Tagged: James Schuyler
Lifesaving Poems: James Schuyler’s ‘June 30, 1974′
James Schuyler is probably best known for being a central member of the New York School of poets comprising Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Having said that, it is probably fair to say that he is not as well known as his compatriots, a state of affairs which is neither just nor entirely explicable.
I was reminded of Schuyler’s delicate, unnerving, gossipy and immediate poems this week as I read an essay of my friend Cliff Yates in which he describes the composition of poetry as an act about itself as much as the ‘subect matter’ at hand.
Schuyler’s project can be categorised in this way, it seems me. His long poems ‘The Morning of the Poem’, ‘A Few Days’ and ‘Hymn to Life’ range widely in their content but are all ultimately about themselves as constructed annotations of minute lived experience. They do not pretend to have been written at one sitting, often notating changes in weather, seasons and news of friends and in the wider world; in this way they are catalogues of experience, more akin to albums of snapshots than portraits in close-up.
What makes Schuyler such a delight to read and re-read, is that he was no less accomplished at the short lyric ‘poem of the moment’. ‘June 30, 1974′ is a good example of how these poems often proceed: there are mentions of specific friends and places, gossip, tabletalk, and a rapturous adoration of the natural world. It is also a good example of the poem as enactment of its own composition.
I like spending time with Schuyler’s poems very much. In contrast to his perhaps more famous colleagues I feel the need to read him very slowly, one poem at a time, savouring the experiences that are being described. I do think he was a great love poet, by which I mean he was in love with every second he was alive and with the process of writing it down.
The poem below feels casual, almost throwaway. Can serious poetry be written at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning after a dinner party, while the rest of the house is asleep? Schuyler seems to imply not only that it can but that it is the true fountain spring of writing, among the dishes and the coffee cups, alone and in perfect quiet.
June 30, 1974
for Jane and Joe Hazan
Let me tell you
that this weekend Sunday
morning in the country
fills my soul
with tranquil joy:
the dunes beyond
the pond beyond
the humps of bayberry -
my favorite shrub (today,
at least) – are
silent as a mountain
range: such a
subtle profile
against a sky that
goes from dawn
to blue. The roses
stir, the grapevine
at one end of the deck
shakes and turns
its youngest leaves
so they show pale
and flower-like.
A redwing blackbird
pecks at the grass;
another perches on a bush.
Another way, a millionaire’s
white chateau turns
its flank to catch
the risen sun. No
other houses, except
this charming one,
alive with paintings,
plants and quiet.
I haven’t said
a word. I like
to be alone
with friends. To get up
to this morning view
and eat poached eggs
and extra toast with
Tiptree Goosberry Preserve
(green) -and coffee,
milk, no sugar. Jane
said she heard
the freeze-dried kind
is healthier when
we went shopping
yesterday and she
and John bought
crude blue Persian plates.
How can coffee be
healthful? I mused
as sunny wind
streamed in the car
window driving home.
Home! How lucky to
have one, how arduous
to make this scene
of beauty for
your family and
friends. Friends!
How we must have
sounded, gossiping at
the dinner table
last night. Why, that
dinner table is
this breakfast table:
“The boy in trousers
is not the same boy
in no trousers,” who
said? Discontinuity
in all we see and are:
the same, yet change,
change, change. “Inez,
it’s good to see you.”
Here comes the cat, sedate,
that killed and brought
a goldfinch yesterday.
I’d like to go out
for a swim but
it’s a little cool
for that. Enough to
sit here drinking coffee,
writing, watching the clear
day ripen (such
a rainy June we had)
while Jane and Joe
sleep in their room
and John in his. I
think I’ll make more toast.
James Schuyler, from Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993)
Innocent Brilliance: James Schuyler’s Other Flowers by Michael Klein at the the poetry blog
James Schuyler is back from the dead with the lovely “Other Flowers” a posthumous book of his unpublished, uncollected poems. Everything I have come to know and love about Schuyler’s eye and heart is here in generous supply. The poems are – like so many of the poems published in his lifetime – made from a kind of brilliance disguised as innocence; a sadness disguised as joy. They feel closer to jazz and painting than to another kind of poetry. And, like they are peculiarly of their own time: still timeless as any poetry this indelible (though more in the sense of memorable than something held down or restricted by an era), but they are also poems that feel (somewhat like Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard and, later, Frank Bidart) almost immediately nostalgic.
