‘In an essay on James Schuyler, Douglas Crase zeroes in on the author of The Morning of the Poem as a poet of the morning: “Fairfield Porter said that in the history of the arts an afternoon sensibility of reflection was common, but a morning sensibility of observation was unusual. Among morning sensibilities he included Sisley. Jimmy’s poems, too, are like urgent morning experience.” As Lee Upton has observed of Schuyler, “it is not surprising that this poet favors mornings. Repeatedly, he enacts qualities associated with mornings: newness and energy of awakening.”
‘I would like to consider briefly another hymn to an ordinary morning, Schuyler’s “June 30, 1974”. The poem, one of Schuyler’s many “date” poems, is also about morning as a state of mind, a mode of wakefulness and receptive attention to daily life. Crase refers to the poem as “an American ode to happiness,” which it certainly is. It also feels like a deliberate rewriting of Wallace Stevens’s great hedonistic hymn to the here and now, “Sunday Morning.” Schuyler speaks rather directly about the deep, simple pleasures of a “weekend Sunday / morning in the country,” which “fills my soul / with tranquil joy.” As he so often does, Schuyler describes his immediate surroundings: the view of the dunes beyond the pond, his “favorite / shrub (today, / at least),” the roses, “a millionaire’s/ white chateau” next door, and, most of all, his friends’ “charming” house, so “alive with paintings.” But most of all, he pays tribute to the pleasurable experience of spending a quiet morning alone while his good friends sleep late, where he— like Stevens’s woman with her “late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”— can sit and “eat poached eggs / and extra toast with / Tiptree Gooseberry Preserve / (green)— and coffee.”
‘The poem turns into a meditation on change when the speaker reflects on the strange fact that the dinner table where he sat laughing with friends the night before is also the exact same place as this quiet breakfast table: “Discontinuity / in all we see and are: / the same, yet change, / change, change.” The lines seem to encapsulate the paradox at the center of Schuyler’s work— the recognition that human experience is founded, simultaneously, upon sameness and discontinuity in all one sees and is, each day so alike and yet unique.
‘As is so typical of Schuyler’s poetry, the poem closes by happily accepting the day as it is and all it brings:
Enough
to sit here drinking coffee,
writing, watching the clear
day ripen (such
a rainy June we had)
while Jane and Joe
sleep in their room
and John in his. I
think I’ll make more toast.
‘Just as it was “enough” in “Hymn to Life” to simply look at the unfolded daffodils in the garden, here Schuyler says it is “enough” to sit and watch the day, June 30, 1974, “ripen.” By doing so, Schuyler further expounds on what might be thought of as a philosophy of “enough,” a poetics of what will suffice— a worldview that again shades into a matter of ethics, of how to live.
‘Whereas Stevens’s own “Sunday Morning” reverie closes with the humble yet lyrical image of pigeons making “ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings” , Schuyler’s poem ends in a deliberately anti- climactic fashion— can one imagine a less lofty close to a powerful poem than “I / think I’ll make more toast”? This is a far cry from how poems that depend on what I have called the “transformation trope” usually operate, like those I discussed earlier by James Wright, Edward Hirsch, or Mary Oliver. These lines seem designed to “strike through sentimentality,” something the poem certainly flirts dangerously with at its start (writing that the morning “fills my soul with tranquil joy” is about as sentimental as Schuyler ever gets). The conclusion yanks the poem back down to earth, keeps it firmly tied to the late coffee and sunny breakfast table with its poached eggs and gooseberry jam. The nod to his plan to “make more toast” also brings Schuyler back to the simple, saving ability one has to “make” (and to make more of) something one enjoys, and finally, back to the day and the daily itself.
‘Earlier in the poem, after Schuyler catches himself referring to coming back to this house, which belongs to his friends, as “driving home,” he turns to reflect on the concept itself:
Home! How lucky
to have one, how arduous
to make this scene
of beauty for
your family and
friends.
‘Schuyler’s celebration of the domestic— even the work that goes into making the scene of the domestic— almost feels like a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and its portrayal of Clarissa as an artist whose specialty is the creation and appreciation of the domestic everyday. Again, we see how Schuyler’s poems keep coming back to those aspects of the daily Rita Felski called our attention to: home, habit, repetition.
