Why James Schuyler Is the Poet for Right Now

James Schuyler’s GeniusWhy our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the momentMae Losasso James Schuyler in the hallway of the Chelsea Hotel, New York City, 1988. Photo: Michel Delsol, Getty Images It’s october and I sit down to type. I gaze out the window to where the house across the road is blanketed in thick wisteria, its waxy leaves turning a deep, plummy red. I get up, put on another sweater, and return to stare at the winking cursor on the screen in front of me. These lapses of attention may be just procrastination. Or perhaps they’re a kind of preparation for writing an essay about James Schuyler, a poet whose work is characterized by lost trains of thought, cleavings of the mind, and the strangeness of writing about your writing as you’re writing it.I open the book on my desk—Schuyler’s Collected Poems—and leaf through the pages until I land on the poem I’m looking for. It’s called “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 booksof fall litter the bed.To catch and pin the ephemeral turn of a season is a well-worn poetic trope. But there are few poets who have done it as well—as attentively, as holistically—as Schuyler. “October” is galvanized by its repetitions: lightly appears in every stanza, suggesting the slant of autumn’s light but also the poem’s lyrical lightness; patterned, patterns, and patter drum like soft raindrops, nodding to the chance nature of nature’s designs. And look at all those leaves in the poem: some strewn haphazardly on the ground, others clinging tremblingly to branches, still more fanned out on the bed and held in place not by stems but by the glue of bookbindings.

For Schuyler, autumn isn’t just something you observe outside in the mellowing air, and poetry isn’t simply a means of registering it; the two are gently, carefully folded together like flour into cake batter. Here, crisp describes the quality not only of a freshly plucked apple but also of the paper bag in which it arrives; leaves the stuff of books and plant mulch alike. This is more than tactile whimsy (even if lines like “Apples / come home crisp in bags” are plosive enough to feel in the mouth). The literary and the organic are tangled up in “October” because pages and plants—writing and life—are inseparable in Schuyler’s poetry.last year marked a milestone in life writing about Schuyler, with the appearance of Nathan Kernan’s long-anticipated biography of the poet, A Day Like Any Other. Almost thirty years in the making, Kernan’s hefty tome is a vivid account of Schuyler’s turbulent life, as well as an invaluable piece of cultural history, offering scintillating glimpses into New York’s queer artistic circles from the 1950s through the 1980s.Born in Chicago in 1923 and raised in upstate New York, Schuyler would become one of the leading voices of the New York school, alongside Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch—though until recently, his work has received significantly less critical or popular attention than the better-known members of this coterie. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II (he was dismissed when his commander discovered that he was gay), Schuyler moved to New York City. A brief, troubled love affair with the Finnish American writer and Spanish Civil War veteran Bill Aalto (who likely inspired the character Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls) took Schuyler to Europe in the late 1940s, a period that Kernan’s biography brings dazzlingly into the light. The details Kernan sketches may be true to life, but their piling up risks stripping Schuyler of his deep poetic sense of the beauty of life.

In 1952, back in New York, Schuyler befriended Ashbery and O’Hara—two Harvard graduates who had recently arrived in the city—and he began to apply himself seriously to writing. Yet his poetic career would be marked by belatedness: his first major collection, Freely Espousing, would not be published until 1969, when he was forty-six years old, and he would not give his first public reading until 1988, just three years before his death. A further four major poetry collections would follow Freely Espousing—The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poem (1980), for which Schuyler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and A Few Days (1985).Schuyler’s poetic style is marked by its attention to the daily. His poems are diaristic, often registering times and dates, with a relentlessly observational eye that comes to rest on what he calls “the said to be boring things / dreams, weather, a bus trip.” His compositions oscillate between intensely truncated lineation and long, page-spilling lines of Whitmanesque excess—both formal strategies that capture the rambling and digressive immediacies of a mind at work.These “vagaries” of thinking, as Guest called them, gesture toward the bouts of mental instability that shadowed Schuyler’s life, and that were often followed by stretches in psychiatric hospitals. He was never accurately diagnosed or properly treated (a product, Kernan suggests, of a homophobic health-care system), but he likely had bipolar disorder, which crescendoed and decrescendoed in erratic patterns, making for a difficult and chaotic life. A Day Like Any Other offers the most complete account to date of Schuyler’s mental health crises. (It also includes Kernan’s extraordinary discovery that Schuyler’s first psychiatrist in New York, a Dr. Charles R. Hulbeck, was in fact the experimental Dada poet and performer Richard Hülsenbeck.) Incidents that readers had gleaned only a little about in the past (from Schuyler’s diaries or from accounts written by friends) are here fleshed out in grim detail, making up the narrative bulk of the biography.

