{"id":167092,"date":"2024-03-18T10:30:14","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T14:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167092"},"modified":"2024-03-15T15:15:20","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T19:15:20","slug":"its-this-line-here-happy-belated-birthday-to-james-schuyler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/18\/its-this-line-here-happy-belated-birthday-to-james-schuyler\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s This Line \/ Here\u201d : Happy Belated Birthday to James Schuyler"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

James Schuyler at the Chelsea Hotel, 1990. Photograph by Chris Felver.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Past is past, and if one <\/span>
\n<\/span>remembers what one meant <\/span>
\n<\/span>to do and never did, is <\/span>
\n<\/span>not to have thought to do <\/span>
\n<\/span>enough? Like that gather- <\/span>
\n<\/span>ing of one of each I <\/span>
\n<\/span>planned, to gather one <\/span>
\n<\/span>of each kind of clover, <\/span>
\n<\/span>daisy, paintbrush that <\/span>
\n<\/span>grew in that field <\/span>
\n<\/span>the cabin stood in and <\/span>
\n<\/span>study them one afternoon <\/span>
\n<\/span>before they wilted. Past <\/span>
\n<\/span>is past. I salute <\/span>
\n<\/span>that various field.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The tiny, beloved \u201cSalute\u201d\u2014which is not the poem that I mean to discuss\u2014both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn\u2019t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler\u2019s enjambments\u2014at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal\u2014are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before they\u2019re scattered or revised.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a second I hear \u201cLike that gather-\u201d as an imperative: Do it <\/span>that<\/span><\/i> way, gather in <\/span>that <\/span><\/i>manner, before the noun \u201cgathering\u201d gathers across the margin. I briefly hear \u201cone of each I\u201d\u2014each of us is a field of various \u201cI”s\u2014as the object of the gathering before it becomes the subject who has \u201cplanned\u201d it. (The comparative metrical regularity of \u201cLike that gathering of one of each I planned,\u201d the alternating stresses, haunts these enjambments, a prosodic past or frame the poem salutes and breaks with, breaks up.) I am always slightly surprised when \u201cto gather one,\u201d at the end of the seventh line, repeats \u201cof each,\u201d as opposed to modifying a new specific noun, at the left margin of line eight. (This break makes me feel the tension or oscillation between \u201ceach\u201d and \u201ckind\u201d\u2014and a kind is a gathering of likes\u2014between the discrete specimen and the class for which it stands, the particular dissolving into exemplarity, when you write it down.) <\/span><\/p>\n

There is so much repetition in the short poem\u2014\u201cone,\u201d for instance, appears five times, undoing the singularity; here it\u2019s a person, here a number, here a specific afternoon. It\u2019s as if the vocabulary were being restricted, held constant, so Schuyler can test what relineation might do to the music and meaning, \u201cstudying\u201d each tentative arrangement of the small words he\u2019s gathered. (There is a sense of provisionality and casualness and plain speech here and most everywhere in Schuyler, but it coexists with the implication of archival formal order; there\u2019s the prosodic backdrop I mentioned, but there\u2019s also the near syllabic regularity of the lines\u2014eight of the fifteen are six syllables, for instance\u2014or that long <\/span>u<\/span><\/i> sound at the end of the fourth and twelfth and fourteenth line, which provides some sonic architecture.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there is the crucial repetition of the tautology \u201cPast is past,\u201d a repetition (of a repetition) that affirms for me that the poem is testing how it might make difference out of sameness, transforming the phrase by delaying the verb across the break when it recurs. The past returns with a difference: \u201cPast is past\u201d does not equal \u201cPast \/ is past.\u201d So much depends on that nonidentity. The latter instance of the phrase, while still melancholy, has a heartbeat: the silence at the break is felt, possesses its own duration, the form <\/span>happens<\/span><\/i> in the renewable present tense of reading, so that\u2014to take a phrase from Jack Spicer\u2014the \u201cthing language\u201d of the poem overcomes its content, and the line no longer laments time that is simply lost. I don\u2019t mean to make the poem sound triumphant, to imply that time is unequivocally regained, for a \u201csalute\u201d can be a salutation or an elegy (as in a funeral salute), and it\u2019s the oscillation\u2014I\u2019m going to run with the word\u2014between those modes that lends the poem its tender force. Still, one is grateful Schuyler only meant to gather specimens so that the field, in all its variety, is intact.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

But I meant to talk about another poem, another flower, \u201cThe Bluet,\u201d in time for his hundredth birthday.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

THE BLUET\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And is it stamina
\n<\/span>that unseasonably freaks
\n<\/span>forth a bluet, a
\n<\/span>Quaker lady, by
\n<\/span>the lake? So small,
\n<\/span>a drop of sky that
\n<\/span>splashed and held,
\n<\/span>four-petaled, creamy
\n<\/span>in its throat. The woods
\n<\/span>around were brown,
\n<\/span>the air crisp as a
\n<\/span>Carr\u2019s table water
\n<\/span>biscuit and smelt of
\n<\/span>cider. There were frost
\n<\/span>apples on the trees in
\n<\/span>the field below the house.