‘As a tribute to someone else’s ability to make a home, it also reflects on Schuyler’s unusual, tenuous relationship to the very idea of home, as one who never fully had one of his own, both literally and figuratively, who relied so much on his friends for shelter and support. But given the tenor of the rest of the poem, and where it ends, it feels as if Schuyler is also suggesting that the day, the everyday itself, is our home; in a sense, the poem acknowledges just how lucky we are to be able to make ourselves at home in daily life, to respect it for what it is. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell argues, “the everyday is ordinary because, after all, it is our habit, our habitat.” For Schuyler, and many other explorers of the everyday, the recovery of the ordinary depends on this hard-won realization: a recognition of what Cavell refers to as “everydayness as home,” as the only home we truly have.’ — Andrew Epstein
_____
Further
James Schuyler @ Wikipedia
James Schuyler, by Wayne Koestenbaum
‘Building a nest out of torn up letters’
“It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated Birthday to James Schuyler
“Always More Roses: James Schuyler at 100”
‘The pure pleasure of / Simply looking …’
PennSound: James Schuyler
Eric Lindstrom on James Schuyler (“February”)
A Schuyler of urgent concern
Discovering James Schuyler
Slowly/Swiftly
Transforming Nature with James Schuyler
Eileen Myles Reads James Schuyler
A few words on James Schuyler
Baby Sweetness Blew His Cool Again
James Schuyler’s Beef with Ordinary Language
James Schuyler in the Spotlight
____
Extras
It Goes, It Goes: James Schuyler Centenary Celebration
James Schuyler Reads “Salute” and other poems
Ben Lerner on James Schuyler
James Schuyler 5 Poems
_______
Darragh Park’s drawings of James Schuyler
Portrait of James Schuyler, 1991
James Schuyler, Hotel Chelsea, 1980
Portrait of James Schuyler, 1996
_______
Fairfield Porter’s paintings of James Schuyler
Fairfield Porter Portrait of James Schuyler, 1961
Sketch for a Portrait of Jimmy Schuyler, undated
John Ashbery and James Schuyler, undated
John Ashbery and James Schuyler, undated
Portrait of James Schuyler, 1955
Jimmy, undated
Jimmy Schuyler, undated
______
Interview (1990)
by Raymond Foye
Q: I want to ask about your daily routine. What time do you get up in the morning?
A: Very, very early. Well before sunrise. It varies.
Q: And what do you do then?
A: Drink coffee and put on the weather channel. I’ve discovered some charming programs on cable TV: My Three Sons, Bewitched. One gets a little tired of them after a while. I’m sort of giving up on them now. And I go out and get the New York Times.
Q: We’re now up to about six-thirty.
A: Well, now that I no longer live alone, at that point I sometimes go back to sleep. My friend Artie likes to stay up very late, playing cards or shooting pool with his friends, so he sleeps in. But I also like to write very early in the day. It’s so quiet, the phone never rings. You don’t have any sounds at all.
Q: Do you write by longhand or use a typewriter?
A: Here I use a typewriter. I do write in longhand if I go out to the country. When I went to the friary at Little Portion recently, I kept a notebook.
Q: Do you write with a pencil or a pen?
A: I use a pen. I don’t know why but I’m quite averse to writing with a pencil. I can never get one that’s dark enough.
Q: What have you written most recently?
A: I wrote a three-page poem recently.
Q: Was it a skinny poem?
A: Not especially. It has some hips and bosoms here and there.
Q: I keep noticing in the small press and little magazines that come across my desk that there seems to be a whole school of young poets writing skinny poems ‡ la James Schuyler.
A: Oh, Raymond, I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.
Q: I always get the impression that it takes you about as much time to write the poems as it does to type them out. Almost as if they’re spoken into the typewriter, with not a great deal of laboring.
A: That’s both true and not true. I do an awful lot of fussing. That doesn’t mean rewriting. Well, it may mean rewriting just little bits. Or getting strung out where a line turns. I can’t keep at it indefinitely because after a point it all goes dead, so I just turn the page facedown. I used to leave it like that for a long time. Now I don’t. I come back to it in a matter of days.
Q: If you change something in one area does it mean you have to adjust it in another, or are they local revisions.
A: It’s usually more local. But I don’t do any “editing” as such. I used to show poems to Kenneth Koch and he would invariably say, “Jimmy, I like it very much, but have you thought about leaving off the last line?” It got to where this was the one thing he always said. So frequently I would chop off the last few lines to a poem and end it that way.
Q: Are you currently keeping a diary?
A: I just started again. I hadn’t in quite a while.
Q: What prompted you to do this?