The subject matter here is still the same as it’s always been: New York, adventures in intimacy, pop culture, gossip, longing and traveling and most of them are famously brief in scope of time and how they fall upon the page. In their brevity, they feel as important and quietly beautiful as leaves we use as summer bookmarkers.
What I find most fascinating about Schuyler’s poems (and probably one of the most interesting aspect of this collection is the fact that there are probably more not so good poems than in his other collections) is how slight they may appear and yet are not slight at all. Like interpretive inkblots that use tea for color instead of ink, the poems are there and not there; emphatic, authoritative, but also whispered. There’s confrontation andresistance – exemplified, in part, in “Vila Della Vite”, which tracks the desire to be a different kind of thinker than he already is:
I’m not happy
My spirits that lifted
me so high, went off like smoke
after a shot. How can
I fear so many diverse things?
I want to think of other things.
Is it all
in how you think?
I want to think of a washing machine
in a basement….
Being a different kind of thinker than he is or wants to be is actually one of the aspects that makes Schuyler such a great poet, if that makes sense. His intelligence is fixed in time but it is also mutable as the subjects it lands on, and rather than the heavy hand of the writer casting a shadow on the subject and/or cadence of the poem, the poem casts the shadow on the writer. In this way, each poem is its style:
It darkens, brother
and your crutch-tip grinds
the gravel the deer stepped delicately along
one breakfast, you were a kid.
Mother says after thirty,
decades clip by
‘and then you have the sum’
or spent it.(From “Coming Night”)
And each poem – especially this one – is stacked in terms of form – a way of making information happen by making each line take on a different subject – what Richard Hugo talks about in his book on poetics, “The Triggering Town”. Here, each next line in that first stanza stands in unison and independently: it darkens, there’s a crutch-tip, gravel and deer, breakfast, Mother, decades, the sum, and then “or spent it” – the culmination.
And while the eye in many of Schuyler poems is in a beautiful gaze about making the moment larger, the mind is also wondering what is really being seen, considered and what the stakes are. Each poem in a way – whether it literally asks a question or not – is wondering who someone is, what something is. Each poem is deceptively simple in that inquiry, but mysterious, too:
The mind dies down.
Nerves, unsheathed, stir.
Radios. A water tap
Depart, flesh, trailed
by barbwire hair. Sea salt
explores lips of lacerations
cut on you like a christening
nick. A yellow light
in blue light. Twilight
and hydrangeas watery
through hedges. Was the hideous
lesson worth the pleasure?
(From “The Exchange”)
It’s so good to have these poems in the world now; to have James Schuyler back, uncollected, saluting the various field: these other flowers.
Lifesaving Poems
I was struck by a remark of Seamus Heaney in an interview he gave some years ago now. He was musing on how many poems can affect the life of an individual across that person’s lifetime. Was it ten, he said, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more? This is the question that has underpinned this pet project of mine since I began it in July 2009.
Since then I have been copying out poems into a plain Moleskine notebook, one at a time, in inky longhand, when the mood took me. Allowing myself no more than one poem per poet, I wanted to see how many poems I could honour with the label ‘lifesaving’. I quickly realised it was a deeply subjective and unscientific exercise. Frequently, the poem that was copied into my book was not especially famous, certainly not representative or even the ‘best’ of that poet’s work.
My criteria were extremely basic. Was the poem one I could recall having had an immediate experience with from the first moment I read it? In short, did I feel the poem was one I could do without?
The list below is, therefore, not a perfect anthology-style list of the great and the good. It is a list of poems I happen to feel passionate about, according to my tastes. As Billy Collins says somewhere: ‘Good poems are poems that I like’.
