by Peter Gizzi

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

—Wallace Stevens

A palpable sense of irreality is everywhere present in the poetry of James Schuyler. I love its effortlessness and grace, its sound, its thick and at times gnarly descriptions. His poems combine the attention of an ethnographic account with the charm of a great dinner guest. He can make common decency thrilling—and, one might add, he had a penetrating notion of a “commons.” This hallmark feature of his work was realized implicitly through an acute spatial geography–his uncanny ability to name; and explicitly, through a private reading of the physical world imprinting on his nervous system. In these hyper-real descriptions, colors shift; the words shimmer. The “violet sea” verges on the violent. There’s a deeper cold behind his “gold and chilly” weather. 

When Schuyler reviewed Fairfield Porter's work in Art News in 1967 he wrote: “The quotidian image is transfigured to pure paint.” Replace language for paint and the same can be said of the transfiguration Schuyler enacts within his own medium. The title of the review, “Immediacy Is the Message,” is telling as well, as Schuyler is a master of the quick take. However it is more complicated than “first thought best thought.” Schuyler would sometimes take up to a year tinkering with a poem—getting it right. The surface of his poems is only an illusion of immediate and effortless description. His poems, like ethnographies, read from a subject-position both inside and outside of the human activities and the “weather” they track. Although a case can be made that he himself was an outsider, we continually find ourselves adopted within the natural and normative social intricacies he records as familiar. 

Objects are never as real in real life as they are in Schuyler's poems. He is an objective surrealist interpolating flat reportage with hyper-descriptive elements. 

The lilac leaves. The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wool:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there. . . .
                                                             (from “Hymn to Life”)

It's as though his “outside” is the reading of an afterimage flashed upon the optic nerve, creating a neurasthenic tableau whose colors shift. Red and green, while complementary colors, sit opposite each other on the color wheel—creating a strong visual contrast when placed side-by-side. In this synesthesia, we find the world and ourselves impressed (nailed down, taken aboard) in his process. Schuyler is an ecstatic, perhaps even a religious thinker, though he is neither overtly moral nor pious. In these visions of excess, Schuyler is never a tourist. He is, however, genuine in his need to get it right. 

There almost has to be a heaven! so there could be
a place for Bruno Walter
who never needed the cry of a baton.
Immortality—
in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy
Magnavox from which a forte
drops like a used Brillo Pad?
                                                (from “A Man in Blue”)

And for Schuyler, sometimes getting it right means he can run on to “camp” where fun “is something more than beer and skittles, and the something more is a whole lot better than beer and skittles!” But his sense of whimsy, like that of Frank O’Hara, can also reveal that life in a funhouse is anything but fun. The nonsense in his poems can sometimes peek through to expose nature and social orders alike as empowered, terrifying and indifferent.

      … Coming from the 
movies last night snow 
had fallen in almost 
still air and lay 
on all, so all twigs 
were emboldened to 
make big disclosures. 
It felt warm, warm 
that is for cold 
the way it does 
when snow falls without 
wind. “A snow picture,” you 
said, under the clung-to 
elms, “worth painting.” I 
said, “The weather operator 
said, ‘Turning tomorrow 
to bitter cold.’” “Then 
the wind will veer round 
to the north and blow 
all of it down.” Maybe I 
thought it will get cold 
some other way. You 
as usual were right. 
It did and has. Night 
and snow and the threads of life 
for once seen as they are, 
in ropes like roots.
(from “Empathy and New Year”)

We know that James Schuyler suffered profoundly in his adult life. He was hospitalized several times for mental instabilities. In many ways, I feel, his work is that of a solitaire, recording the light outside a window—guest room, hospital room, etc. You don't have to go digging. It's in the poems, especially in the precise and rending lyrics of the miraculous series, “The Payne Whitney Poems.” He documents, in near forensic detail, life as a patient in a psych ward:

PASTIME

I pick up a loaded pen and twiddle it.
After the blizzard
cold days of shrinking snow.
At visiting hours the cars
below my window form up
in a traffic jam. A fast
moving man is in charge
herding the big machines
like cattle. Weirdly, it all
keeps moving somehow. I read
a dumb detective story. I
clip my nails: they are as hard
as iron or glass. The clippers
keep sliding off them. Today
I’m shaky. A shave, a bath.
Chat. The morning paper.
Sitting. Staring. Thinking blankly.
TV. A desert kind of life.

                                          2/15/75

His vivid portrayal of the world is born out of a necessity to cohere, not merely for embellishment but as an act of sanity. Yet he is not simply inventing a locus for himself in his poems. The act is, in fact, far more sophisticated—it is description as event. An event which includes potentially everyone: the ominous cabby, a nurse, a failed lover from high school, a newspaper boy, friends and family alike. They all have a place within Schuyler's sense of “camp,” which remains complicated and thick. The event of the poem is a promise of salvation divested within the infinite possibility of forms. 

In his book of essays The Interpretation of Culture the anthropologist Clifford Geertz illuminates the role of ethnography as “thick description.” In Schuyler's case, we might substitute poet for ethnographer in the following quote: 

What the ethnographer [poet] is in fact faced with is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render: incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, censusing households, [describing them] not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.