A: The Yale Review is publishing excerpts from my 1988 diary. You know what my diaries are like—they’re mostly about looking out the window. A few descriptions of having dinner with you at Ninth Street.
Q: I just can’t seem to keep a diary with any consistency.
A: The important thing is not to become discouraged if you miss a few days, or a week, or even a few months. It’s only when you begin missing entire years that you should become concerned.
Q: So your mornings are reserved for writing?
A: I have written and do write in the afternoon, though.
Q: And at night, too?
A: Hardly ever.
Q: Do you ever force yourself to sit down and write for the sake of writing—to see what comes out—or do you know exactly what you’re going to do when you sit down to write?
A: I don’t think I ever know exactly what I’m going to do about anything. If I have any idea about what I’m going to write it’s probably just the beginning of a line, or a word.
Q: At what point did you first think about becoming a writer?
A: As an adolescent the thing I most seriously wanted to be was an architect, although I had no particular gift in that direction. I was a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. But reading is what I did most of, poetry and prose. In the back of our house was a gully, a slightly wild area, where I had a tent for the summer. And I was reading a book called Unforgotten Years, by Logan Pearcal Smith. He told how Whitman used to come to their house in Philadelphia from Camden, and what it was like—how Whitman used to sit in the outhouse singing “Old Jim Crow.” But then he says the idea suddenly entered his mind that maybe someday he too could be a writer. And I looked up from the book to the landscape outside and it all sort of shimmered.
Q: So has being a writer always kept that aura of fantasy or idealism about it for you?
A: What aura of fantasy? It all seems very real to me.
Q: I mean that it’s magical—you’re creating something that did not exist before.
A: Oh yes, very much so.
Q: So it’s been a satisfying decision for you.
A [soberly]: It’s been very difficult much of the time.
Q: If you hadn’t become a writer what might you have done?
A: I have no idea. I might have been some kind of noncreative writer, in advertising maybe.
Q: Would you have come to New York anyway?
A: Oh yes. Where would you go? When I was in high school I used to buy the New Yorker. I would read the stories and essays, but even more avidly I would read the listings of all the nightclubs, El Morocco and the like.
Q: When did you first meet someone your own age who you considered a fellow writer?
A: My friend Bill Aalto, and through him I met Chester Kallman, who was my real close buddy. For Bill writing was very much tied up in politics. He was a Communist, and we had terrible fights about it. To me Stalin had become a terrible monster. I used to pick up the Daily Worker and turn to the literary column, which was written by a man named Dixie Putnam. And he would say things like, “With all her bourgeois values it’s natural that Virginia Woolf would go crazy and drown herself.” Argh! And of course through Chester I met W. H. Auden, who was a very intimidating person.
Q: Was he stern?
A: No, not at all. He was a sweetie. But it was impossible not to be in awe of someone so famous for his writing.
Q: What was he working on when you first met him?
A: He was writing “The Sea and the Mirror.” Also the Age of Anxiety, which he wanted to dedicate to me and to Bill, but he didn’t, because Chester had a furious fight with him, saying Auden was always trying to take things away from him and steal his friends. Later I realized I was just as glad that the Age of Anxiety wasn’t dedicated to me. I had enough problems by then.
Q: What sort of writer was Chester Kallman?
A: I’m afraid as a writer Chester was very constipated. He was most productive when he was collaborating with Auden on those libretti. Wystan was not taking any hocus-pocus about people not getting down to work. He got up every morning around eight, popped his amphetamine, and got right to it. Wystan was also very strict with Chester about his drinking. Wystan believed you had two martinis before dinner and then just wine after that. But I was close with Chester for only a very few years. One of his great interests was cooking. That was what he most cared about.
Q: He was an excellent cook?
A: Well, opinions varied on that. I would say sometimes. He was a somewhat terrifying cook because he was never very clean. You would look into the icebox and things would be growing. I remember once we were living together in Ischia where there wasn’t very much water to wash your hands. He was making old-fashioned southern biscuits, and they turned out charcoal gray.
Q: So Chester was an important, early figure for you?
A: Yes.
Q: At what point did you begin to feel there was a scene in New York among writers—the New York School.
A: It wasn’t until I met John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara that I had a kind of kinship in a writing way, which I never really had with Chester, who was more interested in art, or listening to and attending the opera. Then I met John and Frank, who were at Harvard, along with Kenneth Koch and Kenward Elmslie. And that was marvelous.
