James Schuyler at 100: ‘Schuyler and Mitchell’, by Tamar Yoseloff

Thank you to Tamar Yoseloff for contributing this fourth post in celebration of James Schuyler’s centenary.

In Paris last year, at the miraculous Joan Mitchell retrospective held at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, I stood in a darkened corner looking at a series of pastel drawings. When I came closer to them, I could see there were words along the side of the sheets, in spidery typewritten letters. They were striking in their simplicity, and in their intimacy, surrounded by her monumental canvases.

I recognised them immediately – collaborations between Mitchell and some of her poet friends, including James Schuyler (who Mitchell had met through Frank O’Hara, the social lightning rod in New York’s artistic scene).

I have written previously on Anthony’s blog about one of these poems, ‘Sunday’. Here it is again:

The mint bed is in
bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is
more than green and
throws up sharp and
cutting lights to
slice through the
plane tree leaves. And
on the cloudless blue
I scribble your name.

Schuyler does here in words what Mitchell did in colours. Mitchell was famously synaesthetic and attached moods to different hues. We do that too (‘feeling blue’, ‘seeing red’) but Mitchell truly felt colours. Here Schuyler matches her, creating a feeling of airy springlike hope, priming his own canvas on which to scribble a name, a casual act that feels greatly important, when we realise the lucid observations in the poem are all for the ‘you’ who emerges (as if through that cloudless blue sky) in the final line. This is what Schuyler gives us – something significant in a simple gesture.

Mitchell could see how to compliment his words. Her few strokes of lavender create the haze that permeates the day. In Schuyler’s poem ‘Daylight’, Mitchell covers the sheet in a bright egg yolk yellow. The poem reads:

And when I thought,
“Our love might end”
the sun
went right on shining.

Yellow was complicated for Mitchell. She talked about its presence in the landscape around Vétheuil, a place she called home for the final quarter of her life. She talked about finding a yellow ‘like the color of dying sunflowers’, echoing her hero Van Gogh. ‘She could make yellow heavy’, her fellow artist Brice Marden said once. In Schuyler’s poem, his love might indeed still end, and the sun would still go on shining, oblivious to his struggle. We talk about seeing things ‘in the cold light of day’, so the poem may simply be expressing a realisation rather than a reprise. We will never know what happened next.

The final poem in the trio, simply titled ‘Blue’ could be about Mitchell herself:

No pastel of you
straw-hatter, palming 
your erasures, smudging
(the way you do) your blue
could fix for me
(‘blue blue’ you say)
the way you make your blue.

And for no reason
my eyes and the sky
cry for you. 

Mitchell’s drawing around the poem is a smudge of blue, giving way to white, a few blue thumbprints embedded in the whiteness, a dirtying of that clean, clinical space (Mitchell hated white: ‘It’s death. It’s hospitals. It’s my terrible nurses . . .’). A cloud of blue drifts down and over some of the words, like rain, like tears. Blue here is a fix, but also a spreading sense of woe.

Schuyler and Mitchell both suffered from bouts of depression. You could say they both felt deeply about life and art and people. Mitchell kept a volume of Schuyler’s poems in her studio. They meant something to her. In 1985 she made a couple of paintings entitled ‘A Few Days’, which were inspired by his poem:

A Few Days

are all we have so count them as they pass. They pass too quickly
out of breath: don’t dwell in the grave which yawns for one and all. . .

Schuyler died in 1991, and Mitchell a year later. In the 40 years of their acquaintance, they carried an intense regard for each other’s work. But it was more than that, there was a connection, a realisation that they were doing the same thing, but in different media.

To come across their meeting, in that dark corner of that vast gallery in Paris, I felt almost moved to tears. A few drawings are all we have of their collaboration – but it is enough.

Tamar Yoseloff’s seventh collection, Belief Systems, is due from Nine Arches in June 2024. She is also the author of Formerly (the inaugural chapbook from her publishing venture, Hercules Editions), incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and collaborative editions with the artists Linda Karshan and Charlotte Harker respectively. She has run courses for galleries including the Hayward, the RA and the National Gallery and co-curated the exhibition A Fine Day for Seeing at Southwark Park Galleries in 2021. From 2015 to 2023 she was a lecturer on the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry and continues to teach on a freelance basis. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.

You can read Tamar Yoseloff’s previous guest post on Joan Mitchell on this blog here.

Use this link to see Daylight, Schuyler’s collaboration with Joan Mitchell.

Use this link to see Blue, Schuyler’s collaboration with Joan Mitchell.