\n<\/span>The pond was still, then
\n<\/span>broke into a ripple.
\n<\/span>The hills, the leaves that
\n<\/span>have not yet fallen
\n<\/span>are deep and oriental
\n<\/span>rug colors. Brown leaves
\n<\/span>in the woods set off
\n<\/span>gray trunks of trees.
\n<\/span>But that bluet was
\n<\/span>the focus of it all: last
\n<\/span>spring, next spring, what
\n<\/span>does it matter? Unexpected
\n<\/span>as a tear when someone
\n<\/span>reads a poem you wrote
\n<\/span>for him: \u201cIt\u2019s this line
\n<\/span>here.\u201d That bluet breaks
\n<\/span>me up, tiny spring flower
\n<\/span>late, late in dour October.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Instead of beginning with the past, we start with \u201cand,\u201d in medias res, evoking the epic the poem obviously isn\u2019t, although the question of stamina\u2014of effort and its prolongation\u2014seems consonant with the generic marker, and, from the perspective of something \u201cso small,\u201d unseasonably pushing through the soil is pretty epic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable how much erotic or at least potentially erotic language the poem begins with, but without sex overwhelming the lexical field. I dare you to put the following terms in a Google search: “stamina,” “freaks,” “splashed,” “creamy,” “throat.” All this makes the \u201cQuaker lady\u201d sound a little like a freak, maybe in drag, but then such a reading is cut by the proximity of “lady” to “lake,” which makes it literary, idealizing, Arthurian (epic). So there is oscillation between scales, including of genre, and between the carnal and the courtly. And then \u201cstamina\u201d is also a plural of stamen<\/em>, which is the pollen-producing male reproductive organ of the Quaker lady (of the Lake) in question. The grammar of the line keeps the botanical sexual sense from being the primary one, but it\u2019s there. The words themselves waver between being plain and literary, thingly and allusive, while the diction is at once talky and taut, a little heightened.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I like that \u201cheld\u201d at the end of the seventh line, how \u201cheld\u201d just manages to hold the splash of sky before it spills over the precipice of the right margin. You can almost see it tremble with the effort, buttressed by the comma. All three of the words in the line end in <\/span>d<\/span><\/i>, and all the letters of \u201cheld\u201d are held by \u201csplashed,\u201d as if they splashed out of the longer word. \u201c[P]etaled\u201d in the subsequent line seems to synthesize the sounds of \u201csplashed\u201d and \u201cheld,\u201d and what a lovely definition of a petal: a splash of color that held, that holds, until it withers. (The <\/span>l<\/span><\/i> sounds of \u201cpetaled\u201d will later be held still in \u201cstill,\u201d after resting in \u201capple,\u201d then break into a \u201cripple,\u201d and then continue to ripple through the poem, viz. \u201coriental.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201cpaintbrush,\u201d that important kind of flower in \u201cSalute,\u201d is so called because it is said to resemble brushes dipped in bright red or orange-yellow paint. And I think the bluet in this poem is both an actual blue flower in the world and, invariably, the blue flower of art, the <\/span>Blaue Blume<\/span> of<\/span> Novalis. There is another crucial oscillation, then, between nature and culture, between a particular blossom and a poetic symbol. Schuyler himself might discourage this reading: \u201cAll things are real \/ no one a symbol,\u201d begins the poem \u201cLetter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum?\u201d and in an interview Schuyler said: \u201cI\u2019m not \u2026 interested in the idea of the rose as it occurs on and on throughout literature, I\u2019m interested in <\/span>roses<\/span><\/i>, in Georg Arends, and a new rose.\u201d But even in (these very Williams-like) disavowals of the flower as symbol, there is a blurry boundary between nature and convention: the \u201cnew rose\u201d is brought into existence via the horticulturalist\u2019s art, the flower is named for its \u201cauthor\u201d (Georg Arends), it is ornamental. And what could be more literary than to be fascinated by the <\/span>name<\/span><\/i> of the rose, obsessed as Schuyler was by the nomenclature of flowers? (Schuyler\u2019s \u201cHorse Chestnut Trees and Roses,\u201d for example, is as much a celebration of the names of cultivars as the flowers themselves.) So while the flower is never <\/span>merely <\/span><\/i>a symbol in Schuyler, it could be said to symbolize the meeting of nature and culture, of the given and the made, of the discrete things and the kinds that language makes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Maybe it\u2019s more to the point to say that Schuyler\u2019s description of the flower <\/span>transforms<\/span><\/i> it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That\u2019s why\u2014to skip down a little\u2014the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves \u201cset off\u201d the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.