Thank you to Pam Thompson for contributing this third post in celebration of James Schuyler’s centenary.
James Marcus Schuyler was born on November 9th 1923 in Chicago, Illinois. This year marks his centenary and is a fitting time to pause and reflect why Schuyler means so much to many of us. I love Schuyler because by being alert, he alerts me, wakens my senses and emotions, and, time after time, with absolute recognition, makes me say a huge ‘Yes!’. I was recently a guest on poet and academic, Chris Jones’s Two Way Poetry podcast talking about the influence of Hymn to Life, and Schuyler generally, on one of my own poems. This will be broadcast on November 27th. In each episode, Chris interviews a poet about another poet who has influenced their work. To date, you can listen to Rob Hindle and Suzannah Evans.
I first encountered James Schuyler’s work in the The New York Poets: An Anthology (Carcanet, 2004). I was familiar with the other poets included: John Ashbery, Frank O’ Hara and Kenneth Koch, three distinctly different poets, and found an affinity with the New York School because, despite those differences, there was something fresh and arresting about the poems, and, particularly in relation to Ashbery, O’Hara and Schuyler, intersections with art. I have fantasies of being part of that mileu; New York in the 1950s and 60s when Abstract Expressionism was coming into its own and the poets circulated with artists, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, among others.
Poet Charles Simic said, ‘I would like to write a book that would be a meditation on all kinds of windows’. James Schuyler has done that, not so much the windows themselves, but views out of them, or, ‘as if’ viewed from a window. ‘ I don’t know how / it can look so miraculous and alive / an organic skin for the stacked cubes of air / people need … [ An East Window on Elizabeth Street]. Schuyler is a poet of more than attentive looking; his visual sense is particularly acute but so is his ear. He listens, quotes snatches of overheard conversation (real or imagined), and has a passion for music; his lines, long or short, have a musicality, not arising from stream-of-consciousness exactly but from something like it. He assimilates fragments of the world into his poems: “Today / you could take up the / tattered shadows off the grass. Roll them / and stow them’ [Shimmer].
Schuyler stood apart from the rest of the group: more of the outsider, older, non-Harvard and with debilitating periods of mental illness which meant frequent hospitalisations and added chaos and vulnerability in his self and lifestyle. And despite of this, [or because of it], the stunning poetry continued. James Schuyler’s diaries give extra insight to the poems – where he was, with whom, shifts of language from diary to poem or vice versa. Sadly, there is a lost decade , 1971-1981 from which there are no surviving diaries. During this difficult period, Schuyler experienced personal loss, breakdowns, hospitalisations and injury in a fire. And yet, Schuyler published five books including Hymn to Life (1974).
The title poem, ‘Hymn to Life’, ten pages long, written in the Spring of 1972, was his longest poem up to that point. The poem was inspired by a trip to Washington D.C. with John Ashbery and others and was written over a period of time spent in different locations in New York state. References to Washington D.C. in the poem suggest that city woith its orderly architecture and ceremonial pomp was an alienating place for Schuyler, ‘Strange city, broad and desolating …’, contrasting with the places where Schuyler lived or stayed during the writing of the poem.
‘Hymn to Life’ tracks spring, early and late, beginning in March and ending in May, with the focus being very much mostly on the day, the here and now, but also on the past. The poem moves as the poet’s mind moves. Mark Ford, editor of the Carcanet volume writes, ‘Schuyler, the most literal and descriptive of the group, tends to view the city [New York City] through the prisms of time and loss.’ This is evident in ‘Hymn to Life’. Furthermore, he views the present through prisms of time and loss. The poet, nearly fifty, also reflects on his youth, on Time, steps aside from (or out of) his narrative on occasion, like, say, Prospero:
The turning of the globe is not so real to us As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray -- The world is all cut-outs then -- and slip or step steadily down The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout.
The poem speeds up, catching impressions of the capricious season, slows down, pulls in speech from other people, either caught in the moment, remembered or made up, “It will be here before you know it”. All can seem quick and fleeting, like a film on time-lapse, and repetitive, like how seasons come and go, yet we’re reminded nothing is ever the same, ‘The roses this June will be different roses …’. ‘Life in action, life in repose, life in / Contemplation, which is hard to tell from day dreaming …’, lines which are so pertinent to his subjects and method.
Juxtapositions of opposites are consistent and often breathtakingly achieved: ‘Out of the death breeding / Soil, here rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle / Easily into life …’. The contradiction ‘Struggle / Easily’ alone gives such pause for thought. ‘It is Spring. It is also still winter’. Side by side, consistently are negative and positive, light and dark, spring and winter, life and death, but upliftingly, or why such a title, life predominates, ‘The corms come by mail, are planted, / They do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard …’ There are different perspectives, different angles. The poet observes and comments from changing vantage points (a window, a sidewalk, a train). He is excellent at capturing the effects of weather and how and where light falls, also specific colours and textures. Rain threads through the spring month. This is demonstrated perfectly in a passage halfway down the third page of the poem:
The wind shakes the screen And all the raindrops on it streak and run in stems. Its colder. The crocuses close up. The snowdrops are brushed with mud. The sky Colors itself rosily behind gray-black and the rain falls through The basketball hoop on a garage, streaking its backboard with further Trails of rust, a lovely color to set with periwinkle violet-blue And the trees shiver and shudder in the light rain blasts from off The ocean. The street wet reflects the breakup of the clouds on its face, driving over sky with a hissing sound. The car Slides slightly and in the west appear streaks of moon. Three stars and only three and one planet.
In May, at the close of the poem, the poet asks, “Is it for miracles / We live?” The poem answers his question affirmatively and ends with a testimony and a refusal of closure:
I like 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?"
As I was writing this blog post I came across this comment in a newsletter from poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama, [more on his book, Substack and podcast here https://onbeing.org/series/poetry-unbound/] ‘No poem stands alone; it’s part of the great impulsive tide that has moved every person to write.’ I find this comforting – especially when the well seems dry. I sense a ‘great impulsive tide’ coursing through James Schuyler’s poems and I go to them to help me keep the faith.
Lifesaving Poems 