Among the poets of the quotidian, whose casual energy and allegiance to an American vernacular helped bring verse in this country out from under the shadow of T. S. Eliot and his poetics of impersonality, perhaps none is more concerned with the immediacy of daily life — the day as unit and medium, with all its shopping lists and vigils of memory — than James Schuyler. This is what makes his work so valuable to us. “I find James Schuyler’s poetry…” wrote Kenneth Koch, “honest in a way that poetry rarely is.” It is also what makes him so difficult to write about. His armchair taxonomies delight in the pleasure of surface and name in a way that tends to defer analysis. Take this passage from the long poem “Hymn To Life”:
A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there. Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
Hangs its seed balls out. The apples flower. The pear is past.
Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead. From the train
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower. Is it for miracles
We live? I love it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”
(“Hymn To Life”)
Asking questions of this poetry may be something like interrogating a season. Yet it is high time we turned our focus back on this much loved poet and some of his forgotten poems. The occasion is the publication of Other Flowers, a collection of works that, for one reason or another, fell through the cracks during the poet’s career. Thanks to editors James Meetze and Simon Pettet, these 165 poems and fragments which had been gathering dust in the archives of UC San Diego, are now available from Farrar Straus and Giroux. On Wednesday evening, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church will host a night of celebration, with appearances by an impressive line-up of poets and scholars, in Schuyler’s honor.
Other Flowers is more of the same good stuff from Schuyler, a few duds, and many gems — not the juvenilia one expects to find buried at the bottom of an archival box. There are several poems that increase our understanding of Schuyler’s range and intention. “Blank Regard,” “Loves Photograph (Or Father and Son)” and “Garment” (which includes the phrase “Strasse us Phoebus abedward”) are punchy with surreal imagery and staccato consonance, showing us an aural and visual side of Schuyler less commonly known. The sequence of poems that begins the book offers gorgeous insight into the poet’s East Aurora childhood. “A Blue Shadow Painting” provides a telling explication of Schuyler’s affinity for the work of Fairfield Porter, the painter who, if you are in the business of pairing New York School Poets with painterly analogues, as many are, is Schuyler’s double in the plastic arts. The poem begins with a revision of Pound’s modernist dictum:
of an evening real as paint on canvas.
The kind that makes me ache to have the gift
for dusting off clichés:
not Make it new, but See it, hear it, freshly
And concludes with intimations of Heidegger:
It is like this: the orange assertions, dark there-ness
of the tree, malleable steel-gray blueness of the ground; and sky
set against, no, with, living with, existing alongside of and part of,
the helter-skelter of rust brown, of swift indecipherable. The day
is passing, is past: mutable and immutable, came to live
on a small oblong of stretched canvas. Blue shadowed day,
under a milk-of-flowers sky, you’re a talisman, my Calais.
“[N]ot Make it new, but See it, hear it, freshly.” This valorization of passivity, taken here in negative relation to Pound, is perhaps Schuyler’s greatest contribution to the postmodern turn in American Poetry. It is also what distinguishes him from his contemporaries, who were anything but passive, and whose proximity seems to have somewhat eclipsed, as much as it has drawn attention to, this poet’s contribution.
Schuyler is often regarded as a secondary figure within the New York School of poets that included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, all of whom shared personal, professional, and aesthetic ties to the exploding New York art scene of the 50s and 60s. We tread dangerously when we place too much mythologizing emphasis on this coterie — who’s in and who’s out? — but in Schuyler’s case, this positioning is informative in terms of his poetics. He was the most timid and sedentary of the bunch. Diffident when it came to self-promotion, he did not publish until relatively late in the game and did not read his work publicly until the end of his career. He was a depressive and an alcoholic who survived largely on the charity and hospitality of his friends, living for a long period at the Porter residence and at the Chelsea Hotel (where he is commemorated by a plaque). Schuyler’s biographical shortcomings are, perhaps, recuperated in the form of an ethical comportment that comes across in his work. According to Ashbery, it is possible to justify Schuyler’s biography in terms of “his comforting world-view, which accepts failure as a higher success.” Helen Vendler wrote of Schuyler’s “morality of receptiveness and absence of ego.” The notion of this poetics of failure — its place in relation to other artistic programs of the postwar period — deserves a full study.
Schuyler did have his successes. Along with volumes of poetry, he published three novels (one in collaboration with Ashbery) and in 1981 won the Pulitzer prize. Since the time of his death in 1991, his poems, art writings, and letters have all been collected in lengthy volumes and his work continues to be a great influence on younger generations of writers. No poet or reader of poetry should have to suffer not having read Schuyler’s long poems: “The Crystal Lithium,” “The Morning of the Poem” and “A Few Days.” Unfortunately, this is only common knowledge among those who have read them. Now, thankfully, there is more of Schuyler to love and more, I expect, to come in regard to his life and work. (Nathan Kernan is at work on a biography that slated to appear who knows when?) As the remaining figures of the New York School near the end of their lives and we go on considering what they meant and mean to our culture, Schuyler will no doubt emerge — he has emerged — as a unique and refreshing voice in contemporary American poetry.
Andrew Gorin
Andrew Gorin’s work has appeared in Ostranenie Magazine and The Huffington Post. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. ...
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