\u201d Schuyler\u2019s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)\u2014paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In \u201cEvenings in Vermont,\u201d for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: \u201cI study \/ the pattern in a red rug, arabesques \/ and squares, and one red streak \/ lies in the west, over the ridge.\u201d In \u201cScarlet Tanager,\u201d the bird in the tree provides \u201cthe red touch green \/ cries out for.\u201d In \u201cA Gray Thought,\u201d \u201ca dark thick green\u201d is \u201claid in layers on \/ the spruce \u2026\u201d And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a mild modernism here that reenchants the world\u2014barely, briefly\u2014by converting what\u2019s merely there into significant form so that the landscape becomes a history of small artistic decisions. Whose decisions, whose touches and layerings? Not God\u2019s, and not quite Stevens\u2019s \u201cmajor man\u201d reinvesting the world with meaning through the powers of poetic imagination. But not not that either: It\u2019s more like a minor man, who has looked at a lot of good paintings, and also looked\u2014in a lot of pain\u2014out of the window (another frame) of Payne Whitney (the mental hospital where Schuyler spent some time; \u201cSalute\u201d was written in Bloomingdale Hospital in White Plains). Williams said \u201cno ideas but in things,\u201d Stevens said that poetry\u2019s power is \u201cthe power of the mind over the possibilities of things,\u201d Schuyler oscillates between them. Schuyler is closer to Williams in the attention to mundane speech and the mundane things at hand (e.g., a Carr\u2019s cracker; which is not to say Stevens had no concern with dailiness, or \u201cordinary evenings\u201d), crucially closer to Williams in enjambment as the foundational poetic technique (I think of <\/span>Spring and All<\/span><\/i>: \u201cso that to engage roses \/ becomes a geometry\u2014\u201d). But Schuyler is a little more like Stevens in the project of imaginative redescription: bluet, blue flower, blue guitar. The literary genealogy doesn\u2019t really matter (and one could configure it differently); my point is that the magic of Schuyler is that you feel nature becoming art as you read. Or you feel the effort to make it so, its fluctuations, often its failure.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, he\u2019s not describing an actual painted image, but making a poetic one; Schuyler is composing the scene, the small decisions are his, but it feels like he\u2019s engaging another medium, and so the poet\u2019s act of creation is smuggled in, as if he were just looking at somebody else\u2019s representation of the view. This gives his voice a kind of secondariness, a kind of modesty\u2014I\u2019m not the visionary, I\u2019m just reviewing the visions for <\/span>Art News<\/span><\/i> (where he was an associate editor). This in part accounts for how his tone is simultaneously matter of fact and metamorphic. Schuyler makes his writing seem like he\u2019s \u201creading\u201d a painting, but this kind of secondariness actually becomes a species of immediacy because his ekphrastic language also describes his own verbal form, the poem we\u2019re reading: the splashes and holds, the falls from margin to margin. This means that Schuyler\u2019s \u201creading\u201d and our reading of Schuyler correspond, our acts of attention are calibrated across time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(I assume it\u2019s obvious that I\u2019m not suggesting Schuyler is the only poet who makes the world seem like a made thing, like art, or that he\u2019s the only poet whose unfolding perceptions are transferred to poetic form so that, as we attend to his work, author and reader are in a sense coeval; on the contrary, some version of such transformations and transfers are present in the writing I love across genres and eras. But that\u2019s why I\u2019m trying to describe and celebrate Schuyler\u2019s specific, quiet style, his techniques and tonalities; in his minor way, he makes contact with something fundamental.)<\/span><\/p>\n

