James Schuyler

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New Books in Review: 'The Morning of the Poem'

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While Schuyler knows exactly how the orthodox modern lyric operates, he is much more likely to ask "What is a / poem, anyway?" and to keep on trying to concoct one out of fleeting impressions, thoughts that they trigger, bits of useless information …, quotes from conversations, and whatever else turns up on the nonce. His poems [in the Morning of the Poem] often resemble journal entries, and he continually flirts with the dangers of going flat, turning cute, getting sentimental, thin, or prolix. Hence a part of his charm and fascination. He invites us to challenge him, to test his sensibility, to catch him in a weak moment. Ideally, a Schuyler poem keeps mildly startling us…. Sometimes [its] movement is a matter of sound effects, as in "Good Morning."… His lyricism betrays him sometimes into mechanical chiming, as at the end of "June 30, 1974," but more often he proves that pretty sounds can still be—pretty…. At other times it is a matter of inspired syntax … or a set of terms that click like tumblers…. Nearly always it is a matter of tone … and of rich, original perception…. One could gather a whole anthology of lovely descriptions from the title poem alone. (pp. 121-22)

But "The Morning of the Poem" goes far beyond delicious descriptions…. [It] is a species of autobiography that seems always in medias res. Following his nose and pursuing first this interesting scent and then that distracting one, he covers a great deal of ground, although in the end it would be nigh impossible to put the events in chronological order…. Past, present, and hypothetical future merge in this poem. We ought to be able to see it all at once, so we could watch the parenthetical statements fading into one another in all directions like ripples into ripples on a pond on which rain has just begun to fall. Because he values inclusiveness so highly, he has to forgo a certain elegance. He even seems to mock the notion of aesthetic unity by virtually framing the poem with trips to the john. What we get instead of coherence is scintillating diversity. Loving "things / as they are," Schuyler identifies them as precisely as possible, so the poem presents an astonishing array of proper names: Georg Arends roses, Prell, Istrian stone, a Cranshaw melon, a Segal lock, an Aga cookstove, Jell-O, a Bluebird Laundry truck, and so on and on. The botanical terms alone number in the dozens, as do the place names, and a compilation of the half-forgotten and never widely known people he mentions would rival Gatsby's guest list in length (and weirdness)…. Specificity preserves uniqueness, and the world is a treasure trove of things shining with their specialness…. He is put out on the rare occasion when he cannot come up with the name of a weed or the term for the flaking of brownstone (it's "spalling") because the failure sells short the world's wild variety.

Meanwhile, awash in the items of life, we learn, along with so much else about him, that his discovery in high school of Ulysses was a revelation. This poem's own "'stream of consciousness'" (cf. those trips to the john?) testifies to the novel's impact, and as in Joyce, mutatis mutandis, in Schuyler we must put up with drearier moments, wearying particularizations, esoterica, dull anecdotes (how Fairfield Porter sunburned his penis is not as interesting as one might think). He moves me least when concerned with sex, when he seems to assume that a memory or fantasy will enthrall just because it is sexual. But occasional impatience is little enough to pay for this vision, "evocative and fresh" as the "minor works by minor masters" that he so admires. It is the more remarkable because the life that has produced it has been so riddled and raddled with pain and loss…. "Anticipation" and "Fascination," to borrow the titles of two of his favorite "golden oldies," and the sense that the world is a continuing miracle of abundance, dominate his work. (pp. 122-23)

Stephen Yenser, "New Books in Review: 'The Morning of the Poem'," in The Yale Review (© 1980 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), Vol. 70, No. 1, October, 1980, pp. 119-23.

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