shapiro, a cerebral yet deeply personal poet aligned with the so-called New York School, whose highly lyrical work balanced copious literary allusions with dreamlike imagery and intimate reflections drawn from family life, died on Saturday in the Bronx. He was 77.
His wife, Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospice facility, was Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Shapiro published 11 volumes of poetry during his six-decade career. His book “You Are You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art and the New York School” is scheduled to be published this fall. His 1971 collection, “A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel,” was nominated for a National Book Award.
He was also an art historian, producing monographs on Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and other painters. And he maintained a career in academia that included decades as an art history professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. In the 1970s, he taught English and comparative literature at his alma mater, Columbia University.
It was there as an undergraduate that he first tasted fame, albeit unwittingly, during the landmark student uprising in the spring of 1968, which was sparked by outrage over the university’s ties to research for the Pentagon, its plans to build a gym on nearby public land and other issues.
Mr. Shapiro was just weeks from graduating when another student photographed him when the office of the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, in Low Library was occupied.
