Selected Poems

by James Schuyler, John Ashbery (Introduction)

In Selected Poems, we experience the full range of James Schuyler's achievement, confirming that he was among the late twentieth century's truly vital and distinctive poetic voices. One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

Genres: Poetry, American

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did you know that James Schuyler went to Italy with Auden as his typist? No? Me neither. He was also 'curator of circulating exhibitions' at MOMA in the late 1950s, and the 1981 Pultizer Prize winner. He wrote Frank O'Hara's elegy, and he died of a stroke in 1991. These are all things I found out after reading this collection - I try not to learn anything about a poet when I am reading them.

Schuyler's poems traverse countryside and cityscape, illness and joy, gossip and intimacy. He spends most, if not all, of his time firmly in the real world - few flights of fancy, few big questions. The poems range from the fat and prosey (see 'Milk', below) to the slim and delineated - 'Salute'

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

While the tone and style is usually intimate and loose - the poems don't seem to have an arc, or a beginning and middle and end; instead they seem simply to start at some point and stop at another, wrapping up elements that could be switched about and rearranged - my favourite of Schuyler's poems so far is one of the most structured and formal (if also one of the most oblique):

'Poem'

I do not always understand what you say.
Once, when you said, across, you meant along.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

Words' meanings count, aside from what they weigh:
poetry, like music, is not just song.
I do not always understand what you say.

You would hate, when with me, to meet by day
What at night you met and did not think wrong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

I sense a heaviness in your light play,
a wish to stand out, admired, from the throng.
I do not always understand what you say.

I am as shy as you. Try as we may,
only by practice will our talks prolong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

We talk together in a common way.
Art, like death, is brief: life and friendship long.
I do not always understand what you say.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

(A word-memory tingled in my head when I just now read that last line out loud to myself. It's iambic pentameter, I think (I'm a rank beginner - don't hold it against me if I get this all wrong) and therefore is going to sound like everything else, but the lines that rose up in my mind actually happen to be Auden's: 'O John I'm in heaven,' I whispered to say: / But he frowned like thunder and he went away.)

A friend told me recently that I have a 'certain type of poem' - he didn't extend upon the statement, but I'm pretty sure 'Letter Poem #3' is such a piece; lyrical, a little love-lorn, yet anchored to the real world.

The night is quiet
as a kettle drum
the bullfrog basses
tuning up. After
swimming, after sup-
per, a Tarzan movie,
dishes, a smoke. One
planet and I
wish. No need
of words. Just
you, or rather,
us. The stars tonight
in pale dark space
are clover flowers
in a lawn the expanding
universe in which
we love it is
our home. So many
galaxies and you my
bright particular,
my star, my sun, my
other self, my bet-
ter half, my one

My own writing has a weakness for the running and, and, and, so it's not surprising I fall for Schuyler's romantic list-makings.

I have developed a particular fondness for Schuyler's 'month' poems. They are chronicles of the unremarkable, and this in itself is unremarkable: I often feel that with every other piece of art I try to describe I'm trying to find a new way to say that the artist has taken something from the every day world and made it extra-ordinary. But then there are those who try to do this, and those who succeed, and Schuyler for me, in these poems, falls firmly into the second camp.

'October'

Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in
the shedding leaves.

The maples ripen. Apples
come home crisp in bags.
This pear tastes good.
It rains lightly on the
random leaf patterns.

The nimbus is spread
above our island. Rain
lightly patters on un-
shed leaves. The books
of fall litter the bed.

