Close Readings: James Schuyler
excerpts from ongoing work on Schuyler, Romanticism, and the Poetics of Attention
Last week I recorded an episode of the podcast Close Readings, with Kamran Javadizadeh, with my good friend Kamran! Just as the month was leaving in real time, we talked about James Schuyler’s wonderful poem “February.” Since much of my writing on Schuyler is in draft, here are a few excerpts for readers interested in the topic. Hopefully, there will be a lot more to come in the months and years ahead. If you’ve found your way here from the podcast— Welcome! —Eric
…from “Indication, Ekphrasis, and Things as They Are: Paul Fry with James Schuyler”
“That bluet breaks / me up”
[In her personal remarks on Joan Mitchell’s painting, Les Bluets] Lydia Davis from an initial position in abstraction thus comes upon reference, somehow both taking for granted the idiom in a gruff throwaway gesture (“It was what it was”) and spontaneously discovering the fuller aesthetic and even ethical experience of things as they are via the constructed mediations of painting and language (a “new tolerance for, and then satisfaction in, the unexplained and unsolved that marked a change in me”). In its own idiom, more relaxed to be sure than Lydia Davis’s translations, essays, and very short stories, James Schuyler’s poetry often and characteristically does something similar to de-routinize the basic experience of linguistic reference so that it is felt as an achievement of being present “on the side of things,” and not merely to be made witness to a state of compulsory givens. In this sense, it is wrong to suppose as many readers do that Schuyler is being particularly humble in voicing his characteristic desire “ ‘merely to say, to see and say, things as they are’ ” (Nelson 25). Much as the adjectives “mere” and “pure” (bloß, rein) serve central ambitions in Kant, Schuyler’s modesty or minimalism leverages a strong, if not at all transcendental, position. In the traditions of philosophy and aesthetics inherited from Romanticism, to seek out the right vision and articulation of “the object” at this level of being could not be a more glorious endeavor. It is numinous. The obduracy of affirming “things as they are” may sound like an avant-garde anti- intellectualism and a claim against personal expression, or come across as a modesty trope, but it can afford Modernism a way of smuggling back a prohibited closeness, though not knowledge as such, with the domain of the Kantian “thing-in-itself.” Except that, as in Paul Fry’s writings upon Wordsworth, the disclosure of “things as they are” in Schuyler presents an ultimately material ground of being. Pretty much exactly as Fry argues of Wordsworth, I believe, Schuyler’s poetics shows that “the ostensive impulse realizes itself in a dialectical movement of estrangement from instrumental language which enables its reappearance within language as such” (Fry Defense 50).
At least as often as they do so by taking the extravagant — but more expected —dérive of metaphor and of figural language, Schuyler’s poems deploy the art of straight-up reference to summon the experience of opacity; and with it the experience that Davis reports as falling more against the grain for her, of a willingness to allow Keatsian irresolution.[1] (Like the experience Davis reports, Schuyler’s collaborations with painters and his way of forming cooperative intimacy with things and their reference promote the quiet solidarity of affiliative clusters: i.e., “the painting abruptly went beyond itself, lost its solitariness, acquired a relationship to fields, to flowers.” Thus Maggie Nelson rightly sees Schuyler’s poetics as essentially collaborative and juxtapositional, not metaphorical [26].) Around the same time Davis visited Mitchell’s studio in France, Schuyler wrote two (or, depending on what you count, three)[2] poems about the “same” flower that formed the subject of the paintings, the bluet. These texts include one of Schuyler’s most memorable of many poems that depict and enact the delicate, vital powers of surprise — the fall flower poem, “The Bluet” (1974):
And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petalled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr’s table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
[……….]
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: last
spring, this spring, what
does it matter? Unexpected
as a tear when someone
reads a poem you wrote
for him: “It’s this line
here.” That bluet breaks
me up, tiny spring flower
late, late in dour October. (CP, 195-96)[3]
With a view ahead to Mitchell’s painting (which the reader of Schuyler’s collection Hymn to Life in 1974 would almost certainly not know about just yet), it is worth noticing the way a close translation between modes of experience is already enacted in the poem, between the touching surprise of coming upon the flower and the single tear shed upon the poem’s individual, but unspecified, line. There is a kind of level openness, though not indifference, between the bluet of the poem and the subject of the painting. It winningly manifests here in the analogous but different formal likeness between the “late” speaker’s feeling in response to the “tiny spring flower,” and the “[u]nexpected” tearing up of the reader at a specific one of his lines whose exact place and identity we are not given.