Copying them out into my book has not always been fun, but now that I am finished, I am in possession of a deeply satisfactory feeling of having learnt more about myself and about each poem that I copied.
Over the next weeks and months I am going to be blogging here about the stories behind the choices I made, the influences upon them, and what I learnt in the process. (Before anyone writes in, I have noticed that William Blake snuck in with two choices).
For what it is worth, here are my
Lifesaving poems
Let a place be made, Yves Bonnefoy, from European Poems on the Underground Read more here
Isn’t My Name Magical, James Berry, from A Caribbean Dozen
‘This morning was cold’, Jaan Kaplinksi (trs. Jaan Kaplinski, Sam Hammill and Riina Tamm), from The Wandering Border Read more here
Hamlet, Boris Pasternak (trs. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France), fromSelected Poems
Beachcomber, George Mackay Brown, from Selected Poems
Prosser, Raymond Carver, from Fires Read more here
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, James Wright, from Poetry With an Edge
Night Drive, Seamus Heaney, from Door Into the Dark Read more here
A Letter to Peter Levi, Elizabeth Jennings, from Selected Poems Read more here
K563, Peter Sansom, from Everything You’ve Heard is True Read more here
Era, Jo Shapcott, from Of Mutability Read more here
Corminboeuf 157, Robert Rehder, from The Compromises Will be Different Read more here
Bike, Michael Laskey, from The Tightrope Wedding Read more here
A Morning, Mark Strand, from Selected Poems Read more here
To My Heart at the close of the Day, Kenneth Koch, from New Addresses Read more here
May the Silence Break, Brendan Kennelly, from A Time for Voices Read more here
Words, Wide Night, Carol Ann Duffy, from The Other Country Read more here
Mansize, Maura Dooley, from Explaining Magnetism Read more here
Aunt Julia, Norman MacCaig, from Worlds Read more here
Tides, Hugo Williams, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry Read more here
Fishermen, Alasdair Paterson, from Strictly Private Read more here
On Roofs of Terry Street, Douglas Dunn, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry Read more here
Coming Home, Carol Rumens, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry Read more here
One Cigarette, Edwin Morgan, from Worlds
Autobiography, Thom Gunn, from Worlds Read more here
This is what I wanted to sign off with, Alden Nowlan, from Do Not Go Gentle
Wind, Ted Hughes, from Worlds
Riddle (No. 7), Anon (trs. Kevin Crossley-Holland), from The Exeter Book: Riddles
Alone, Tomas Tranströmer (trs. Robin Fulton), from New Collected Poems Read more here
Listen, John Cotton, from The Crystal Zoo
A Private Life, John Burnside, from Swimming in the Flood
Sunday Lunchtime, Connie Bensley, from Choosing to be a Swan Read more here
Loch Thom, W.S. Graham, from Selected Poems
Eating Outside, Stephen Berg, from New and Selected Poems Read more here
A Lyric Afterwards, Tom Paulin, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
I am a Finn, James Tate, from Emergency Kit Read more here
The Missing Poem, Mark Halliday, from Jab Read more here
You!, Anon (Igbo dialect, Nigeria), from The Oxford Book of Animal Poems
Love, Miroslav Holub (trs. Ian Milner,) from Touchstones 5
The Picnic, John Logan, from Touchstones 5 Read more here
June 30, 1974, James Schuyler, from Collected Poems Read more here
Heliographer, Don Paterson, from Nil Nil
An Horatian Notion, Thomas Lux, from New and Selected Poems Read more here
Jet, Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel Read more here
Everyone Sang, Siegfried Sassoon, from Selected Poems
Reading the Books Our Children Have Written, Dave Smith, fromThe Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry
Song of Reasons, Robert Pinsky, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry Read more here
Elegy for Jane, Theodore Roethke, from Poetry in the Making Read more here
‘No Worst, There is None’, Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose Read more here
Picture of a Cornfield, Stanley Cook, from Writing Poems