'December'

The giant Norway spruce from Podunk, its lower branches bound,
this morning was reared into place at Rockefeller Center.
I thought I saw a cold blue dusty light sough in its boughs
the way other years the wind thrashing at the giant ornaments
recalled other years and Christmas trees more homey.
Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event”
and then bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance
to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all
the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops
and how can I help falling in love? A calm secret exultation
of the spirit that tastes like Sealtest eggnog, made from milk solids,
Vanillin, artificial rum flavoring; a milky impulse to kiss and be friends
It’s like what George and I were talking about, the East West
Coast divide: Californians need to do a thing to enjoy it.
A smile in the street may be loads! you don’t have to undress everybody.
“You didn’t visit the Alps?”
“No, but I saw from the train they were black
and streaked with snow.”
Having and giving but also catching glimpses
hints that are revelations: to have been so happy is a promise
and if it isn’t kept that doesn’t matter. It may snow
falling softly on lashes of eyes you love and a cold cheek
grow warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.

'February'

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can't see
making a bit of pink
I can't quite see in the blue.
The pink of five 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.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we'd gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They're just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can't get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She's so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It's getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It's the shape of a tulip.
It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It's a day like any other.

Those last four lines. How can they not leave you undone? How can you not repeat them over and over to yourself (I get shades of the For want of a nail rhythm when I do this) - gradually growing out from the pollen to the flower to the container to the whole of the world, going about its business as a flower sits on your desk and somehow by looking at it and letting your mind float you connect with that world in a totally unexpected way. And there's what Schuyler does with colour - he eschews analogy, uses small, plain nouns, yet makes so much of them. I want to take 'February' and colour it in, in a way that wouldn't be cheesy and awful, but instead would draw out the way we are subtly shuttled between colour and colour and colour - pink to blue to pink, green, green / violet / green / violet, blue looking pink, a gray hush, green, pink, gray gold yellow: 'I can't get over / how it all works together' indeed.

I promised you fat and prosey at the beginning of this wander through my fancies. Here you go: 'Milk'

Milk used to come in tall glass, heavy and uncrystalline as frozen melted snow. It rose direct and thick as horse-chestnut tree trunks that do not spread out upon the ground even a little: a shaft of white drink narrowing at the cream and rounded off in a thick-lipped grin. Empty and unrinsed, a diluted milk ghost entrapped and dulled light and vision.

Then things got a little worse: squared, high-shouldered and rounded off in the wrong places, a milk replica of a handmade Danish wooden milk bat. But that was only the beginning. Things got worse than that.

Milk came in waxed paper that swelled and spilled and oozed flat pieces of milk. It had a little lid that didn’t close properly or resisted when pulled so that when it did give way milk jumped out.

Things are getting better now. Milk is bigger—half-a-gallon, at least—in thin milky plastic with a handle, a jug founded on an oblong. Pick it up and the milk moves, rising enthusiastically in the neck as it shifts its center of weight. Heavy as a breast, but lighter, shaping itself without much changing shape: like bringing home the milk in a bandana, a neckerchief or a scarf, strong as canvas water wings whose strength was only felt dragged under water.

On the highway this morning at the go-round, about where you leave New Hampshire, there had been an accident. Milk was sloshed on the gray-blue-black so much like a sheet of early winter ice you drove over it slowly, no matter what the temperature of the weather that eddied in through the shatterproof glass gills. There were milk-skins all around, the way dessert plates look after everyone has left the table in the Concord grape season. Only bigger, unpigmented though pretty opaque, not squashed but no less empty.

Trembling, milk is coming into its own.

You're still here? Good. Because I've saved two of the best for last. 'The Bluet' has that Why does this poem start here? Because that's as good a place as any other. quality I admire in Schuyler's work (it reminds me of Charles Simic, come to think of it, though Simic is more drop-you-into-it, whereas Schuyler feels sometimes like you've come within earshot halfway through a quiet recitation).

And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr’s table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: last
spring, next spring, what
does it matter? Unexpected
as a tear when someone
reads a poem you wrote
for him: “It’s this line
here.” That bluet breaks
me up, tiny spring flower
late, late in dour October.