In his next collection, Schuyler includes a short descriptive prose poem, “Footnote” (1980), that is generous yet precise in its designation and assignment of the bluet’s various appearances. The poem’s earnestly “funny,” evocatively informative tone of address plays equally off expectations for prose poetry, and the voice of the flower guidebook (Nelson 29):
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 them, broken up piece 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.” (CP, 238)
“Footnote” distinguishes and records the separateness of closely related, only apparently identical things: the two types of bluet (the flower known in France and the flower of New England; with the two corresponding pronunciations, Bloo-et, “ ‘Bloo-ay’”; the Joan Mitchell painting and the James Schuyler poem.[4] However — and here the flat and at first rather faux-naïve tone of the poem does its part — the distinctions made have no edge of invidiousness. They are simply there to be clearly indicated. I almost wrote, “drawn.” And though the speaker of “Footnote” nowhere suggests there is an influence of Mitchell upon “The Bluet” as “a poem I wrote,” there is a visible throughline of connection that does exist between Schuyler’s evocation of Mitchell’s painting and his earlier poem about the flower: “a drop of sky that / splashed and held” (in “The Bluet”); “runs and holds …. running and holding, staring you down with beauty” (in “Footnote,” as a description of the effect of color and paint in Mitchell’s painting).
So a spontaneous, overflowing fluid verb, and the act and state of holding, are common to both. I am not suggesting this continuity of imagery about the application and temporal form of a color — that is splashes, runs, but also holds (the material paint and the viewer’s attention) — means that “The Bluet” was in fact composed in or before 1974 already with Mitchell’s 1973 canvas in mind. Only that, when Schuyler writes “Footnote” in or before 1980, he basically repeats (whether by spontaneous recovery of the words, or with more conscious intent) the evocative phrase he had used for the rhythm of color as a metaphor (“a drop of sky”), to re-use in a plain-faced description of Mitchell. Schuyler’s refusal to make rivalrous distinctions applies not only, then, to the relationship between painting and poetry but to the modal shift between metaphorical and more “literal,” descriptive and referential, dimensions of language.
If “The Bluet” is a poem about stamina and the delightful “freak[ing] forth” of beauty and surprise, in the midst of the unseasonable “dour” autumn season, it is also a poem that welcomes and celebrates the difference of sources of unexpected emotional response. Schuyler’s pervenche moment is not egotistical but relational, even as it remains strikingly impersonal. A friend or lover (“someone”) points with emotion to a specific spot in the poem, “it’s this line / here”; and so the experience of the flower does the same for the poet: “That bluet breaks / me up.”[5] The effect of the formal repetition in the reduplication of experiences is not predictable; it carries the quietly electric touch of surprise. “Someone’s” pointing to the specific moment in an unspecified poem — the very act of pure index itself, without any content at all that we are given directly to see — and the indication of the existence and naming of the flower, are different from each other of course, though they are presented together on one plane. (It would not feel right to say either experience is the vehicle to express the other; even though the poem’s title would fix the bluet as the subject of all other elaborations.)
Schuyler thereby offers the suggestion that we take this difference of “moments,” in all its noted specificity, as a basis for the broader non-subordinated relation of (his) poetry and (Mitchell’s) painting. Paul Fry’s “ontological continuum with the things [language is] perceived to indicate” is thereby brought unexpectedly home (Fry Defense 55). This mood is effected as though it were sponsored by an indifference to the long-fabled rivalry between arts: an in-difference which is not dull to its respective media but, quite the opposite, makes pleasure, surprise, and observation all keener. One senses this undramatic, non-competitive heightening of observation between arts is possible because, as Maggie Nelson writes, “Mitchell’s work creates a space similar to that of Schuyler’s poetry: one in which self-expression and leaving the world ‘as is’ need not contradict or compete with each other, in which ‘feelings’ and ‘objects’ move in and around each other” (Nelson 27).
Schuyler is a pervasively ekphrastic poet in the broad, original sense of that term — he is a poet who seeks to describe visuality in detail in language. Yet (apart from his commissioned ARTnews reviews and criticism) he seldom writes ekphrastic works in the more narrow sense common to us now. What happens when ekphrasis is loosed from the occasion of providing written description and interpretation of a specific artwork (or other visual object), and is understood as a mode of writing that can be prompted across a range of unframed occasions, and can apply to a theoretically unlimited visual field? Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery’s celebrated long poem of 1975, ingeniously engages this rich question.
Schuyler’s two best known comments on his poetry’s relation to painting both confirm how he thinks and writes in modes of likeness outside the frame of mimesis. In response to an interviewer’s question in 1983, about whether he ever wrote poems about his friend Fairfield Porter’s paintings, Schuyler replied “No, but I tried to write poems that were like his paintings” (before he interestingly added, as if this fact were just as much of an answer, that he often read to Porter while the latter was painting: the text he mentions having read to Porter is Anna Karenina).[6] In place of the notorious “aboutness” that defines and ultimately defeats mimesis, then, Schuyler’s tellingly casual answer gives evidence not only of alternate registers of metaphor and simile, but of a metonymy that exceeds its location in rhetorical space so as to participate materially within the environs of the painter’s productive scene. (The “occasion” and milieu of painting along with that of writing and reading: in ontological continuum.) Decades before, in the brief “Poet and Painter Overture” of 1959, in his response to a request for a prose lead-in from the editor Donald Allen, Schuyler offered right off the top that “New York poets, except I suppose the color blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.”[7] There — in the reverse operation of the same levelling ontological effect —it is the painters who supply the environs, although they are sublimely overwhelming, not quietly domestic. These two remarks have in common a way of making the poet’s medium simply contiguous and adjacent to painters’ work, rather than an attempt to interpret, capture, or mirror the visual arts. Admittedly, the work differs in its scale and cultural impact: poetic sound and inscription are nearly washed out by the 1950s New York Abstract Expressionism of de Kooning, and by Pollock’s Action Painting. Still the poet’s work partakes of the material atmosphere of visual artist.
In the context for close reading I have elaborated, Schuyler’s poem “The Bluet” could be justly said to be like Mitchell’s “Les Bluets” in its grasp of color and rhythmic form, “Joan’s giant vision” that “runs and holds.” But its art lies at the other end of a scale: “So small, / a drop of sky that / splashed and held, / four-petalled, creamy / in its throat.” Schuyler’s own direct poet-painter collaboration with Mitchell takes not the bluets she made heroically sublime, but his own short poems “Sunset,” “Daylight,” and “Sunday” for texts (Nelson 14).[8] Two of these are published in the “Loving You” section of Hymn to Life (1974); the other is taken from the same collection’s sequence called “Evenings in Vermont” (the section in which “The Bluet” also appears). The poems are retyped — by whom I do not know — and accompanied by Mitchell’s 1975 pastel drawings. In Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions, Maggie Nelson finds in “Daylight” a lyric that undergoes “the dialectic of haiku,” enacting “the dance between one’s emotion and one’s thought-in-language” (Nelson 26). The poem in full reads:
And when I thought,
“Our love might end”
the sun
went right on shining (CP, 183)
In the slightly longer “Sunday,” an implied quiet inertia of time and rest dissolves upward, from green to blue, from the observation of garden color and form to a sky linked to writing:
The mint bed is in
bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is
more than green and
throws up sharp and
cutting lights to
slice through the
plane tree leaves. And
on the cloudless blue
I scribble your name. (CP, 189)
As a description of what the writer does — playing off the artist’s casual practice of hand and eye, and also the absorbed doodles we associate with infatuation — “scribble” in “Sunday” sends the overt signal of poetic modesty (again, as in “The Bluet,” in the company of another art, as in the company of love). But when approached in view of Schuyler’s other writing, and in the theoretical framework of Paul Fry’s ostensive moment, accessed in part by means of the “phonic-scriptive” register of language, scribbling is not at all so unassuming a word for what language may do to uniquely disclose its material truth.
“Scribbling” is also the verb Schuyler takes for his writing in the strong and major poem, “Korean Mums”: “The dogs are barking. In / the studio music plays / and Bob and Darragh paint. / I sit scribbling in a little / notebook at a garden table, / too hot in a heavy shirt” (CP, 231). Fry takes a kind of Bloomian line on ekphrasis in A Defense of Poetry, arguing that “poetry enviously discovers the meaninglessness of the nonhuman in pictures” (Fry Defense 70). “Korean Mums” is a poem with a plot that evokes one of Schuyler’s odder — because so straight — precursors, Robert Frost, in which a dog kills a rare barn owl: “now it’s gone, / a dream you just remember.” Stepping away from, but also strangely attendant to this day’s drama of sentient animal life, the “huge and daisy-like” heliotropic plant that turns to face the sun first becomes just the words and their sounds, then itself is lost, even to poetic oversound. Thus Schuyler’s poem gives three different ways and layerings of forgetting:
Light on leaves,
so much to see, and
all I really see is that
owl, its bulk troubling
the twilight. I’ll
soon forget it: what
is there I have not forgot?
Or one day will forget:
this garden, the breeze
in stillness, even
the words, Korean mums (CP, 232)
The tendency for Schuyler’s poetry to approach haiku (“Sunday”) and koan (“Korean Mums”) expresses the way it, too, as in Fry’s dialectic of the occasion of writing, works through indication and reference to reach the clearing of the third space, a de-signifying moment that allows language “to mean absolutely nothing at all,” in a “community of human and inhuman things” (Fry Wordsworth 128, 148). Intoning and scribbling, dissolving from the trace of sound to the ostensive moment in itself of inscription, he lets us feel that mum’s the word. It is not the repression of some human act in the language of silencing, but of what all human acts industriously hide — the non-tragic continuities of insignificance.
[1] Fry, proceeding more scrupulously than I do over this deeply-mined ground, distinguishes the linguistic “moment” of index (indication) from that of reference (predication). Both of these, in turn, he distinguishes from the “phono-scriptive moment”; A Defense of Poetry, 54. I may seem to collapse Fry’s three moments of language here. It is because Schuyler’s poetry so characteristically deals in index — stays with the “moment” of “pure indication” that Fry associates with “the whole Keatsian ‘poetry of earth’” — that the otherwise default “moment” of predication is refreshed with the quality of an act; A Defense of Poetry, 64.
[2] Going off Davis’s translation of les bluets to “the cornflowers”; Schuyler wrote a poem called “Cornflowers” in his collection A Few Days (1985) (CP, 312).
[3] James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993); cited CP.
[4] With more space I could show how the cornflower, die blaue Blume, is the central, dominant symbol of German Romanticism (in Novalis, Tieck and others). Mitchell and Schuyler were almost certainly aware of this. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Seattle: Wave, 2009) meditates with ardency not just on the color blue but on this tradition.
[5] “Breaks me up” could mean laughter, but here it implies tears. The fit-like, “arbitrary” pivot between laughter and tears altogether echoes Wordsworth in the Lucy poems, especially “Strange fits of passion have I known,” with its struck final quatrain.
[6] “An Interview by Mark Hillringhouse”; The American Poetry Review 14.2 (1985): 5-12; 7.
[7] Donald Allen, ed., The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (Berkely: Univ. of California Press, 1960), 418.
[8] Painters & Poets: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, ed. Douglas Crase and Jenni Quilter (New York: Tibor de Editions, 2011) shares full images of two, “Daylight” and “Sunday” (91-2).
…from “Air and Atmospheric Apostrophe: James Schuyler’s ‘Light Blue Above’”
I went to City Lights Books on Friday and, with this panel in mind, picked up a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Mind Breaths (Poems 1972-1977): a volume described as “Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions, and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade” (Goodreads).* As opposed to the lithic, sculpted, and collage forms of much Modernist poetry, a breath poetics return us to the rhythm of respiration and the modalities of rhapsody, exorcism and song. Revaluing the poetics of air and the breath could lead back toward the kinds of “open,” projective, and ambient poetics favored by the avant-garde from Charles Olson onward. But reading by these terms also promotes a closer and richer attention to formalized practices in literary space.
For my part of this roundtable I’d like to consider the relationship of one traditional poetic figure — apostrophe — with renewed attention stemming from both Romantic-era and more contemporary ecological poetics. In The Sky of Our Manufacture (2016), Jesse Oak Taylor discusses the fundamental way in which “[a]tmospheric thinking reconfigures the relationship between interiority and exteriority” (68). Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, in Air’s Appearance (2012), explores the boundary-notion of atmosphere at the threshold between material and immaterial worlds in the Eighteenth Century Novel. Similarly, Thomas Ford, in Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change (2018), demonstrates how Romantic poetics — along with the nascent Romantic-era environmental and atmospheric thinking developed by Goethe, Davy, Luke Howard, and other lettered scientists —“practice[s] the category-switching operation between conceptuality and materiality” (62). The Wordsworthian poetics of air troubles the distinction between breath and voice according to Ford, and hence nuances the divide between life and non-life: “For language, like humans, would seem potentially to lie on both sides of this boundary in Wordsworth’s poetics” (183).
In their very difference from each other, air, breath, and atmosphere make no boundary distinctions. This interest in air and the breath — material and conceptual alike — as no longer the mute other of language, but as a precondition and valuable practice and site of attention, disrupts the subject/ world dualism that explicitly undergirds Jonathan Culler’s influential essay “Apostrophe,” first published in Diacritics in 1977. (The original essay’s subject/ world dualism is amplified and then relieved, partly, in the course of the overlapping account in Culler’s more recent Theory of the Lyric [2015]). {comment here on the spatial and psychological defensive structure in apo-strophe as a turning away; Schuyler, instead performs a version of apostrophe that is permeable and embodied in the breath.}
In this context my main contribution here today is to share a James Schuyler poem, “Light Blue Above,” which both manages the difficult task of describing the manifestations of air, and plays across generic and presentational distinctions that have tended to make breath and air far too static, predictable tropes in the history of poetry. Begun from a journal entry with an exact known date (July 8, 1969), the poem comprises two disparate modes and sections — a short opening taken from Schuyler’s diary and an ode thereafter — cutting rapidly from descriptive prose to an apostrophic address to air. The poem begins:
Light blue above, darker below, lightly roughened by the stirring air and with smooth tracks on it. There goes Reynald Hardie’s lobster boat, taking another load of pleasure-seeking shoppers to Camden.
O Air
the clear, the soot-bearer, the unseen that rips
that kills and cures, that keeps
all that is empty filled, the bright invisible
into which we move like fingers into gloves
that coats our rolling home with the sweet softness
between grape and grape skin[.] (Collected Poems of James Schuyler, 92)
By addressing air as the subject of an extended act of apostrophe (not unlike Shelley’s West Wind, but laying bare the elemental, indefensible recursion of the “subject’s” breath to the “object” air), Schuyler’s poem faces and names directly what Culler once called the evasively “embarrassing” situation of apostrophe toward the address of the inanimate. Yet “Light Blue Above” also evokes and generously honors the service of air’s ontological reticence and inanimacy in “filling” the null set of an unthinkably empty space, by manifesting a plenum that is nested with absences.
In Schuyler’s poem, air not only “fills” the world or earth’s atmosphere, but fills life variously. Compare Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s remarks in The Weather in Proust on the object-relations psychology of Michael Balint, in which air exemplifies one of the “friendly substances,” and — quoting from Balint’s The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (1969) — “ ‘an environment that accepts and consents to sustain and carry the patient like the earth or the water sustains and carries a man who entrusts his weight to them,’ or like the air that we breathe without caring whether it is inside or outside of us’.”** The “environment” here is psychoanalysis, in the sense of Balint’s concept of “Primary Love” in object relations psychoanalysis. The “relationship to the air surrounding us” can, for Balint, exemplify the regressive and primary state of “harmonious interpenetrating mix-up.”**
The quicksilver sudden mutation from a personal diary entry to published poem offers a kind of descriptive genre frame, or envelope of occasion, for the breakout of a wild inset ode to air, which itself adumbrates experiences of air’s enveloping surround as a knife (ripping) and envelope (ripped) that includes the gaps and emptiness of this element. In its aspect as a journal entry, the poem begins as a kind of cyanometer of the variant blues of the sea and sky, before it breaks forth from that particularity, with sudden amplitudes of intensity and abstraction. “O Air” leaps from there, and from Camden, Maine to the radically motile spaces of apostrophe and the breath. If blue registers the “world at its edges and in its depths,” naming as color the perceptual phenomenology of “scattered light,” air is not simply an element necessary to sustain life but the medium in which embodiment and history are inflected and experienced.** Not only the bracing and spontaneous quality, but the intense latent conceptual force, of “Light Blue Above” as a poem stems from this primary juxtaposition of color (blue) and element (air), and the question of how to think and feel their (non)relation — which is neither a contrast nor an identity; neither a flight nor a nesting exclusively, but a pervasive and subtle act of invocation as ecological imbrication.
Schuyler dissolves the distinctions between inner and outer form, animate and inanimate being in a poem that announces itself as an inset ode, “O Air.” But he does so in a characteristic descriptive mode:
in silent laughter in a glass pushed down
into a basin at retreating puzzled water
constrained to rise elsewhere up
the sides of the basin, of the glass
up fingers and hand and wrist
clinging to arm hair in mercurial bubbles
that detach and rise and join itself
the quick to heal
that wriggles up from hot
heat-wave pavement like teased hair
or has a wintry bite, or in the dog days saps
or is found at the bottom
of a mailbox on an empty house
or in a nest between twigs, among eggs
and we go on
with it within us
in bubble air
* Ginsberg’s preface: “Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom’s hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing ‘round the globe;’ then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies’ half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries.”
** Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 11, 26.
***Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1992), 66, 72.
**** I quote Rebecca Solnit from A Field Guide to Getting Lost, in The Blue of Distance (Aspen: Aspen Art Press, 2015), xvii.