James Schuyler is often celebrated as a poet who celebrated the everyday and ordinary, what he called “the pure pleasure of / Simply looking.” He took a walk or peered through his window, and the poem became the daily record of what he saw. He had a keen eye and reveled in particularity. But Schuyler was afflicted by periodic bouts of mental illness and he was often looking at life from the outside, as through a looking glass. The reason that daily life takes on such a luminous glow in a great deal of his work is because he was effectively cut off from it much of the time. He cherished the familiar because it was never quite familiar enough, never something that he could take for granted. He reminds me of the eighteenth-century English poet, Christopher Smart, in the way his work spotlights and exaggerates familiar things. Both fastened themselves to daily life as a meaningful way to hold onto the world.
It’s not necessary to pathologize Schuyler’s enthusiasms or the way that he took pleasure in describing ordinary things. But this way of looking at some of his work from this angle does help account for its psychological pressure, its odd intensities. The language is plain but seems psychologically lit from within. He looked hard at things, but he wasn’t an Objectivist poet, like Louis Zukofsky or George Oppen. There is an inner nervousness driving his work.
Schuyler’s mental health was fragile, and he was institutionalized several times in the 1970s. In 1975 he wrote “The Payne Whitney Poems” while he was interned at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City. He published the entire eleven-poem cycle in the New York Review of Books in 1978. The diary-like series subsequently appeared in The Morning of the Poem (1980). Here, as the poet David Herd suggests, “Schuyler presents in miniature many aspects of his work: the importance of observation, a fascination with the vicissitudes of weather, a fondness for the collage-like list (as in ‘Sleep’), and, throughout the cycle, a sense that in writing one might better make oneself at home in one’s world.”
“The Payne Whitney Poems” are nervous, low-key, focused on the daily, sometimes funny. The opening lines of the poem “Trip” set the tone and establish the subject: “Wigging in, wigging out: / when I stop to think / the wires in my head / cross: kaboom” (“Trip”). Here’s the poem “Arches”:
Arches
of buildings, this building,
frame a stream of windows
framed in white brick. This
building is fireproof; or else
it isn’t: the furnishings first
to go: no, the patients. Patients
on Sundays walk in a small garden.
Today some go out on a group
pass. To stroll the streets and shop.
So what else is new? The sky
slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
A gray in which some smoke stands.
The title runs into the first line and the poem sets off on its own hesitant string of thoughts. As so often happens in Schuyler’s poems, the speaker is looking out the window and recording what he sees, as if the window serves him as a protection against what Gaston Bachelard calls "exterior dizziness." He is engaged but slightly removed from it all. The lines are cut short, the rhythm jittery. There isn’t much to hold onto. What’s striking is how immediately Schuyler’s speaker begins adapting (“Arches // of buildings, this building”) and correcting (“This / building is fireproof, or else / it isn’t”) what he observes. The buildings narrow to a single building. The poem itself is visually “framed.” The speaker is looking through the enclosure of his own window and through the arches that “frame a stream of windows / framed in white brick.”
Everything is provisional, every statement leads to a revision. This building is fireproof or, whoops, it isn’t. There’s dry grim humor in the recognition that in a fire the patients will go before the furnishings. The uncapitalized word patients is immediately capitalized. This poem has the simple language of someone who has come through a great catastrophe, who needs to remember how to use language again. It is very shaky and tentative.
There is a tiny drama here. The speaker is looking at the windows of the other buildings, at the patients walking in the garden on Sunday. He isn’t one of them. They’re free, or somewhat free, to stroll about; he is not. He takes a moment to ask himself “So what else is new?” It is almost as if he is trying to think of something interesting to tell a visitor. He seems slightly desperate to come up with something fresh in a place where life has come to a standstill, where nothing new seems to happen. That’s why he turns to the weather:
The sky
slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
A gray in which some smoke stands.
Schuyler manages to capture the texture of a small moment in time, how the day darkened and dusk sets in, simultaneously slowly and swiftly. No other poet would have jammed those two words together as “slowly/swiftly”. A person is sitting or standing by the window as the day closes shop. As soon as he describes the sky going from blue to gray he immediately corrects this observation, noting a “gray in which some smoke stands.” The three alliterative s sounds—“some smoke stands”—enact the way that the day comes to a lingering and yet sudden close. Something can still be seen, something preserved. Something is left standing. But it is mist and vapor.
The poet Michael Hofmann hears an undertone of nervous amusement in this poem, despite everything. He writes: “However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, however low, is merriment. The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, in the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire. It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary.” This is well said about a poem that is somehow hesitant and yet sure of itself. It seems quietly aware of its own construction, of being made in front of us. The speaker of this poem is ill, but the poet who crafted it was healthily—slowly/swiftly—making a new kind of poem.
From 100 Poems to Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch (published on March 30, 2021, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Above left: James Schuyler.