It's a little soppy, I know, but still beautiful. And finally, 'Fauré Second Piano Quartet', which I just discovered today, and which has stolen away with my heart:

On a day like this the rain comes
down in fat and random drops among
the ailanthus leaves—”the tree
of Heaven”—the leaves that on moon-
lit nights shimmer black and blade-
shaped at this third-floor window.
And there are bunches of small green
Knobs, buds, crowded together. The
rapid music fills in the spaces of
the leaves. And the piano comes in,
like an extra heartbeat, dangerous
and lovely. Slower now, less like
the leaves, more like the rain which
almost isn’t rain, more like thawed-
out hail. All this beauty in the
mess of this small apartment on
West Twentieth in Chelsea, New York.
Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,
more slowly still, fat rain falls.

An honest final note. The looooooooooooooong poems defeated me. I flipped through these pages, reading fragments at random, and made my own little poems that way. I'm sure Mr Schuyler wouldn't have minded.

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best and grandest days of being a college student, more than 20 years ago now, was the afternoon I sat in the big white tent at Naropa and listened to Eileen Myles read poems by “Jimmy” Schuyler and tell tales. She had been his assistant for a time -- indeed, he chats about her in several of these poems. Because I am such a glacially slow learner, I just thought this was all very cool -- it took me a couple decades to perk up to the fact I had to actually read the poems.

I read all the other New York School Poets first and still wasn’t serious about reading Schuyler until I read David Lehman’s discussion of him in The Last Avant-Garde, which seems to me a very beautiful and helpful introduction. Since then, I’ve read these poems endlessly, over and over again. The 3 long poems, in particular, seem to me essential -- absolute proof that the long poem can be the very opposite of epic bombast.

Excuse me for quoting Ashbery’s blurb: “Schuyler’s poems are seldom ‘about’ anything in the way poetry traditionally is; they are the anything.” Or, as I said to a friend in a vastly more stupid style, “It’s all very ordinary in a completely inexhaustible way.” (How excellent it would be to walk into a bookstore and announce to the staff, “Please, I must have a new book of poems! But I don’t want poems that are ‘about’ anything!”)

Since I am something of a traveling hobo, I can only carry one book of poems. Day after day, I am so very grateful that it is this one. If you are already interested in the New York School of Poets, don’t let the bright lights of O’Hara, Ashbery and Koch delay you too long in getting to Schuyler. Much as I love the others, Schuyler is, for me, the poet most suitable for reading endlessly.


from “A Few Days”:

A few days: how to celebrate them?
It’s today I want
to memorialize but how can I? What is there to it?
Cold coffee and
a ham-salad sandwich? A skinny peach tree holds no
peaches. Molly howls
at the children who come to the door. What did they
want? It’s the wrong
time of year for Girl Scout cookies.
My mother can’t find her hair net. She nurses a cup of
coffee substitute, since
her religion (Christian Science) forbids the use
of stimulants. On this
desk, a vase of dried blue flowers, a vase of artificial
roses, a bottle with
a dog for stopper, a lamp, two plush lions that hug
affectionately, a bright
red travel clock, a Remington Rand, my Olivetti, the
ashtray and the coffee cup.”

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

February

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can't see
making a bit of pink
I can't quite see in the blue.
The pink of five 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.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we'd gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They're just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can't get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She's so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It's getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It's the shape of a tulip.
It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It's a day like any other.



Sweet Romanian Tongue

Drew down the curse of heaven on her umbrella
furled and smelling of wet cigarettes,
Jo ran off in rain one pitchy night,
one bloody a.m. found her staring, snoring.

“Why do we all stay up so late?” Jo queried.
“Though I don’t stay up so late as my friends.”
She tripped the little bomb of wasps.
They got her.

Tears for Jo, four, each perfect, waspish.
A silver tongue and piss-blond hair
decants a funeral oblation for the mouse.
“She was a rare sight, a winning wonder.
Jo cultivates her toothaches elsewhere.”