(And here I might mention that, while they are very different writers, Schuyler\u2019s tendency to reframe nature as art is a characteristic shared with his friend, the brilliant Barbara Guest, and while Schuyler\u2019s talkiness and dailiness have more in common with O\u2019Hara\u2014who couldn\u2019t, as he wrote in \u201cMeditations in an Emergency,\u201d \u201c<\/span>even enjoy a blade of grass\u201d unless he knew \u201cthere\u2019s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally <\/span>regret<\/span><\/i> life\u201d\u2014Schuyler is in many ways closer to Guest in his tendency to redescribe nature as culture, to present the merely contingent as arranged. As with Schuyler, this transformation in Guest often involves a window\u2014a frame through\/in which natural phenomena might appear as the touches or layerings of the compositional. Art and windows are often paired in Guest, as in her great poem, \u201cThe View from Kandinsky\u2019s Window,\u201d or the title of her collected writings on art, <\/span>D\u00fcrer in the Window<\/span><\/i>. Has someone written an essay on the windows of The New York School? I think of Ashbery\u2019s \u201cOctober at the Window\u201d or \u201cThe New Higher\u201d\u2014\u201c\u2026 the window where \/ the outside crept away\u201d\u2014and O\u2019Hara\u2019s small \u201cWindows\u201d: \u201cthis space so clear and blue \/ does not care what we put \/\/ into it \u2026\u201d One way Schuyler has a significant aesthetic affiliation with these other writers\u2014as opposed to just a social one\u2014is in his experiments with what one can put into the window: \u201cput into\u201d because the frame of the window stands for the transformation of contingency into composition. For his part, Schuyler is clear and modest\u2014sometimes to the point of quiet comedy\u2014about the centrality of the window to his compositions. Interviews get answers like this when they ask him about his method: \u201c[T]here are things all through the poem that are actually what I\u2019m seeing out the window in Southampton,\u201d \u201cThe things described in it are what I was seeing out the window in the house in Maine,\u201d and so on.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But to return to lateness and its undoing: \u201cPast is past,\u201d \u201clate, late\u201d\u2014belatedness is the traditional theme that \u201cSalute\u201d and \u201cThe Bluet\u201d indulge and, in their small way, defeat or, better, gently suspend. The bluet can be assigned to the last spring or the next one, that doesn\u2019t matter, since it\u2019s happening now, unexpected as a \u201ctear\u201d (rhymes with dear<\/em>) that we\u2019re not entirely sure isn\u2019t a \u201ctear\u201d (rhymes with dare<\/em>, like the torn or jagged right margin of a poem) until it\u2019s tuned\u2014made decisively lacrymal\u2014by the \u201chere\u201d arriving at the left margin in the third to last line. \u201cTear\u201d itself remains suspended between being a drop (recalling the drop of sky the flower holds) or something rent \u201cso as to leave ragged or irregular edges\u201d until it drops over the irregular edge of the poem. \u201cIt\u2019s this line \/ here.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Except it isn\u2019t, or it is and isn\u2019t: \u201cthis\u201d refers (at least at first) to the fourth to last line, the \u201chere\u201d begins the third to last. The line about the line that caused the tear is torn across the margin, it\u2019s in both places at once, or it\u2019s in neither place, a Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat of a line. Last line, next line, what does it matter? One way it matters is that the formal irony\u2014the way the line break renders \u201cthis\u201d and \u201chere\u201d paradoxical, undecidable\u2014means that these deictics seem ultimately to refer to the unnameable break itself, that little moment of hesitation that we use a virgule to denote in prose, a felt silence, the white space that is the drop of sky or teardrop no longer held or contained within the terms of the poem; emotion is instead expressed by formal motion. (Dramas of lineation are further heightened by the fact that this poem\u2014like \u201cSalute\u201d\u2014is a single stanza; there are no larger breaks, no other species of segmentation, competing with the irregular margins.) \u201cPast is \/ past,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s this line \/ here\u201d\u2014all of poetry is for me in these little delays, catches in the breath, delays that both formally enact belatedness and, by making it felt in the embodied present tense of reading, undo it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In both instances\u2014\u201cPast is past\u201d is a cliche; \u201cIt\u2019s this line \/ here\u201d is quoted speech from a friend or lover\u2014Schuyler is breaking up received phrases, found language, showing how lineation, how art, can alter the given, how secondariness isn\u2019t just lateness but an opportunity for imaginative transformation. The person Schuyler quotes has to point to the line that moves him; it escapes description or paraphrase. (I think of the \u201chim,\u201d whatever