Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Schuyler was a central member of the New York School. Freely Espousing, Schuyler’s first major collection of poetry, was published in 1969 at the age of 46. His other major collections include The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poem (1980), and A Few Days (1985). Schuyler also wrote novels, including Alfred and Guinevere (1958), A Nest of Ninnies, with John Ashbery (1969), and What’s for Dinner (1978). In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Schuyler received the Longview Foundation Award in 1961, the Frank O'Hara Prize for Poetry in 1969, a Whiting Award in Poetry in 1985, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets. He passed away in 1991.
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The Morning of the PoemFrom"Footnote"
The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”
The Morning of the Poem: -
The Morning of the PoemFrom"Dining Out with Doug and Frank"
My abstention from the Park
is for Billy Nichols who went
bird-watching there and, for
his binoculars, got his
head beat in. Streaming blood,
he made it to an avenue
where no cab would pick him up
until one did and at
Roosevelt Hospital he waited
several hours before any
doctor took him in hand. A
year later he was dead. But
I’ll make the park: I carry
more cash than I should and
walk the street at night
without feeling scared unless
someone scary passes.
The Morning of the Poem: -
The Morning of the PoemFrom"Trip"
Wigging in, wigging out:
when I stop to think
the wires in my head
cross: kaboom. How
many trips
by ambulance (five,
count them five),
claustrated, pill addiction,
in and out of mental
hospitals,
the suicidalness (once
I almost made it)
but – I go on?
Tell you all of it?
I can’t. When I think
of that, that at
only fifty-one I,
Jim the Jerk, am
still alive and breathing
deeply, that I think
is a miracle.
The Morning of the Poem:
“ . . . 19 years after his death and 17 after his Collected Poems, this trove of previously unpublished work shows just how much fun (and how unsettling) Schuyler can be. Campy, cryptic or over the top, sometimes resembling verse diaries or word games . . . the poems slow down to reveal their serious goals . . . Many poets tell us we ought to enjoy every moment. Schuyler's verse, by precept and example, can actually help us do it.” —Stephen Burt, The New York Times [on Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems]
“Schuyler, who died in 1991, was a noted poet, however this book is not written in 'poetic prose'—he employs a simple style, without imagery or complexities. But every page displays a poet’s sensibility in the fresh and inventive ways Schuyler has his child narrators use and misuse language. Alfred and Guinevere is a small treasure, and its restoration to print is to be commended.” — Phillip Routh, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"To read Schuyler is, almost inevitably, to be struck with the desire to be a poet.” —Troy Jollimore, Los Angeles Times
Selected Works
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