Q: Do you ever wonder what kind of a poet Frank O’Hara would have been had he lived, because I always wonder about that.
A: Oh, I don’t know. What I wondered about was what would happen with Frank’s drinking. His alcoholism was so far advanced, the last few times I saw him I couldn’t believe it. He was red-eyed and looked awful. Frank used to be very handsome. And his health was deteriorating, which also had to do with his having been shot.
Q: Frank O’Hara was shot?
A: Yes, he was shot in the hip on West Forty-ninth Street in a mugging by some young kids. The bullet couldn’t be taken out, and it moved around in him. It was a situation of great concern.
Q: Some people consider his accidental death a result of his drinking.
A: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. It was a terrific shock for many, many people. I didn’t see much of Frank from the time I began living in Southampton. Our paths rarely crossed, except at parties. Frank had this terrific social life—he went to hundreds of parties.
Q: Do find yourself thinking about Frank, or the past, very much, or do you seldom give it a thought?
A: I give it a thought but not a great deal. Whenever people are writing about Frank they interview me, and I’m aware that I remember much less than I did a few years ago. Ten or more years ago I made some tapes for Peter Schjeldahl and I know I had much more information then than I could dig up now.
Q: You never had the desire to write a memoir of that period?
A: I don’t think so. I’ve thought of it but . . . A certain kind of diary would have been more interesting, but it would never have been the sort of diary that I would have kept.
Q: How did the writing for Artnews come about?
A: Fairfield Porter was writing for Artnews. Elaine de Kooning and Robert Guest were working there for a while. At one point Fairfield knew they needed a new reviewer, and they suggested Frank. But Frank was working at the MoMA and there was a conflict of interest, so I applied for the job. I worked under Tom Hess, a wonderful man. He was brisk and snappy.
Q: Did they assign the exhibitions you were to review?
A: No, I got to select the shows I reviewed. On occasion I did write some bad reviews, and I regretted it afterwards. At a cocktail party John Button once referred to “Schuyler’s scorn.” The artists weren’t worth being so scornful about. I could have just dealt with it very briefly and not made as if they were doing something terrible by not being better painters than they were.
Q: How do you feel about the art world then as compared to now?
A: I knew the art world then very well, and I don’t know it at all now, except for a few people, so I can’t compare it.
Q: In those days who would you bounce ideas off of about art? Fairfield?
A: I think Frank, mostly. Fairfield too, and sometimes John. But Frank and I lived together for a number of years. Frank was always talking and one got caught up in it. If you didn’t believe that Helen Frankenthaler—or whoever it was he was touting that month—was the greatest thing since Titian, you were in for quite the verbal barrage.
Q: How did you feel about the Beats when they came along?
A: I didn’t think anything much.
Q: Did you read “Howl” at the time?
A: I wanted to, but I was having a nervous breakdown and Frank wouldn’t let me.
Q: Did you read On the Road?
A: Yes, I reviewed it at the time.
Q: What did you say?
A: I said it was like a boy’s book.
Q: Would you say John Ashbery is the writer whom you’ve felt closest to through the years?
A: Yes, much.
Q: Has John always been pretty much the same person he is now?
A: Oh, I think he’s ripened a bit . . .
Q: Was he always so charismatic? People are so deferring to John, even his closest friends.
A: No, I don’t think he had any charisma at all when I first knew him. He would usually eat dinner then head for the nearest sofa and fall asleep with his back to the room. Not a very charismatic way to behave. He was charismatic for the few of us who knew who John was, from the beginning—he was for me, actually, yes. Frank O’Hara had much more charisma. He had so much social flourish he could talk to anyone.
Q: How did your collaboration with John Ashbery on the novel A Nest of Ninnies come about?
A: We started that in the backseat of a car, driving in from Southampton one afternoon. We didn’t care for the people we were riding with. We didn’t want to be rude, so we wrote a novel.
Q: You began by swapping sentences?
A: Yes, then paragraphs, and finally chapters, I think.
Q: What year was that?
A: 1961, I think. John had come out to visit for a weekend. We were walking along the beach at sunset, heading for a cocktail party. The sun was casting those extraordinary technicolor effects on the sea and sky. John turned to me and said, “I always feel so embarrassed by these gaudy displays of nature.” I didn’t feel embarrassed at all.
Q: I notice you subscribe to Country Life. What do you look at in the magazine?
