The words shimmer. It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.

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. He attended Bethany College, and afterward joined the U.S. Navy. 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).

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. Schuyler exchanges a syntax of memory and judgment for a syntax of simultaneity. 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. You can read the rest of my chapter on Schuyler and the everyday in my book, which you can find here and here. “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.

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. James Schuyler PoemTalk Podcast #85, Discussing James Schuyler's “February,” feat. USA.gov, Poetry of America: A Collection of Field Recordings by Award-winning Contemporary Poets. Schuyler describes a sudden decision to reject the “laborious and flat” exercise he had been working on, a poem in a traditional, inherited form that took for its subject an exotic location and a masterpiece of Western art (traits, clichés even, associated with the dominant, New Critical mode of mid-century verse). News, links, resources, and commentary on poets and artists of the New York School, by Andrew Epstein. Press | Jobs | February, by James Schuyler Old Photographs, by Gabeba Baderoon On Hearing That My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place, by Hyam Plutzik Alphabetical Poem Index 2015 // February Poem for Adlai Stevenson and The everyday? Thank you for the poem and the excerpt from your book. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. William In his hyper-real descriptions, colors shift. Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment. James Schuyler, "February" from Collected Poems. It also registers the mixture of repetition and variety in everyday life that will so fascinate Schuyler throughout his career. I argue that this poem actually represents something of a turning point in Schuyler’s early work, encompassing a new embrace of the daily and ordinary that would become the signature concern of his poetry as a whole. ( Log Out /  It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. Change ). The “violet sea” verges on the violent. Peter Gizzi (1959- ) was born in Alma, Michigan. at five p.m. on the day before March first. out of the blue looking pink in the light. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Accessibility | “February” is not a tranquil Romantic recollection; it is active observation that creates the effect of recollection. 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.

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. “Daily life,” “the day,” “the everyday,” “the ordinary”—these are not just ideas critics can apply to Schuyler’s work after the fact but are also frequently recurring phrases, key words, and concepts that the poet himself uses overtly throughout his poems and his extensive body of art criticism. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent his teen years in East Aurora, … Instead, he realizes a poem could be born simply from paying close attention to the present and immediate, to what was happening outside his window: an ordinary evening in New York City at sunset. Add to this a private reading of the physical world imprinted on his nervous system. 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. And in this simple gesture nature, commerce, and human reason are intertwined. ( Log Out /  He has served as poetry editor for The Nation, and his honors include the Peter I.B. 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. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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). 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. This world as he presents it is both reassuring and unstable. in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue, The green leaves of the tulips on my desk.