Small Daily Details
James Schuyler: Last Poems. London: Slow Dancer, £7.99.
John Ashbery has noticed that American English has a less strong sense of possession than its English forebear. That’s worth stating in relation to his friend Schuyler’s work. Here in these last poems – first collected in this beautifully produced edition – Schuyler gazes intently at the world around him, yet never tries to fix things into too rigid forms, and remains open to life’s contingencies. Perhaps for this reason one of Schuyler’s most cherished themes is flowers, particularly garden flowers; for Schuyler, a flower is a forever changing beauty. Here is part of ‘Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses’:
At the corner of the house Rosa Mutabilis fluttered
its single, changeable wings. My favourite perhaps.Then, in the border, along the south side of
the white house, Golden Wings (a patented rose –
did you know you can patent roses? well you can);
prickly, purplish Rose de Rescht; Souvenir
de la Malmaison (named by a Russian Grand Duke in
honour of the Empress Josephine, Empress of Rosarians);
Mabel Morrison, lifting her blowsy white blooms
to the living room windows.
This also displays two of Schuyler’s most notable characteristics. The savouring of the world through cataloguing – in another poem, ‘Six something’, he mocks this tendency in himself: “I/ count seedlings:/ always counting”. And the spoken asides, conveying in this instance unlikely information (that you can patent roses) but elsewhere, such as in the opening poem ‘Mark’, tugging the narrative into sudden self-consciousness: “On that overcast day/ a haze like smoke (it/ was smoke)”. These asides cause Lee Harwood, in a well judged ‘Afterword’, to note, “Reading one of James Schuyler’s poems often feels like looking over his shoulder as he writes. The process is that open to view.”
Born in Chicago in 1921 and dying in New York in 1991, Schuyler is probably best known for being, along with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, part of the so-called New York School of Poets who gravitated around the Museum of Modern Art and the magazine Art News – Schuyler worked for both. But, as is often the case, the label obscures as much as it clarifies. In an interview for the American Poetry Review (March 1985) Schuyler remarked that having recently spent twelve years living on Long Island he missed nature when he returned to the city, adding sardonically, “I get bored looking at that building across the street”. Not something we could imagine the city-fixated O’Hara saying. Schuyler’s paradise is not so much the “this, then this” bustle of O’Hara’s New York, as the urban garden – verdant yet contained, a place where nature and the human blend comfortably and sanely. This is how Schuyler closes a poem called ‘Three Gardens’:
Behind
up the 1880’s iron balustrade, twine
a few implacable thin tendrils
of morning glory.
Like much American poetry, Schuyler’s is conversational in tone and often has the feel of a journal. What distinguishes it is the absence of self-pity. For on the evidence of these poems, even at the end of his life, Schuyler had a remarkable capacity to find enchantment through close observation of the things around him. It also avoids that other American poetic-curse of being cloth-eared – prose disguised to look like poetry through lineation. In contrast Schuyler’s poems are carried along exquisitely by the sustained resonance of one or two particular sounds. (Notice how the ‘n’ runs through the example I just quoted.) That he makes this look easy is part of the charm. There are things in this book that on first encounter seem not to work: unlikely enjambements, skinny stanzas used for no obvious reason. Yet these devices intrigue rather than irritate, suggesting we are in the presence of a real lyric poet whose constraints are ultimately there to bring about transcendence.
Perhaps Schuyler learned this artistry through his love of Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese, since they too come to understanding through meditation upon specifics rather than generalities. That Schuyler was able to do this amidst the clamour of modern urban American life is the particular gift these last poems impart. Here for example in ‘Six something’ he observes the antennae on top of the Empire State building:
rising in stages
first woven then
slim out of thick
to an ultimate
needle taper pricking
the day: its point
a test of clarity.
I’m not sure Schuyler had enough range to be a major poet. The portraits of the jazz singer Mildred Bailey and the death of the French actress Simone Signoret don’t quite convince me when they slip into a racey-jazz vernacular. But, just as a garden should be greater than the sum of its parts, it is the book as a whole rather than individual poems that I praise. For here are gathered the last thoughts of an open, loving and generous character.
Page(s) 94-96
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