Kernan gives us, for example, a blow-by-blow account of an infamous episode in 1971, when Schuyler, in the grip of a severe hallucinatory breakdown, terrorized the poet Ron Padgett and his family. Padgett called the cops. When they arrived, Schuyler was naked and covered in rose petals. And he tells of the occasion, years later, when Schuyler, in a paranoid prelude to another nervous collapse, accused his devoted caretaker Helena Hughes of stealing from him. “The bitch took my money,” he insisted. There was also the time when Schuyler, posing for a friend, the artist Anne Dunn, “suddenly got up and went into the bathroom, took off all his clothes, and came back and sat down again.…Anne felt that this was both a tease and an oblique way of making a kind of pass at her.”It wouldn’t be possible to narrate the story of Schuyler’s life without including some of these uncomfortable details. (This may be, in part, why Kernan’s is the first full-length biography of the poet.) But there is something troubling about the way Kernan’s account pushes the poems to one side (as he notes at the outset, it “is not intended to be a critical biography”), revealing Schuyler at his most vulnerable. What do these disclosures offer literary study? What do they bring to the poetry? The details Kernan sketches may be true to life, but their piling up risks stripping Schuyler of his deep poetic sense of the beauty of life.every literary biography wrestles with this question of the relationship between life and art. But it’s especially vexing in the case of Schuyler, where the gap between the life—tumultuous, painful, often miserable—and the work feels large. Kernan is aware of this tension. “Even at his most deranged,” he tells us, “[Schuyler] could appear, and perhaps be, calm and rational in his writing. There was a discipline and a sense of performance in writing that he could harness, making it hard at times for anyone reading his letters…to reconcile their sensible tone with his actual behavior around the time of writing.”

The contrast, in Kernan’s book—between the reality of Schuyler’s day-to-day existence and Schuyler’s own representation of that existence in his poetry—exposes the distinction between life writing and lyric poetry. Schuyler sometimes invites the reality of his life into his work, but the details are always in service to the poems. His verses about life inside the Payne Whitney sanatorium, for instance, are not histrionic or mad but focused on the banalities of the everyday. “What’s in those pills? / After lunch and I can / hardly keep my eyes / open. Oh, for someone to / talk small talk with.” Or: “This morning I / changed bedding. / At lunch I watched / someone shake out / the cloth, fold and / stow it in a side- / board.” And notably, in these poems, it’s writing—not pills—that figures as a “curative.” “Now, this moment / flows out of me / down the pen and / writes,” Schuyler tells us. “I’m glad I have / fresh linen.” Schuyler’s capacity to knit together the mundane and the metaphysical is unparalleled. All of which is to say that no poem by Schuyler is a vehicle for confession; instead, real events are like base metals that he transmutes into poetic gold. Take his well-known poem “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” an almost narrative account of an evening with friends. (“Doug” is the poet Douglas Crase.) The poem’s descriptive elements (“so I went with Frank,” he writes, “to dine at McFeely’s / at West 23rd and Eleventh Avenue / by the West River”) are the foil for deeper, more digressive channels of thinking around death, distraction, and memory. Schuyler buries these in unwieldy parentheses (the longest bracketed aside spans thirty-seven lines), but they are never just incidental remarks: his parenthetical intrusions are more revealing than prattling. “I really like / dining out and last night was / especially fine,” Schuyler muses toward the end, but then swerves to confront the poem itself: “Why is this poem / so long? And full of death? / Frank and Doug are young and / beautiful and have nothing / to do with that.