Indeed, Schuyler’s entire opus is full of “transient examples of shaped behavior,” never “conventionalized graphs of sound.” Ethnography is not so far off, considering the subject matter of Schuyler's poems, especially the long poems (“Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A Few Days”). Take almost any passage:

. . . I think with longing of my years in
               Southampton, leaf-turning
trips to cool Vermont. Things should get better as you
               grow older, but that
is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to handle.
               Here it is
the Labor Day weekend and all my friends are out of town:
               just me and some
millions of others, to whom I have not yet been introduced.
               A walk in the
streets is not the same as a walk on the beach, by
               preference, a beach
emptied by winter winds. A few days, and friends will
               trickle back to
town. Dinner parties, my favorite form of entertainment.
               Though in these
inflationary times you're lucky to get chicken in
               place of steak.
What I save on meals I spend on taxis. Lately a lot
               of cabs have
signs: NO SMOKING, PLEASE, or NO SMOKING DRIVER ALLERGIC.
               A quiet smoke in
a taxi is my idea of bliss. Yes, everything gets more
               restricted, less free.
                                                       (from “A Few Days”)

Not unlike Whitman, Schuyler believed that “a freedom which excludes is less than free” (“Immediacy Is the Message”). He has invented a form wherein we are free to come and go as we partake of the terms of its unfolding. Another example of his technique to create an open field was never more telling than when, in an important gesture near the end of his life, Schuyler gave his first public reading in 1988. The line outside of the DIA Foundation was four abreast, over a block long and comprised of life-long devotees and younger readers. There were uptown poets and downtown poets, Language Poets and New Yorker poets, editors of major presses and of little magazines, painters, composers, etc. In short, all the various clans turned out to participate in that masterful event.

Permit me to meditate for a moment on an early favorite poem of his:

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.

In one sense “February” is composed as a painstakingly specific catalog of discrete images. Each line is a surprise, delighting in the pleasures of coincidence, like “the pink of five tulips / at five p.m.” Gradually we progress through the city day to the dust inside the tulip, to the shape of the tulip, the container the tulip is in (a glass), and the container the glass is in (this day).  The poem draws us from 

      1) the impalpability of the discrete units of matter; the fuzz of memory; the microscopic material of being; the “dust” inside the tulip; 
      2) to the shape of the tulip; its form, here both symbolic and specific;
      3) to the container; the context we can “place” it in; the context of the day, as the poet records the shifting of the light; 
     4) to the container of the poem, which can contain more than the day; the lyric tension between the beginning of matter—the baby being jogged on a hip—and the end of matter—the dust we become. The beauty of the tulip may draw us to observe it but inside it we see a reflection of what we ourselves are made of, just as we may see an image of our own childhood when we look in someone else’s window.

“February” is not a tranquil Romantic recollection; it is active observation that creates the effect of recollection. Schuyler exchanges a syntax of memory and judgment for a syntax of simultaneity. He uncouples his sentences, so that the electric spark must jump from noun to noun, and from event to event, no matter how disparate or seemingly unrelated. The gaps between his lines give us the experience of the passage of time, a verbal time-lapse photography. Schuyler is a watcher. If you look out the window long enough you can see time pass as the light and colors of the world shift. In the first poem of his first book, Some Trees, John Ashbery wrote “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.” In “February” Schuyler does the work to disclose this invisible schedule, revealing the seemingly random syntax of the physical world.

And yet, reality is never as real as it is in a Schuyler poem. One has a sense of events and words being brought together out of necessity, to conduct a vision, giving the apparent randomness of living a coherence and even an inevitability. This world, as he presents it, is both reassuring and unstable. The “day before March 1st” is not always February 28th and by not naming it—but naming what is next to it—he draws attention to this hinge of seasonal, temporal change, this “leap.” The poem is partly about this passage, getting over the hump of winter, as the truck disappears over the hump of the hill, or the speaker who “can’t get over” his latest observation. In this simple gesture nature, commerce, and human reason are intertwined. It is this interconnectedness that makes Schuyler’s poems reassuring in spite of the instability of their surfaces.

The most striking aspect of reading Schuyler is the variousness of his craft, from short staccato lines to luxurious run-on sentences. The entirety of his output creates an almost seamless vision of life as it is and as we see ourselves in it from a distance. There, or rather here in his poems, one visits with a poet whose art transforms us as it illuminates and deepens our relationship to the actual, to sensory data, to language. As Barbara Guest would have it: “Words of the poem need dimension. They desire finally––an education in space.” 

           …May leans in my window, offering hornets. 
To them too I give leave to go about their business, which is not 
Nesting in my books. The fresh mown lawn is a rug underneath 
Which is swept the dirt, the living dirt out of which our nurture 
Comes, to which we go, not knowing if we hasten or we tarry. May 
Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a 
Chain saw. The blighted elms come down. Already maple saplings, 
Where other elms once grew and whelmed, count as young trees. In 
A dishpan the soap powder dissolves under a turned on faucet and 
Makes foam, just like the waves that crash ashore at the foot 
Of the street. A restless surface. Chewing, and spitting sand and 
Small white pebbles, clam shells with a sheen or chalky white.
A horseshoe crab: primeval. And all this without thought, this 
Churning energy. Energy! The sun sucks up the dew; the day is 
Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off 
Or a storm will chip it loose. Life, I do not understand. The 
Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter 
In the grass? May is not a flowering month so much as shades 
Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like 
The lilac leaves. The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal 
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood: 
A red that leaps from green and holds it there. Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and 
Hangs its seed balls out. The apples flower. The pear is past. 
Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead. From the train 
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower. Is it for miracles
We live? I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why 
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?” 
(from “Hymn to Life”)

His grammar is impeccable and his syntax is not only exceptional, it’s magical. The world he presents, as we are keenly aware in every line, is neither his nor ours, even when the recognition of the real in his observations is so stunning we can only acquiesce. Within Schuyler’s spatial imagination, his thick description, we discover our deep need for a proper attention to detail in a musical and clarifying language—the visionary landscape in which we want most to dwell.