Poetry, Iain Chrichton Smith, from Ends and Beginnings
The New Poem, Charles Wright, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry
Epilogue, Robert Lowell, from Day by Day
Down by the Station, Early in the Morning, John Ashbery, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry Read more here
Birth of the Foal, Ferenc Juhasz (trs. David Wevill), from The Rattlebag Read more here
And Yet the Books, Czeslaw Milosz, from Collected Poems
‘Be not afear’d: the isle is full of noises’, William Shakespeare, fromThe Tempest, Act 3 Scene 2
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, Wallace Stevens, from The Rattlebag
Mushrooms, Sylvia Plath, from Collected Poems
Cups, Gwen Harwood, from Emergency Kit
The Middle Kingdom, John Ash, from Selected Poems Read more here
Looking at them Asleep, Sharon Olds, from The Matter of This World Read more here
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest, Gary Snyder, from Making Your Own Days
Kin, C.K. Williams, from New and Selected Poems Read more here
Why I Am Not a Painter, Frank O’Hara, from Selected Poems Read more here
With Only One Life, Marin Sorescu, from The Biggest Egg in the World Read more here
My Shoes, Charles Simic, from Selected Poems: 1963-2003
I Cavalli di Leonardo, Rutger Kopland (trs, James Brockway), fromMemories of the Unknown Read more here
Deep Third Man, Hubert Moore, from The Hearing Room
Nightwatchman, Peter Carpenter, from After the Goldrush Read more here
‘So we’ll go no more a roving’, George Gordon, Lord Byron, fromShort and Sweet
Results, Siân Hughes, from The Missing Read more here
Groundsmen, David Scott, from Selected Poems
Avocados, Esther Morgan, from Beyond Calling Distance
The Beautiful Appartments, George Messo, from Entrances Read more here
Morning on Earth, Piotr Sommer, from Continued
Exe, Alan Peacock, from Collected Poems
The Lack of You, Lawrence Sail, from Building into Air
The Only Son in the Fish ‘n’ Chip Shop, Geoff Hattersley, from Back of Beyond
Swineherd, Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, from Emergency Kit
Chemotherapy, Julia Darling, from Sudden Collapses in Public Places Read more here
Psalm 102, of David, from The Old Testament Read more here
Instructor, Ann Sansom, from Vehicle
Talking in Bed, Philip Larkin, from The Whitsun Weddings
Poetry and Religion, Les Murray, from Collected Poems
Buffalo Dusk, Carl Sandburg, from This Poem Doesn’t Rhyme Read more here
History, Tomaž Šalamun, from Homage to Hat and Uncle Guido and Eliot: Selected Poems
Some of the Usual, Naomi Jaffa, from The Last Hour of Sleep Read more here
Caring for the Environment, Mandy Sutter, from Greek Gifts Read more here
An Upstairs Kitchen, Susannah Amoore, from Poetry Introduction 6
Morning, Caroline Yasunaga, from Hard Lines 3
Heaven on Earth, Craig Rain, from The PBS Anthology 1986/87
This is just to say, William Carlos Williams, from Wordscapes
Pigtail, Tadeusz Rōżewicz, from Faber Modern European Poetry
Atlas, U.A. Fanthorpe, from Safe as Houses
The Black Wet, W.N. Herbert, from New Blood Read more here
To His Lost Lover, Simon Armitage, from The Book of Matches
From the Irish, Ian Duhig, from Short and Sweet Read more here
Slaughterhouse, Hilary Menos, from Berg Read more here
High Fidelity, Christopher Southgate, from Easing the Gravity Field Read more here
Mercifully ordain that we may become aged together, Ann Gray, from At the Gate Read more here
I Would Like to Be a Dot in a Painting by Miro, Moniza Alvi, from The Country at My Shoulder Read more here
Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910, Don Coles, from Someone has Stayed in Stockholm: New and Selected Poems Read more here
Machines, Michael Donaghy, from Shibboleth
Swans Mating, Michael Longley, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
Before, Sean O’Brien, from Emergency Kit
The Ingredient, Martin Stannard, from The Gracing of Days Read more here
The Birkdale Nightingale, Jean Sprackland, from Tilt Read more here
Prayer/Why I am Happy to be in the City This Spring, Andy Brown, from Goose Music Read more here