A Stone Knife

December 26, 1969

Dear Kenward,
What a pearl
of a letter knife. It's just
the thing I needed, something
to rest my eyes on, and always
wanted, which is to say
it's that of which I
felt the lack but
didn't know of, of no
real use and yet
essential as a button
box, or maps, green
morning skies, islands and
canals in oatmeal, the steam
off oyster stew. Brown
agate, veined as a woods
by smoke that has to it
the watery twist of eel grass
in a quick, rust-discolored
cove. Undulating lines of
northern evening—a Munch
without the angst—a
hint of almost amber:
to the nose, a resinous
thought, to the eye, a
lacquered needle green
where no green is, a
present after-image.
Sleek as an ax, bare
and elegant as a tarn,
manly as a lingam,
November weather petrified,
it is just the thing
to do what with? To
open letters? No, it
is just the thing, an
object, dark, fierce
and beautiful in which
the surprise is that
the surprise, once
past, is always there:
which to enjoy is
not to consume. The un-
recapturable returns
in a brown world
made out of wood,
snow streaked, storm epi-
center still in stone.

*

[Alicia Farmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I saw a Poetry Foundation poem-of-the-day tweet with one Schuyler's poems. I liked it, so I decided to check out a collection of his poems. I read through page 100, which excerpts poems from his first 3 books. I didn't like most of them. Their subjects didn't interest me and I didn't find much music in his words.

But a few poems resonated:

Buried at Springs (p. 41)

The Edge in the Morning (p. 62)

Closed Gentian Distance (p. 68)

Verge (p. 72)

A man cuts brush
and piles it
for a fire were
fireweed will flower
maybe, one day.
All the leaves
are down except
the few that aren't.
They shake or
a wind shakes
them but they
won't go oh
no there goes
one now. no.
it's a bird
batting by.
[...]

[__e__g · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always enjoyed Schuyler's poems but this was the first time I spent a sustained amount of time with them and I am even more convinced that he is one of my all-time favourite poets. I've been reading them early each morning, which also suits this book.

I bought this + a book of Brecht poems from PS Bookshop in Brooklyn 8 years ago (which I just looked up and saw closed in 2016).

Probably a good book to dip into but I feel like the experience of reading it every day for weeks on end really helped me survive iso life, and helped me take some comfort, if not pleasure, in the quiet, quotidian aspects of daily life.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy, I'm glad I read this. Schuyler doesn't seem to be anthologized as much as O'Hara, Ashbery, and Koch are. I don't see why not. "A blue towel" is on my list of all-timers. The long poems were wonderful; I read them all in one sitting. [Well I took a break during "Morning of the Poem" (60 pages):]. <3<3<3<3

[Shhhtevie St. Evie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book will be sitting on your shelf for years. What I mean to say is it’s densely packed with a decade’s worth of Schuyler’s work. And like all good poetry you must sit with it and that takes time: days, weeks, maybe years. A daily dose of James Schuyler goes a long way.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conversation and a lyrical love of words crafted in surprising, short snappy poems and masterful long works (“The Morning of the Poem” “A Few Days”) make this volume a joy to read.

[A. Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Schuyler is such a joy. His poems rarely jumped out at me, yet I could've kept reading for a long time. I was sad when the pages ran out, and very happy.


From 'The Morning of the Poem':

       This day, I want to
Send it to you, the sound of stirring air, soft
       sunlight, quivering trees
That shake their needles and leaves like fingers
       improvising on a keyboard
Scriabin in his softest mood, and the wind
       rises and it all goes Delius,
The sky pale and freshly washed, the blue flaked
       off here and there and
Showing white, flat and skimpy clouds haunting
       a bright green, a soft blue day.