A: Every house ad. Pretty much everything except the advertising in small type in the back. I don’t read the text of all the articles. I love the columns by Frank Davis on the art auctions. That old devil fascinates me. He’s a hundred years old. He’s always putting in remarks about what a disagreeable painter Picasso is. And I read the gardening articles. I like Christopher Lloyd quite a lot. If you read him over a period of years he gets a bit repetitious. I get a little tired of hearing about how to root cuttings every year.
Q: Do you ever wish you still had a garden?
A: I’d love to, yes, to be outside of the city. Because I’ve written about plants and flowers so much people get the impression I was a gardener, but I wasn’t. I was a gardening slave when I was a kid, being forced to weed or hoe or mow. So I’m very ambivalent about the actual physical work of gardening. The hell, I’d rather read about it.
Q: What other magazines do you look at regularly?
A: The one I read most seriously is the Times Literary Supplement. I’m sent a subscription to the New Yorker every year but there’s not much in it I actually read. The movie reviews by Pauline Kael, and Whitney Baillant, their jazz critic, I like very much. Otherwise I don’t read much else in it.
Q: It’s so boring. I always find myself in the middle of some three-part article about yams.
A: Yes. Would they were on yams.
Q: Is reading your main activity in the afternoon?
A: Well, up till Hawaii Five-0 comes on at four.
Q: You were watching Santa Barbara for a while.
A: Oh, not for very long. Only a few months.
Q: You’re not currently watching any soap operas?
A: I don’t watch any, no. They can really make you go cross-eyed before a very short while.
Q: Do you eat out every night?
A: Not by any means. Every other night, maybe.
Q: What time do you usually go to bed at night?
A: It depends whether I go out or not. Nine-thirty if I’m staying home.
Q: Recently, when you were assembling your Selected Poems, did you see any progression in your work, thematically or otherwise, that you hadn’t seen before?
A: I really wasn’t looking at it in that way. It was an odd experience because I had never reread my own poems. I never gave poetry readings until maybe a year or two ago, so once the book was out I never went back and looked at them.
Q: Why?
A: Oh, I had a number of reasons—not wanting to be influenced by what I wrote. But one thing I learned to my horror is that there are certain words that I thought I’d used once, but I’ve used a number of times. And I thought I’d very much overdone the business of having a line end with the article “the.” That seemed kind of silly to me.
Q: Do you ever have an experience with a poem where you are left standing completely outside of it, having no connection or relation to it?
A: I think I know what you mean, and if the answer is yes, then it’s been rarely. I don’t think I ever completely lost touch with anything I wrote. But when Simon Pettet was collecting my art reviews and art writings I was very surprised at some of the things he would read to me from them that were totally unfamiliar, as if by someone else. I had no recollection of writing them at all.
___
Book
James Schuyler The Morning of the Poem
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
‘Schuyler’s ability to write self-consciously without injecting any hint of pompousness or self-satisfaction makes this book succeed. At the heart of many of his poems is a powerful sense of self which simultaneously observes and writes, thereby initiating a process which charges the relationship between the poet and the world with an unusual intensity. The best results of this technique are his observations on the texture of the dynamic world: ‘The light lies layered in the leaves.’ (So it is that he can write ‘I don’t want to be open, / merely to say, to see and say, things/ as they are.’) The book ends with its long title poem, an autobiographical letter which examines the tragic content of Schuyler’s experience as a source for his poetic material. — ‘Daniel Weiss
‘The flowers, trees, birds, clouds, and effects of light that Schuyler describes with such lan, even if only glimpsed from the window of his apartment, could easily be transposed to the poetry written in Japan or Persia many centuries ago. Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost to pass unnoticed, link his verse to other and larger traditions, as in this reflection on Baudelaire – clearly intended as an artistic credo of sorts …’ — Open Letters Monthly
Excerpts
This Dark Apartment
Coming from the deli
a block away today I
saw the UN building
shine and in all the
months and years I’ve
lived in this apartment
I took so you and I
would have a place to
meet I never noticed
that it was in my view.
I remember very well
the morning I walked in
and found you in bed
with X. He dressed
and left. You dressed
too. I said, “Stay
five minutes.” You
did. You said, “That’s
the way it is.” It
was not much of a surprise.
Then X got on speed
and ripped off an
antique chest and an
air conditioner, etc.
After he was gone and
you had changed the
Segal lock, I asked
you on the phone, “Can’t
you be content with
your wife and me?” “I’m
not built that way,”
you said. No surprise.
