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Collected Poems
This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize. "Schuyler's subject is his life, and his poems often read like elegant journal entries." - Publishers Weekly
430 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 25, 2009
ah, it's good to read dear jimmy.....but remember that he was young and beautiful before he had to wonder what was in those pills...
November 2, 2007
James Schuyler is the quiet Beatle...he is my favorite Monday poet. No, wait, maybe he is my favorite Sunday poet. Anyway, read this book...it will change your life!
August 12, 2008
As opposed to Koch's "Collected," which has some kinda weak poems in it, this book held my interest from start to finish. Criminally underrated.
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February 27, 2008§ James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, consists of a series of poems placed in three sections, in which “New Poems” make up the first cycle. In “New Poems,” which include 14 poems of varying length, Schuyler’s eye inhabits a place that owes not so much to a camera eye, but to a roving, impressionistic sense of things as they are. When Louis Zukofsky wrote about the concept of “sincerity,” he was making reference to the physical object that was a poem, in other words, “the care for detail” in the rendering of an order that would essentially speak to all men, to paraphrase. While Schuyler’s poems certainly do render the objects of our common world with precision and care, it’s his rendering of human experience that places the poems in the realm of impression, physical and emotional sensation, and subjectivity. Perhaps, we still recall the overbearing questioning and assertions of the postmodern period regarding the status of the “I,” however, as Schuyler’s poems make clear, his sense of self is often constituted by a kind of inter-subjectivity that is carefully filtered through those people who surround him, his immediate landscape, and of course, his sense of the visual, as if he is always in the process of trying to respond to painting.
§ But all this talk is not to forget how Schuyler’s ear is well-attuned to spoken speech patterns. If we are to speak of the style of Schuyler’s rendering of human experience, of autobiographical information infused in the poems, it is important to note how many of his poems sound as if they are conversing with another. While this other may be difficult to locate, except when the poem directly addresses others from Schuyler’s life, it may also be useful in thinking how Schuyler’s poems become an epistolary event. Consider how “June 30, 1974” from “New Poems” begins:
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—
§ The voice contained in the poem cited above is emblematic of an address that seems common throughout The Morning of the Poem, especially in the longer poem of the same title. It also shows how Schuyler is skilled through his use of the catalogue, which acts as a mode that can serve his quick and fleeting gaze, often of a specific landscape and its physical contents. Many of Schuyler’s poems are rife with interruptions that can often act as commentary, or be suggestive of doubt as to what’s just been articulated by the speaker of the poem. These interruptions can also act as interrogative of a longer seam of thought, or simply act to shift the scene, to textually create spaciousness, in a collage-like manner, which would certainly echo his various projects as a reviewer for ARTnews and curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
§ The middle cycle of poems is titled, “The Payne Whitney Poems,” which chronicle the time Schuyler spent at a psychological clinic. They are shorter in length and the imagery is cautious as well as much more condensed than in other poems of longer length. The tone of the poems found here sometimes takes on the quality of being self-interrogative, in a way where critical self-reflection becomes, ironically, a hymn to life, with a moment to moment appreciation of the small things, say, found from a window view, or placed around Schuyler’s room. This is all to say that despite the emotional turmoil hinted at in the opening poem, “Trip,” there is a candor that’s refreshingly poignant as in closing lines of this poem:
When I think
of that, that at
only fifty-one I,
Jim the Jerk, am
still alive and breathing
deeply, that I think
is a miracle.
§ Better put, Barbara Guest has written about Schuyler’s work that he “translates the vagaries of inhabitancy, of wherever he is, his locale particularly his into poetry.” I can’t think of a more concise way to articulate the mode of Schuyler’s poetry, but especially within the poems that find him inhabiting “Payne Whitney.” Here, there is a curiosity and sense of the transient that perhaps mirrors that of human life, which act to carry out an inner dialogue that’s responsive to one’s surroundings. However, I think it’s important to note how his poems don’t some much record what’s given to his perceptions through language, but rather how the poems enact the process of thinking through the objects of his perception.