Ultramarine, Michael Symmons Roberts, from Raising Sparks Read more here
Domestic Bliss, Mark Robinson, from The Horse Burning Park Read more here
To Autumn, John Keats, from The Rattlebag Read more here
Goodbye, Adrian Mitchell, from Worlds
The Tyger, William Blake, from The Rattlebag Read more here
Sowing, Edward Thomas, from Selected Poems and Prose
Birches, Robert Frost, from The Rattlebag Read more here
Tube Ride to Martha’s, Matthew Sweeney, from Blue Shoes
Annunciation, Gillian Allnutt, from How the Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems
Midsummer, Tobago, Derek Walcott, from Collected Poems: 1948-1984
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, W.B. Yeats, from Selected Poems
Literary Portrait, Evangeline Paterson, from Lucifer at the Fair
‘A man called Percival Lee’, Spike Milligan, from The 101 Best and Only Limericks of Spike Milligan Read more here
‘I always wanted to go on the stage’, Roger McGough, from Unlucky for Some
The Dog, Christopher North, from A Mesh of Wires
On the Impossibility of Staying Alive, Ian McMillan, from Selected Poems Read more here
Let Evening Come, Jane Kenyon, from Let Evening Come
Saint Francis and the Sow, Galway Kinnell, from Selected Poems Read more here
Ghost of a Chance, John Harvey, from Ghosts of a Chance
What it’s Like to be Alive, Deryn Rees Jones, from Signs Round a Dead Body Read more here
Praying Mantis, Yorifumi Yaguchi, from Three Mennonite Poets
Poem, Elizabeth Bishop, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry Read more here
Morning, Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightning
Prayer, Marie Howe, from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time Read more here
The Way We Live, Kathleen Jamie, from The Way We Live Read more here
Dusting the Phone, Jackie Kay, from Other Lovers Read more here
Women Who Dye Their Hair, Janet Fisher, from Women Who Dye Their Hair Read more here
Who?, Charles Causley, from Collected Poems for Children
The Journey, Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems Vol. 1
Early Summer, Peter Scupham, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
Wet Evening in April, Patrick Kavanagh, from Collected Poems Read more here
August 1914, Isaac Rosenburg, from Poems on the Underground
Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden, from Selected Poems
Paris, Paul Muldoon, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
Putney Garage, Paul Durcan, from Daddy, Daddy
Let’s Celebrate, Mandy Coe, from Clay Read more here
Hysteria, T.S. Eliot, from Collected Poems: 1909-1962
‘my way is in the sand flowing’, Samuel Beckett, from ‘Four Poems’
Leaning into the Afternoons, Pablo Neruda, from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
The Simple Truth, Philip Levine, from The Simple Truth
Silence, Stephen Dobyns, from Velocities: New and Selected Poems
The Last Hours, Stephen Dunn, from Different Hours
Boggle Hole, Cliff Yates, from Frank Freeman’s Dancing School Read more here
in Just, ee cummings, from Wordscapes Read more here
The Divine Image, William Blake, from The Human Dress (Lies Damned Lies) Read more here
Owl, George MacBeth, from Poetry in the Making
Wintering, Matthew Hollis, from Ground Water
Not Me, Shel Silverstein, from Poetry Explored: 5-8
Everything is Going to be All Right, Derek Mahon, from Selected Poems Read more here
8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970, Tom Raworth, from Jumpstart Read more here
The Bluet by James Schuyler
Re-reading Steven Waling’s review of Frank O’Hara reminded me of James Schuyler today. Not as famous as his friend but just as vital, I think the poem below is one of his loveliest.
Late one night sometime around 1986 I remember John Peel announcing before playing The Go-Betweens’ ‘Bachelor Kisses’: ‘Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, you just need to step back and listen to this.’ That is how I feel about ‘The Bluet’ by James Schuyler. It is transparent, apparently artless, and as good in its way as Seamus Heaney. Simply amazing poetry. You can listen to it on the Poetry Foundation site.
POEM
