The Jotter by the Ashtray
James Schuyler is [one] of the New York School poets, whose ideas come out of Abstract Expressionism. Schuyler, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, believe—it seems—in putting down the first (or last) thing that comes into their heads because any correction comes out of a new moment and is therefore a different poem, which they also write of course. The snag to this is that words, unlike paint, don't automatically assume a convenient abstraction—and hence a spurious form—when slapped on any old how. They just look slapped on.
This not to say that Schuyler's poems [in The Morning of the Poem] don't sometimes have a lame-duck charm. "He's extremely, almost pathologically shy," Ashbery said of him recently…. Mostly, these are poems of waiting and healing, of desperate situations barely redeemed by the jotting of words you feel with a pang are their author's only contact with the world…. The success of this depends on whether that tone conjures a broken down, "pathologically shy" creature holed up in a depressed corner of middle age, or whether you hear it as the careful disingenuousness of a man who knows only too well how to play the New York game. You may not like either impression. Schuyler certainly takes self-tolerance to considerable lengths….
Admittedly Schuyler's train of consciousness is a mite more lovable than some people's—especially in his parenthetical bridge passages about roses or shopping—but for how long can one take such a ramble through a man's daydreams? What there is to admire in The Morning of the Poem (is there an afternoon and an evening still to come?) comes from the often touching trust which Schuyler manages, in spite of crippling doubt, to invest in certain limited combinations of words—words which are seen as being valuable and beautiful in themselves….
Hugo Williams, "The Jotter by the Ashtray," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1981; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 4081, June 19, 1981, p. 707.
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