§ Equally, “The Morning of the Poem,” shows how Schuyler is skilled as a poet of the city as well as of country life. It is also a much more rigorous working, again in the mode of an epistle, as serving to make recollection/memory and immediate experience find a way to enter into dialogue. As in earlier poems in The Morning of the Poem, Schuyler’s sexual status is more on display, as he recollects past male lovers, sometimes in the form of a tribute, other times as an achingly potent account of loss. The overall effect of the poem has elsewhere been described by Joseph F. Conte as “kaleidoscopic,” as the poem “twists the lens of observation and reflection, continually revealing still another pattern no less fascinating than the last.” This textual movement is enacted through creating a fissure in the concept of time, by utilizing what I earlier called those interruptions, or in the case of this long poem, digressions that serve to amplify the process of recollection and statement. Among these movements, the cityscape is juxtaposed with the pastoral, the actual place of the writing, creating a constellation of voicing and speech acts, while finely attentive to the “rhythms of consciousness,” as has been noted by David Lehman. But above all, the poems present and think through a tremendous amount of information that’s seems autobiographical and inclined toward speculation, or a meditative quality. The role of the artist is drawn into question from the beginning by conjuring the image of “Baudelaire’s skull.” How this functions as whole for Schuyler is more than I can account for. Perhaps it’s in the line which reads: “The exhalation of Baudelaire’s image of/terror which is/Not terror but the artist’s (your) determination/to be strong/To see things as they are too fierce and yet/not too much…”
§ But all this talk is not to forget how Schuyler’s ear is well-attuned to spoken speech patterns. If we are to speak of the style of Schuyler’s rendering of human experience, of autobiographical information infused in the poems, it is important to note how many of his poems sound as if they are conversing with another. While this other may be difficult to locate, except when the poem directly addresses others from Schuyler’s life, it may also be useful in thinking how Schuyler’s poems become an epistolary event. Consider how “June 30, 1974” from “New Poems” begins:
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—
§ The voice contained in the poem cited above is emblematic of an address that seems common throughout The Morning of the Poem, especially in the longer poem of the same title. It also shows how Schuyler is skilled through his use of the catalogue, which acts as a mode that can serve his quick and fleeting gaze, often of a specific landscape and its physical contents. Many of Schuyler’s poems are rife with interruptions that can often act as commentary, or be suggestive of doubt as to what’s just been articulated by the speaker of the poem. These interruptions can also act as interrogative of a longer seam of thought, or simply act to shift the scene, to textually create spaciousness, in a collage-like manner, which would certainly echo his various projects as a reviewer for ARTnews and curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
§ The middle cycle of poems is titled, “The Payne Whitney Poems,” which chronicle the time Schuyler spent at a psychological clinic. They are shorter in length and the imagery is cautious as well as much more condensed than in other poems of longer length. The tone of the poems found here sometimes takes on the quality of being self-interrogative, in a way where critical self-reflection becomes, ironically, a hymn to life, with a moment to moment appreciation of the small things, say, found from a window view, or placed around Schuyler’s room. This is all to say that despite the emotional turmoil hinted at in the opening poem, “Trip,” there is a candor that’s refreshingly poignant as in closing lines of this poem:
When I think
of that, that at
only fifty-one I,
Jim the Jerk, am
still alive and breathing
deeply, that I think
is a miracle.
§ Better put, Barbara Guest has written about Schuyler’s work that he “translates the vagaries of inhabitancy, of wherever he is, his locale particularly his into poetry.” I can’t think of a more concise way to articulate the mode of Schuyler’s poetry, but especially within the poems that find him inhabiting “Payne Whitney.” Here, there is a curiosity and sense of the transient that perhaps mirrors that of human life, which act to carry out an inner dialogue that’s responsive to one’s surroundings. However, I think it’s important to note how his poems don’t some much record what’s given to his perceptions through language, but rather how the poems enact the process of thinking through the objects of his perception.