Now, without saying
why, you’ve let me go.
You don’t return my
calls, who used to call
me almost every evening
when I lived in the coun-
try. “Hasn’t he told you
why?” “No, and I doubt he
ever will.” Goodbye. It’s
mysterious and frustrating.
How I wish you would come
back! I could tell
you how, when I lived
on East 49th, first
with Frank and then with John,
we had a lovely view of
the UN building and the
Beekman Towers. They were
not my lovers, though.
You were. You said so.
June 30, 1974
for Jane and Joe Hazan
Let me tell you
that this weekend Sunday
morning in the country
fills my soul
with tranquil joy:
the dunes beyond
the pond beyond
the humps of bayberry –
my favorite shrub (today,
at least) – are
silent as a mountain
range: such a
subtle profile
against a sky that
goes from dawn
to blue. The roses
stir, the grapevine
at one end of the deck
shakes and turns
its youngest leaves
so they show pale
and flower-like.
A redwing blackbird
pecks at the grass;
another perches on a bush.
Another way, a millionaire’s
white chateau turns
its flank to catch
the risen sun. No
other houses, except
this charming one,
alive with paintings,
plants and quiet.
I haven’t said
a word. I like
to be alone
with friends. To get up
to this morning view
and eat poached eggs
and extra toast with
Tiptree Goosberry Preserve
(green) -and coffee,
milk, no sugar. Jane
said she heard
the freeze-dried kind
is healthier when
we went shopping
yesterday and she
and John bought
crude blue Persian plates.
How can coffee be
healthful? I mused
as sunny wind
streamed in the car
window driving home.
Home! How lucky to
have one, how arduous
to make this scene
of beauty for
your family and
friends. Friends!
How we must have
sounded, gossiping at
the dinner table
last night. Why, that
dinner table is
this breakfast table:
“The boy in trousers
is not the same boy
in no trousers,” who
said? Discontinuity
in all we see and are:
the same, yet change,
change, change. “Inez,
it’s good to see you.”
Here comes the cat, sedate,
that killed and brought
a goldfinch yesterday.
I’d like to go out
for a swim but
it’s a little cool
for that. Enough to
sit here drinking coffee,
writing, watching the clear
day ripen (such
a rainy June we had)
while Jane and Joe
sleep in their room
and John in his. I
think I’ll make more toast.
Korean Mums
beside me in this garden
are huge and daisy-like
(why not? are not
oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?),
shrubby and thick-stalked,
the leaves pointing up
the stems from which
the flowers burst in
sunbursts. I love
this garden in all its moods,
even under its winter coat
of salt hay, or now,
in October, more than
half gone over: here
a rose, there a clump
of aconite. This morning
one of the dogs killed
a barn owl. Bob saw
it happen, tried to
intervene. The airedale
snapped its neck and left
it lying. Now the bird
lies buried by an apple
tree. Last evening
from the table we saw
the owl, huge in the dusk,
circling the field
on owl-silent wings.
The first one ever seen
here: now it’s gone,
a dream you just remember.
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
in the mid-October sun
into which the Korean mums
all face. There is a
dull book with me,
an apple core, cigarettes,
an ashtray. Behind me
the rue I gave Bob
flourishes. 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.
Dining Out with Doug and Frank
Not quite yet. First,
around the corner for a visit
to the Bella Landauer Collection
of printed ephemera:
luscious lithos and why did
Fairy Soap vanish and
Crouch and Fitzgerald survive?
Fairy Soap was once a
household word! I’ve been living
at Broadway and West 74th
for a week and still haven’t
ventured on a stroll in
Central Park, two bizarre blocks
away. (Bizarre is for the ex-
town houses, mixing Byzantine
with Gothic and Queen Anne.)
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.
II
Now it’s tomorrow,
as usual. Turned out that
Doug (Douglas Crase, the poet)
had to work (he makes his bread
writing speeches): thirty pages
explaining why Eastman Kodak’s
semi-slump (?) is just what
the stockholders ordered. He
looked glum, and declined
a drink. By the by did you know
that John Ashbery’s grandfather
was offered an investment-in
when George Eastman founded his
great corporation? He turned it
down. Eastman Kodak will survive.
