Pots of sun by Moe Shapiro from xPress of San Francisco
Moe Shapiro’s collection Pots of sun from xPress of San Francisco reads like a restless map of consciousness—part road journal, part spiritual interrogation, part wry, self-aware performance. Taken together, the poems you’ve provided suggest a poet working in the long shadow of Beat lineage while refusing to simply reenact it. Instead, Shapiro leans into immediacy, tonal shifts, and a kind of disarming plainspoken insight that often sneaks up on the reader.
At the core of the collection is a tension between ego and erasure. In “Unprized,” the narrator inflates himself—“master poet, songwriter extraordinaire”—only to undercut that bravado with humor and vulnerability, ending on the mock-plea, “Where’s my Nobel Prize?!” This oscillation between swagger and self-awareness becomes one of the book’s defining gestures. It’s not just comic; it’s diagnostic. The poet is examining the machinery of artistic identity in real time.
That same reflexive quality appears in “INSPIRATION,” where Shapiro traces poetic creation back through a lineage—Lu Ji, Pound, Snyder—before collapsing the distance between tool-making and poem-making. The insight that “A poem just like that” emerges from a sudden conceptual leap mirrors the invention of the axe handle itself . It’s a compact ars poetica: art as both inheritance and rupture.
Nature, especially the California landscape, functions as both setting and corrective. In “IN BIG TREES,” the speaker dissolves into redwoods, bark, fog, and filtered light, moving toward a quiet psychic resolution: “this peace of mind / finally / I see my foe rest.” The poem suggests that immersion in the natural world quiets an internal adversary—perhaps the ego so loudly foregrounded elsewhere. Similarly, “Somewhere Near Barstow” juxtaposes desert vastness with human noise, culminating in the desire to simply “sit here awhile” . These poems recall the ecological awareness of Gary Snyder but are less doctrinaire, more observational, grounded in lived moments.
Travel is another recurring structure—not just physical but existential. “Waking Up in Lone Pine” captures the disorientation and revelation of movement: cheap motels, unexpected vistas, and the sudden presence of Mt. Whitney “looming, huge & unexpected” . The poem’s plain diction allows the surprise to land cleanly, without ornament. Shapiro trusts the image.
Yet the collection is not content to remain in quietude. It repeatedly veers into critique—political, social, and spiritual. “Fleet Week” is one of the sharpest examples, transforming spectacle into indictment. The roaring jets become symbols of militarism and complicity, ending with the biting line: “You kicked me in the ass and charged me for it!” This is protest poetry, but it avoids abstraction by grounding itself in sensory immediacy.
Likewise, “A Poem for Officer Robles” channels anger through repetition— “you called me a weirdo”—building a litany of systemic injustices that implicate authority structures . The poem’s power lies in its accumulation; each iteration sharpens the accusation while reinforcing the speaker’s defiant identity.
Spirituality in the collection is treated with equal parts curiosity and skepticism. “The Spiritual Teacher” dismantles the figure of the guru, exposing manipulation and ego beneath the guise of enlightenment. In contrast, “I Want to Be Like Water” adopts a more sincere, almost Taoist aspiration toward flow and surrender. The coexistence of these tones—satirical and reverent—suggests that Shapiro is less interested in doctrine than in the experience of seeking.
There are also moments of surreal compression, as in “Romance,” where love is reframed through absurdist political metaphors, ending with the disarmingly ordinary: “Do you want to get coffee?” . This ability to pivot from the conceptual to the mundane is one of Shapiro’s strengths; it keeps the poems from becoming overly abstract.
Formally, the poems favor free verse with a conversational cadence. Line breaks often function as pauses in thought rather than strict rhythmic units, giving the work an improvisational feel. This looseness can occasionally verge on prosaic, but more often it creates a sense of intimacy—as if the reader is inside the poet’s thinking process rather than observing a polished artifact.
Ultimately, Shapiro’s collection is animated by a searching intelligence and a refusal to settle. It is a book that questions its own premises, laughs at its own ambitions, and keeps moving—across landscapes, identities, and states of mind. In that sense, it honors its Beat inheritance not by imitation, but by continuing the restless inquiry at its heart.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
