Freely Espousing: Poems

by James Schuyler

The first book of poems by this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

Incomplete contents

Salute
Freely Espousing
February
A Reunion
"The Elizabethans Called It Dying"
Fabergé
A White City
December
A Man in Blue
Sestina
An Almanac
Hudson Ferry
April and Its Forsythia
Roof Garden
May 24th or so
Today
Sorting, wrapping, packing, stuffing
Seeking
Milk
Going
The Master of the Golden Glow
Stun
Poem (How about an oak leaf
Now and Then
Buried at Springs

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1969

Reviews

[Sparrow .]

This may be the first time I've read this book all the way through, though I struggled with it in 1982, when my professor, Ted Berrigan, required me to buy it, and strongly implied it was a masterpiece. At the time, I couldn't perceive Schuyler -- I didn't have the sensitive fingertips one needs, for sentences like:

Codicils
don't add up to much when there's nothing to leave:
a bedroom, stretching from Portland
to Richmond stunningly furnished in
French-motel provincial.

Besides, I was searching for an elegant working-class diction, which I would find a decade later in Langston Hughes.

But Freely Espousing -- with a beautiful rowboat on the cover, painted by Alex Katz -- is perfect, or at least so far above the present-day poet that it feels like a blazing nine-pointed star slowly descending in one's front yard. It's full of wit, but sad wit:

The bay today breaks
in ripples of applause.

(As I write this out, I realize it's a pun on "the day breaks.") Schuyler's great breakthrough was assuming he had an audience, though he didn't. He writes for delicate, brilliant, gay dancers.

This was published by Paris Review, before the magazine got taken over by cufflinks and billiard cues. In 1969, the year there should've been a revolution. Instead, there was Freely Espousing (with a title like an anarchist manifesto) and Crisis, an album by Ornette Coleman.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why it seems awfully far
from the green hell of August
and the winter rictus,
dashed off, like the easiest thing

- May 24th or So

* * *

It's funny early spring weather, mild and washy
the colour of a head cold.
The air rushes. Branches
are going nowhere, like the ocean,
spring salt unstopping sinuses. Winter salt doesn't.

- 3/23/66

* * *

The pink of the tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can't remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.

- February

* * *

February, your arms are so long
for such a short month
your hair is so fine
it drifts across your eyes
and I feel one barely visible strand
when we kiss: gracile, you are not
like March, boisterous and butch

- Thinness, III

* * *

It's snowing on the unpedimented lions. On ventilator hoods
white triangles. It evens up wrinkled tar roofs,
smooths out rough concrete coping, showing the shape
of a wall side between coping top and roof. The census
taker was just here. She had on transparent overshoes, coat and
hat: are clothes less secret? Less snowlike?

- April and Its Forsythia

* * *

The heavy umbrellas
aren't worth their weight.
Doors swing and slam
checked by gusts. A whisperer
has a friendly reek.
A hell broth!
and hollows among clouds.
Then the moon goes crocus.

- Crocus Night

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am absolutely in rapturous love with Schuyler as a poem of the day, or of the unit of time (a poem titled "February" that registers the assumptions about February compared to the current February, or maybe it's not about the general "February" but just a catalogue of things you'd expect to hear about during February). I was just reading Andrew Epstein's Attention Equals Life, and he puts Schuyler and Ammons right next to each other, which makes so much sense. But between those two I think I'd say Ammons is the Saltine cracker and Schuyler is a Ritz. There is just this extra tastiness to what Schuyler does. The details about a day or a situation feel so effortless and light. Ammons is great, too. But it feels like Ammons is always hovering over his poem. I'M GOING TO FIND SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY IN THIS MUNDANENESS.

Reading Schuyler is like this long sigh of relief. "Chill out, dude!" But not like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. More like Eugene Levy in almost anything. Maybe Eugene Levy who had taken some muscle relaxers, so his eyebrows are moving, but only subtly moving. This is the pacing of Schuyler. The vibe. The movement. Something that wonderful.

If only the poems in this book just stuck to the days. But, honestly, there are poems in here that I find it difficult to be with completely. And this is me really wanting to fall in love with those poems. Alas.

[Trevor Gemmel]

Ok. So just like my reading of this book, this ( being my first review on this site) review is also kind of slow on the making. Ninety some pages of one page poems? I would calculate that but this is a comed-er-literature website and i promised the dudes on the particle collider (yes I collide particles for a living) that i would not bring up anything about art or lit (in particular none of the New York school or abstract expressionist schools).
Anyway, having always admired this website i finally decided to take read my first book. Lots of birds. You know that show "on cinema at the cinema" where the one guy uses it to just talk about himself? I am afraid that this is becoming very similar. To read the actual full book review (it's in the process of being screened for wokeness for which I am confident there is none) you can check out my YouTube and substack and every other thing i signed up for today because the flies are my only friends now.

Peace and love, Trev
Dedicated in the memory of John Asbury

[Nick Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's original humor in here, playing with expectations, juxtaposing anachronistic subjects fluently. It's modest and grand in one. Schuyler is a poet would be fun to sit around talking shop with.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating: 3.75

This book was very good, not fabulous, but very good. Schuyler has a good command of sound, especially alliteration, which is seen very well in "Now and Then" which was my favorite of the poems in the collection. At times, his stream of consciousness style can get in the way of his flow and meaning, but every poem is packed chock full with vibrant, easily understood metaphors and similes so that usually makes up for any syntactical confusion. Overall, pretty good, recommended to readers of poetry, but more as a secondary recommendation, the sort given when someone has read all the obvious ones.