the biographical facts, as a lover because of the erotic language earlier in the poem, where the drops of sky, why not just say it, might also be sexual fluid.) It\u2019s a wonderful feedback loop of reading and writing (or a M\u00f6bius strip in which the two become a single practice): Schuyler writes the poem that moves the lover, Schuyler is moved that the lover is moved, the lover\u2019s language about being moved\u2014indicating a line we never see\u2014is then so movingly arranged, broken up in a second poem that breaks me up each time I read it. So mere belatedness is replaced with a chain of feeling to which we readers can add links. Another poet would sound self-aggrandizing\u2014look how my poems move men to tears!\u2014but what I hear is Schuyler\u2019s melancholy gratitude, admiration, for that openness, receptivity, which his poem communicates, makes available in the \u201c\/ here\u201d of poetry. (Schuyler\u2019s \u201cthis line \/ here\u201d\u2014the indication without quotation of the line in question\u2014reminds me of Denise Levertov\u2019s \u201cThe Secret,\u201d another poem in which the poet is moved by readers\u2019 capacity to be moved, and in which the adventure of enjambment\u2014the way poetic form <\/span>happens<\/span><\/i>\u2014is celebrated for its inexhaustibility: \u201cTwo girls discover \/ the secret of life \/ in a sudden line of \/ poetry. \/\/ I who don\u2019t know the \/ secret wrote \/ the line \u2026\u201d) That \u201c\/ here\u201d is what I hear described in Schuyler\u2019s thank you poem to Kenward Elmslie for the gift of a letter opener in \u201cA Stone Knife,\u201d a poem that recalls \u201cSalute,\u201d and that both celebrates and enacts the renewable \u201csurprise\u201d of poetic form:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

the surprise is that
\n<\/span>the surprise, once
\n<\/span>past, is always there:
\n<\/span>which to enjoy is
\n<\/span>not to consume. The un-
\n<\/span>recapturable returns \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Schuyler\u2019s breaks, his sense of the line, are precious to me, and yet he was matter of fact to the point of dismissiveness about how they came to be. \u201cI don\u2019t really know how I happened to get into writing such very thin poems,\u201d he told an interviewer. \u201cI was writing in very small notebooks that I carried around with me, and it was easier just to write like that \u2026”<\/span><\/p>\n

I think I started it because I wrote in John Ashbery\u2019s living room\u2014I was on my way to Southampton and Vermont\u2014a poem called \u201cWho is Nancy Daum?,\u201d which is in <\/span>The Crystal Lithium<\/span><\/i>, and I had written that in a very small notebook, thinking that I could rearrange the lines if they weren’t long enough for whatever lines I intended. It was the kind of notebook you carry in your jacket pocket. And then when I came to type it up, I thought I would leave it the way it was, in jagged lines.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some feel this is evidence that Schuyler\u2019s poems are haphazardly composed, and so it\u2019s some kind of misreading to be moved by this or that \u201cline \/ here,\u201d but I find this casual account of lineation entirely compatible with the complex and delicate effects his enjambments produce. When a painter decides on the size of a canvas to stretch, we don\u2019t then discount every other compositional decision she makes as random. That\u2019s how I think of those notebooks in which so many of the poems I love were made: that Schuyler was often negotiating a miniature, objective margin in real time as his acts of observation unfolded strikes me as another way we might meaningfully speak of him as painterly (often a supremely meaningless adjective for a poet), another way the presence of a frame structured his compositional technique, whether he took the notebook en plein air or worked indoors, looking back and forth from notebook to window. Notebook and window, his two frames. It makes me think of one of my favorite of his uncollected poems, another poem that echoes \u201cSalute,\u201d and its pasts that are and aren\u2019t past: \u201cA Blue Shadow Painting,\u201d dedicated to Fairfield Porter, that begins by describing \u201can evening real as paint on canvas.\u201d When the painter in this poem loads his brush and concentrates, it\u2019s \u201cas though he saw neither the work in hand nor the subject\u201d\u2014he makes quick, perhaps only semi-conscious decisions in the time of composition, thereby managing to store some of that time in art, where it awaits us: \u201cThe day \/ is passing, is past: multiple and immutable came to live \/ on a small oblong of stretched canvas \u2026 \u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Darragh Park, Portrait of James Schuyler<\/em>, 1996, ink on acetate, 10 x 8″. Private collection.