“Yes” and where would our
John be now? I can’t imagine him
any different than he is,
a problem which does not arise,
so I went with Frank (the poet,
he makes his dough as a librarian,
botanical librarian at Rutgers
and as a worker he’s a beaver:
up at 5:30, home after 7, but
over striped bass he said he
had begun to see the unwisdom
of his ways and next week will
revert to the seven-hour day
for which he’s paid. Good. Time
and energy to write. Poetry
takes it out of you, or you
have to have a surge to bring
to it. Words. So useful and
pleasant) to dine at McFeely’s
at West 23rd and Eleventh Avenue
by the West River, which is
the right name for the Hudson
when it bifurcates from
the East River to create
Manhattan “an isle of joy.”
Take my word for it, don’t
(shall I tell you about my
friend who effectively threw
himself under a train in
the Times Square station?
No. Too tender to touch. In
fact, at the moment I’ve blocked
out his name. No I haven’t:
Peter Kemeny, gifted and tormented
fat man) listen to anyone
else.
III
Oh. At the Battery all
that water becomes the
North River, which seems
to me to make no sense
at all. I always thought
Castle Garden faced Calais.
IV
Peconic Bay scallops, the
tiny, the real ones and cooked
in butter, not breaded and
plunged in deep grease. The food
is good and reasonable (for these
days) but the point is McFeely’s
itself – the owner’s name or
was it always called that? It’s
the bar of the old Terminal Hotel
and someone (McFeely?) has had
the wit to restore it to what
it was: all was there, under
layers of paint and abuse, neglect.
You, perhaps, could put a date
on it: I’ll vote for 1881
or the 70’s. The ceiling
is florid glass, like the cabbage-rose
runners in the grand old hotels
at Saratoga: when were they built?
The bar is thick and long and
sinuous, virile. Mirrors: are
the decorations on them cut
or etched? I do remember that
above the men’s room door the
word Toilet is etched
on a transom. Beautiful lettering,
but nothing to what lurks
within: the three most
splendid urinals I’ve ever
seen. Like Roman steles. I
don’t know what I was going
to say. Yes. Does the Terminal Hotel
itself still function? (Did you
know that “they” sold all the
old mirror glass out of Gage
and Tollner’s? Donald Droll has
a fit every time he eats there.)
“Terminal,” I surmise, because
the hotel faced the terminal
of the 23rd Street ferry, a
perfect sunset sail to Hoboken
and the yummies of the Clam
Broth House, which, thank God,
still survives. Not many do:
Gage and Tollner’s, the Clam Broth House,
McSorley’s and now McFeely’s. Was
that the most beautiful of the
ferry houses or am I thinking
of Christopher Street? And there
was another uptown that crossed
to Jersey and back but docking
further downtown: it sailed
on two diagonals. And wasn’t
there one at 42nd? It couldn’t
matter less, they’re gone, all
gone and we are left with just
the Staten Island ferry, all
right in its way but how often
do you want to pass Miss Liberty
and see that awesome spiky postcard
view? The river ferryboats were
squat and low like tugs, old
and wooden and handsome, you
were in the water, in the shipping:
Millay wrote a lovely poem about
it all. I cannot accept their
death, or any other death. Bill
Aalto, my first lover (five tumultuous
years found Bill chasing me around
the kitchen table – in Wystan Auden’s – house
in Forio d’Ischia – with
a carving knife. He was serious
and so was I and so I wouldn’t go
when he wanted to see me when
he was dying of leukemia. Am I
sorry? Not really. The fear had
gone too deep. The last time I
saw him was in the City Center lobby
and he was jolly – if he just
stared at you and the tears began
it was time to cut and run –
and the cancer had made him lose
a lot of weight and he looked
young and handsome as the night
we picked each other up
in Pop Tunick’s long-gone gay bar.
Bill never lets me forget that
on the jukebox I kept playing
Lena Horne’s “Mad about the Boy.”
Why the nagging teasing? It’s
a great performance but he
thought it was East Fifties queen
taste. Funny – or, funnily enough –
in dreams, and I dream about him
a lot, he’s always the nice guy
I first knew and loved, not
the figure of terror he became.
Oh well. Bill had his hour: he
was a hero, a major in the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade. A dark
Finn who looked not unlike
a butch version of Valentino.
Watch out for Finns. They’re
murder when they drink) used
to ride the ferries all the
time, doing the bars along
the waterfront: did you know
that Hoboken has – or had –
more bars to the square inch
(Death. At least twice when
someone I knew and hated
died I felt the joy of vengeance:
I mean I smiled and laughed out
loud: a hateful feeling.