[Mari Kovalik Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somebody in my writing group put me onto James Schuyler and thank god for that… definitely found some of my new favorites here, like “February 13th, 1975”, “Evening Wind”, “Morning Poem”, … . I don’t usually like poetry heavy on nature imagery, but Schuyler is so good at intertwining it with very interesting bodily imagery. There are some beautiful love poems as well. From “We Are Leaves”:

[…] Do
I miss you?
You know, yes
and I know,
no, you are
so with me
when apart, I
think I under-
stand you and
you me: I’m
happy as a rained -
on leaf or
lettuce in a
crisper. You
love and I reciprocate. […]

Anyways, I’m just excited to find a new writer I like.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schuyler always struck me as an underrated, often overlooked figure of the New York School. Really great breezy poems capable of turning on a single word, so you’re never fully settled into a relaxed reading. That being said this is the perfect selection of his poems for summer time beach reading

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I salute this various book.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the long poems the best as they mentioned punk rock.

[Shira · Rating 3 out of 5]

poems of description, seasons, hot men, memory, aging, and complaining. hilarious at times. not quite my thing but it is refreshing to read something that isn't quite your thing!

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely one of the best things i read this year. Kind of like a better, gayer, and more sensitive frank o’hara. Just amazing

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morning of the Poem. The Crystal Lithium. Hymn to Life. A Man in Blue. An East Window on Elizabeth Street. Some are long and some are not, but all are endlessly cherishable. And funny. I like funny.

Schuyler was the ultimate loafer and it definitely shows in the poems. But the loafing is just so charming. I've never appreciated a couch potato more in my life. The cover painting is particularly accurate in this case.

In general, I think that the New York School is the greatest poetic movement after the modernists. I can take or leave the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (and I think they would appreciate a sentiment like that), the beat's have a few shining stars and then a load of drivel and European poetry after the World Wars is overly, but understandably, angsty. But the New Yorkers really bring out the joy, beauty and humor in life. And there are so many good ones! And they all wrote letters to each other! And wrote novels together! And were museum curators in their spare time (although it is perhaps more accurate that museum curation was more of a day job. Those crazy moonlighters). Unfortunately, they all turned out to be fairly lousy playwrights. At least when it comes to performance; most of their plays are beautiful to read. But what is drama without performance? I would certainly just prefer a novel. Or some poetry. But drama needs to be performed. Sorry. Tangent.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

A friend recommended him to me because I was interested in reading more prose poetry and wanted to get some ideas on how to fix my line breaks. Schuyler also hung out with Frank O'Hara (I'm a fan) and the rest of the New York School and I’ve read some of the others but never him. I either rushed through or skipped a good number of his nature poems and New England farmhouse countryside scenes (except the ones about skies and ocean) but did really get into his poems about New York, love, and people. I liked his use of dialogue which conveys intimacy and a shared experience. Love for him is coffee, mornings, and warm bodies. I can agree with that. A sample:

It is not so quiet and they
are a medium-size couple who
when they fold each other up
well, thrill. That’s their story.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb poet and right in the ground zero of New York Poets via the 50's and 60's. The beautiful moments he captures is quite remarkable. I did a Tosh Talks segment on another collection of his poetry



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meIBcu...

[Sean A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, largely personal sometimes humanist images, details and minutia, presumably largely from Schuyler's own direct experience. More-or-less engaging and interesting. Rarely goes for the gut, better seen through rimmed glasses.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm unsure as to why FSG chose this instead of the Collected Schuyler, but Ashbery's introduction is enchanting and as true to Jimmy as could be desired. This is still a major collection of poems.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really don't know why more people don't teach Schuyler. He's also really fun to listen to if you can get ahold of the old recordings (try PENNsound).

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poet's poet. A breath of fresh air when you get bored of Ashbery. "The Morning of the Poem" is beautiful and damaged, but also incredibly light and funny.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

good stuff once he gets away from botany and the changing of the seasons.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conversational and insightful, Schuyler is a beauty with an eye for the truth of a thing in its details. Read these now, read them later, read them whenever.

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt my insides intricately woven by experiences made poetic through proximity out of his model to those that already carried heightened image and sound.