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are, of course, a range of forms (and moods and modes) in Schuyler\u2014long poems, poems with very long lines, poems that incorporate a lot of white space, not to mention the novels\u2014but my Schuyler will always be the miniaturist of \u201cSalute\u201d or \u201cThe Bluet\u201d (or \u201cKorean Mums,\u201d and other flowers). In these poems in particular Schuyler possesses a kind of soft Midas touch in which everything his eye alights on becomes art, becomes composition as he describes it, and then his own compositional decisions\u2014especially his enjambments, his unexpected tears (rhymes with stairs<\/em>)\u2013bring our attention in line with his, so that we feel we are looking together across time, and so the past is not merely past, but always present in the form, available as the present of form, which is never consumed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But again I feel I\u2019m making him sound too triumphant, as if losses were ultimately overcome. I say it\u2019s a Midas touch because often in Schuyler the poem, the art, is a document of emotional suffering and isolation. The drama of part and whole so central to poetry is also a drama, in Schuyler, of holding it together; the threat of falling apart is emotional, not just technical. (I\u2019ve always been struck by the injunction: \u201cCompose yourself,\u201d a cruel and revealing thing to say to an upset person.) Sometimes the lines seem to tremble with the effort; sometimes the desire to bring the outside inside, to press nature into art, has a quiet desperation, as in these last lines of the last poem I\u2019ll quote in its entirety, \u201cFebruary 13, 1975,\u201d one of the poems written in Payne Whitney:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tomorrow is St. Valentine\u2019s:<\/span>
\n<\/span>tomorrow I\u2019ll think about<\/span>
\n<\/span>that. Always nervous, even<\/span>
\n<\/span>after a good sleep I\u2019d like<\/span>
\n<\/span>to climb back into. The sun<\/span>
\n<\/span>shines on yesterday\u2019s new<\/span>
\n<\/span>fallen snow and yestereven<\/span>
\n<\/span>it turned the world to pink<\/span>
\n<\/span>and rose and steel blue<\/span>
\n<\/span>buildings. Helene is restless:<\/span>
\n<\/span>leaving soon. And what then<\/span>
\n<\/span>will I do with myself? Some-<\/span>
\n<\/span>one is watching morning<\/span>
\n<\/span>TV. I\u2019m not reduced to that<\/span>
\n<\/span>yet. I wish one could press<\/span>
\n<\/span>snowflakes in a book like flowers.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So many of the oscillations I\u2019ve described are happening softly here. Do you read the first line as talky, as matter of fact, or as iambic tetrameter, evoking a traditional prosody that the poem will then break up? (I hear the last line of the poem as echoing and revising the meter; to my ear, it\u2019s trochaic tetrameter, though my friends hear it differently.) There is the plain speech (and ghosts of made phrases: nothing new under the sun; \u201cyesterday\u2019s news\u201d is almost there in the sixth line) coexisting with the archaic literariness of \u201cyestereven.\u201d This casualness, the talkiness, is also cut by the sonic relays\u2014”<\/span>into,” “new,” “blue,” “soon,” “do,” “reduced”<\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/i>that help hold the form together. The world becomes a made thing when the sun turns it into \u201csteel blue \/ buildings.\u201d\u00a0 (And even the small surprise of \u201cTV\u201d at the left margin of the third to last line, where \u201cmorning\u201d reveals itself to be an adjective and not the object of someone\u2019s watching, is another instance of nature becoming culture.) And again we have the temporal tensions, glitches across the margins, as in \u201cyesterday\u2019s new \/ fallen snow.\u201d What was new yesterday is already old, the new fallen is the recently belated, especially if you make the \u201cnew\u201d pause for a moment before it falls. The poem (like every poem?) is late and early (like a spring flower in October) as it is written in lonely anticipation of tomorrow, Valentine\u2019s Day, and all this leads to the fantasy of art existing outside of time, of a \u201cyet\u201d that could be pressed, the snow preserved between the pages like a flower one planned to gather.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And is not to have thought to do \/ enough?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ben Lerner’s most recent book is<\/em> The Lights. This talk was delivered as part of a new semiannual lecture series at the Poetry Society of America in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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