It passes.) to the square inch
than any other city? “Trivia,
Goddess . . .” Through dinner
I wanted to talk more than we
did about Frank’s poems. All it
came down to was “experiment
more,” “try collages,” and “write
some skinny poems” but I like
where he’s heading now and
Creative Writing has never
been my trip although I understand
the fun of teaching someone
something fun to do although most people
simply have not got the gift
and where’s the point? What
puzzles me is what my friends
find to say. Oh forget it. Reading,
writing, knowing other poets
will do it, if there is
anything doing. The reams
of shit I’ve read. It would
have been so nice after dinner
to take the ferry boat with Frank
across the Hudson (or West River,
if you prefer). To be on
the water in the dark and
the wonder of electricity –
the real beauty of Manhattan.
Oh well. When they tore down
the Singer Building,
and when I saw the Bogardus building
rusty and coming unstitched in
a battlefield of rubble I deliberately
withdrew my emotional investments
in loving old New York. Except
you can’t. I really like
dining out and last night was
especially fine. A full moon
when we parted hung over
Frank and me. Why is this poem
so long? And full of death?
Frank and Doug are young and
beautiful and have nothing
to do with that. Why is this poem
so long? “Enough is as good
as a feast” and I’m a Herrick fan.
I’d like to take that plunge
into Central Park, only I’m
waiting for Darragh Park to phone.
Oh. Doug and Frank. One is light,
the other dark.
Doug is the tall one.
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominick, Hi!!!! No problem, and for ‘bringing it to [you]’, to quote the almighty ABBA. Sometimes I like to sit on the edge of my bed if that counts. And your yesterday love plucked out yet another mem-able quote. Love suddenly realising he’s never seen a single snail in Paris and wondering why, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. First, the latest PTv2 was great! I loved the kind of mutant industrial start into the super lofi synth period then that track that sounded like early wire w/ keyboards and then into outer space and onwards into chillax. Great work, sir! Oh, damn, so sorry for the sports related worries and grimness. Prayers that your guys win and Ipswich flops out at least. In that case no news does seem like good news. From over here. ** Joseph, An Emily Dickinsonian stand-up act might just really fly. When my parents used to watch me scribbling stories and poems in a notebook and say ‘you’re going to grow up to be a bum’, they were mostly right. Great about the new book with Schism! That’s a really swell press. Fantastic news! I’m a Paul Cunningham fan too. And your book has a really great title that would have my hand pawing at the ‘new books’ table the moment my eyes focused on it. You can’t lose. Exciting, man, and, yeah, edit that fucker. Do it for us. ** Dev, Thank you for the tips on the YouTube channel. That had escaped me. I’ll venture over there with headphones in place in a bit. Even rusty Japanese is highly enviable and must be a minor godsend at least. ** Justin D, Hi. Shoegaze was quite good live in most instances. MbV shows are extremely legendary for an ultra-good reason. My guess is exciting and a nuisance simultaneously is my fate. For the first week or so, and then probably 90% nuisance. But I’m sure I’ll learn something. MedFet is an interesting fiction possibility. I’ve had lots of characters interested in others’ skeletons and internal organs and so on, but they’re usual just daydreamers. Hm, you’re right. I’ll make a note. Thank you, muse for a day. ** Steve, My suspicion is that the slaves are more Lana Del Rey boys. Do Lana Del Rey fanatics have a Swiftie type name? Lana-ites? Reys? Thanks, I’ll go find the cult’s tunes. I’m quite curious, naturally. I too loved the Shoegaze era and snapped up almost everything that had a gauzy album cover. ** Harper, My pleasure, sir. Well, you’ll be hard pressed to find another band on MbV’s level. They were the gods, for sure. But there’s a fair amount of excellent stuff that still sounds excellent. Yeah, my novel ‘Guide’ is about that lofi vs. electronic dichotomy and trying to negotiate from the former into the latter. Well, I certainly listen to infinitely more electronic music now than indie rock, but I do think indie rock has been in the doldrums for, gosh, twenty years now? So, I feel like it’s indie rock’s fault more than mine really? What do you think? ** Uday, Making someone a zine is so romantic and, you know, it can work. Probably more than just writing a poem for them, which was more my method. I don’t think people understand how hard it is write a good poem. Anyway, a zine should at the very least cement a friendship, I think. Pack light. Or I always do. I hate checking bags. ** Okay. Today I spotlight my favorite book by one of my all-time very, very favorite poets, and I hope you’ll find interest or solace or something therein. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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