§ Equally, “The Morning of the Poem,” shows how Schuyler is skilled as a poet of the city as well as of country life. It is also a much more rigorous working, again in the mode of an epistle, as serving to make recollection/memory and immediate experience find a way to enter into dialogue. As in earlier poems in The Morning of the Poem, Schuyler’s sexual status is more on display, as he recollects past male lovers, sometimes in the form of a tribute, other times as an achingly potent account of loss. The overall effect of the poem has elsewhere been described by Joseph F. Conte as “kaleidoscopic,” as the poem “twists the lens of observation and reflection, continually revealing still another pattern no less fascinating than the last.” This textual movement is enacted through creating a fissure in the concept of time, by utilizing what I earlier called those interruptions, or in the case of this long poem, digressions that serve to amplify the process of recollection and statement. Among these movements, the cityscape is juxtaposed with the pastoral, the actual place of the writing, creating a constellation of voicing and speech acts, while finely attentive to the “rhythms of consciousness,” as has been noted by David Lehman. But above all, the poems present and think through a tremendous amount of information that’s seems autobiographical and inclined toward speculation, or a meditative quality. The role of the artist is drawn into question from the beginning by conjuring the image of “Baudelaire’s skull.” How this functions as whole for Schuyler is more than I can account for. Perhaps it’s in the line which reads: “The exhalation of Baudelaire’s image of/terror which is/Not terror but the artist’s (your) determination/to be strong/To see things as they are too fierce and yet/not too much…”
July 13, 2023
Summing up James Schuyler's entire oeuvre isn't easy, but if there is a throughline throughout this collection, it is his easy words made accessible to anyone who will give him the time of day. You won't find yourself re-reading couplets to suss out meaning. No, Schuyler—born 1923 in Chicago; died 1991 in Manhattan—was perhaps the most understated of the New York School poets. His friends, Frank O'Hara, whose brash, bawdy a-little-this-a-little-that miniatures of New York flamboyantly upstages Schuyler while John Ashbery, restrained, tight, quizzical, worldly, outlived both to become America's most recognized poet. Schuyler, who died too late for vainglory, and who lived too short to become an elder statesman, is somewhere in the middle. He's joyful, but sometimes sour, always observant, he'll throw anything into a poem, like it were a blender and he was making the world's grossest smoothie. But, it pays off in charming ways. His longer poems are, god help me for this phrase, subdued meditations on life. He (metaphorically) clips his fingernails and tells us how the cuttings smell, and it's intimate and beautiful and your life means more for its proximity to the humdrum life of Jimmy Schuyler.
October 22, 2018
Highly
Recommend
will read again...
absolutely fell in love
with him
his endings to poems were so
endering.
His knowledge
is incredible.
The way he works with his titles
The approaches he used
The life he lived
was it the twenty first or the second
it was was the first.
To me
Recommend
will read again...
absolutely fell in love
with him
his endings to poems were so
endering.
His knowledge
is incredible.
The way he works with his titles
The approaches he used
The life he lived
was it the twenty first or the second
it was was the first.
To me
November 1, 2007
My bible
September 13, 2024
this is a collection that made me question how i evaluate a poem or a poetry book the most. if a poetry book/collection is like an album where each song only tangentially responds to the last, i think schuyler's collections do not give me that sense of satisfying architecture--at least not reliably. not in individual volumes nor in some of the poems. i also struggle with the purported "consumability" of new york school poets as if aesthetics was made up of admiring sunlight on a lover's body or of a vibrant dinner, images to which you can easily project yourself and so make whole. but then i have a problem with my own problem: 1) these lines are never as accessible as i remember them to be--they are more artfully deceitful or surprising than the immediately felt melange of nostalgia/yearning 2) such "aestheticized" images are kinda what life is about so who am i to talk... on the level of the line, though, these poems are so frequently thrilling, masterful, and downright dizzying: strong enjambments, coy & gorgeously hidden rhythm, words resplendent & gem-like. i mean, no one told me schuyler was a poet of flowers. beyond a painterly gaze, careful sense of mise en scene, or the wondrously futile attempt at describing things "as they are," i encountered my main sense of him early on in these lines: "hints that are revelations: to have been so happy is a promise / and if it isn't kept it doesn't matter. It may snow." happiness is no less real for not having returned; sex is no less hot for having been absent; flowers are no less blooming for being symbols--and i have no more access to all these friends & quips & ferns & rain just bc i imagined them. that distance i have loved to feel
January 2, 2023
James Schuyler is a poem whose bright spots dazzle but could dip into the banal or uneven poetry. This is a great collection for contextualizing his work.
December 16, 2008
an utter lack of most sonic devices makes much of this plain, and the focus on his friends and social interactions makes it more like reading a bunch of line-broke gossip than the images and interesting language that i look for in writing.
August 28, 2011
"The Morning of the Poem" & "A Few Days" -- just read them. Delightful.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews