at five p.m. on the day before March first.

First, here is the poem in its entirety (you can also listen to Schuyler read the poem here): What follows is a passage that I’ve adapted from my chapter on Schuyler.

He is the author of several poetry collections, including The Morning of the Poem (1980), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The rest of poem popped out of its own accord. We see beauty and power twinned, the UN building on big evenings, and the green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. In the letter, he explains that, the day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels decorated by Serpotta, with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvelous was happening to the light, transforming everything. Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets, Roundup of Recent “New York School of Poetry” News and Links (4/2/18), James Schuyler’s “February”: “It’s a day like any other”, On Five Years of Locus Solus | Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets, “Bluets”: James Schuyler, Carl Phillips, Joan Mitchell, Maggie Nelson, and Lydia Davis | Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets, Ben Lerner’s Oblique Elegy For John Ashbery, Sea Wolf’s “Frank O’Hara,” a Tribute to the Poet of Indie Rock, “Art Cooking: Frank O’Hara” (with Sarah Urist Green, John Green, Paige Lewis, and Kaveh Akbar), The Weather on 2/9/62: A Footnote for Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed)”, “Dear David”: Joanna Fuhrman and Elaine Equi Pay Tribute to David Shapiro. Rather than dwelling, or concluding the poem, on this moment of insight or revelation, as many other poets might have done, the poem ends: It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly. William

( Log Out /  Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Noonday, 1993), 5.

As a whole, the chapter explores the complex and moving poetics of everyday life at the center of his work.

It’s February 28, and that means it’s a good day to read and think about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems, “ February,” which takes place “on the day before March first.” I’ve decided to post an excerpt from my recent book, Attention Equals Life, which discusses “February” in some detail.

out of the blue looking pink in the light. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Archeophonics (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Poetry? Change ). (Just the Thing 240). Bernadette Mayer, Julia Bloch, and erica kaufman on February 20, 2015 For complete recording and program notes go to Jacket2 He currently teaches in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The words shimmer. and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Add to this a private reading of the physical world imprinted on his nervous system. Inspector General | Suddenly aware that this kind of “marvelous” event happens “more often than not,” that it literally occurs every day, and that only our inattention obscures it from view, Schuyler discovers a new, more vital mode of writing, one highly attuned to what is happening right in front our noses, all the time. (I also posted another excerpt from this chapter, on Schuyler’s poem “June 30, 1974” a while back). While the reference remains loose and indeterminate, the passage, with its insistence underscored by repetition, makes a declaration about what is valuable, what is worth noticing, as it zooms in like a telephoto lens to see the dust inside the flowers and then pulls back to consider the entire, ordinary day in which all these things occur. For example, he carefully recreates the way the pink of the tulips on the window-sill echoes the colors of the setting sun in the sky and building facades and vividly etches the gritty details of the urban scene. (“February” was also one of only four poems by Schuyler included in The New American Poetry, the epochal 1960 anthology edited by Donald Allen, which ensured that it would become an early “greatest hit” for the poet). By deciding to abandon the other, unwritten hymn to Palermo and Serpotta’s baroque cherubs, and by choosing to write “February” instead, Schuyler seems to have stumbled upon a recognition about subject matter, about attentiveness to daily life, and about form.

Each line is a surprise, delighting in the pleasures of coincidence, like “the pink of five tulips/at five p.m.” Gradually we progress through the New York City day to the dust inside the tulip, to the shape of the tulip, the container the tulip is in (a glass), and the container the glass is in (this day).Â. … Schuyler seems to arrive at this commitment to the daily, this devotion to the “literal / and unsymbolic / day,” in one of his most important early poems, “February,” which catches the poet at the very moment of a conversion to an everyday-life aesthetic. I’ve decided to post an excerpt from my recent book, Attention Equals Life, which discusses “February” in some detail. He attended Bethany College, and afterward joined the U.S. Navy. In a way, the anecdote about the genesis of Schuyler’s “February” neatly recapitulates the emergence of the “New American Poetry” in the 1950s more broadly, which saw poets like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara rejecting what they saw as the stultifying, artificial conventions of mid-century poetry and embracing organic form, quotidian experience, and colloquial language.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

One has the sense of events and words being brought together out of necessity, to conduct a vision, giving the apparent randomness of living a sense of coherence and even inevitability. out of the blue looking pink in the light. Schuyler deliberately leaves open what “it” is meant to refer to – is “it” the meaning of this specific everyday moment? Although many writers turn to ordinary experience as vital subject matter for their writing, Schuyler goes further, consciously adopting the everyday as a central category and conceptual term for his thinking about art, as well as for his own poetry. The gaps between his lines give us the experience of the passage of time, a verbal time-lapse photography, kind of. Despite, or perhaps because of, all its richness and vitality, this day is, in the end just “like any other.”  The poem’s conclusion turns the everyday – and everydayness – into its central theme and subject, as well as an object of representation. A palpable sense of irreality is everywhere present in it; his poems combine the attention of an ethnographic account with the charm of a great dinner guest. Two dog-size lions face each other Schuyler, Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951–1991, ed. at the corners of a roof. He didn’t so much teach as exemplify, which is the way it should be, since even the wisest lessons sound like drivel.” What Schuyler exemplifies, the moral stance his poetry models, is how one can—as well as why one should—lead a life buoyed by an attentiveness to daily life. James Schuyler (1923-1991) was born in Chicago, Illinois.

Or so it seems now. I love James Schuyler’s poetry—its effortlessness and grace, its sound, its thick (and at times gnarly) descriptions.

(5). He studied at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. And Now Upon My Head the Crown by Phillip B. Williams. He uncouples his sentences so that the electric spark must jump from noun to noun, and from event to event, no matter how disparate or seemingly unrelated. Life? Schuyler exchanges a syntax of memory and judgment for a syntax of simultaneity. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. “February” is one of the first of Schuyler’s many “window” poems; it sets out to recount exactly what could be seen from his apartment window in New York during a wintry sunset, at precisely 5 P.M. “on the day before March first.”  Fortunately for us, Schuyler discussed the composition of this poem in a letter he wrote (and apparently never mailed) to a woman (“Miss Batie”) who had written a fan letter to him about his poems. Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment. It is this interconnectedness that makes Schuyler’s poems reassuring in spite of the instability of their surface. Then, in the middle of the poem, the speaker’s jaw drops open at the wonderful, accidental congruence of this contingent everyday moment: “I can’t get over / how it all works in together / like a woman who just came to her window / and stands there filling it / jogging a baby in her arms” (Collected 5). Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

(This excerpt can be found on pages 75 to 79 of Attention Equals Life): The poet and critic Douglas Crase, a friend of Schuyler’s, once hinted at the seriousness of Schuyler’s investment in the quotidian when he recalled that “Jimmy was our own moralist of the everyday. You can read the rest of my chapter on Schuyler and the everyday in my book, which you can find here and here. Accessibility | ( Log Out /  USA.gov, Poetry of America: A Collection of Field Recordings by Award-winning Contemporary Poets. He has served as poetry editor for The Nation, and his honors include the Peter I.B. Ah, beautiful, Andrew. Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Schuyler was a central member of the New York School. Defiantly spurning what he calls (in the letter to Batie) “regular form,” Schuyler instead writes a free verse poem in a colloquial voice, with enjambed lines, surprising line breaks, quick, associative leaps, and repetition (as in the last four lines), using precise and fresh images to notate how the speaker’s eye perceives the minute and shifting details of an ordinary dusk in Manhattan. This world as he presents it is both reassuring and unstable. The President Visits the Storm by Shane McCrae, What We Know of Horses by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday by Rachel Zucker. James Schuyler PoemTalk Podcast #85, Discussing James Schuyler's “February,” feat. John Ashbery wrote “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is,” and one might say that in this poem, “February,” Schuyler does the work to disclose this invisible schedule, revealing the seemingly random syntax of the physical world. It’s the shape of the tulip. Jobs | For more on Schuyler’s “February,” check out this 2015 podcast discussion of the poem at PoemTalk (featuring Al Filreis, Julia Bloch, Erica Kaufman, and Bernadette Mayer). It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. Peter Gizzi (1959- ) was born in Alma, Michigan.

( Log Out /  Thank you for the poem and the excerpt from your book.


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