James Marcus Schuyler was the son of Marcus Schuyler (a reporter) and Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler.
A native of Chicago, he attended Bethany College of West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. In recollection of his times at Bethany College, Schuyler said in an interview published in the spring of 1992, that he did not excel, "I just played bridge all the time."
Schuyler moved to New York City in the late 1940s where he worked for NBC and first befriended W. H. Auden. In 1947, he moved to Ischia, Italy, where he lived in Auden's rented apartment and worked as his secretary. Between 1947 and 1948, Schuyler attended the University of Florence.
After returning to the United States and settling in New York City, he roomed with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.
In April 1991, at age sixty-seven, Schuyler died in Manhattan following a stroke. His ashes were interred at the Little Portion Friary (Episcopal), Mt. Sinai, Long Island, New York.
Schuyler was not known for revealing much about his personal life. It is known that he was gay, was manic depressive, suffered several years of psychoanalysis and withstood many traumatic experiences. One of these includes a "near death experience" in a fire which he caused by smoking in bed.
In a spring 1990 special issue of the Denver Quarterly that was written by Barbara Guest in devotion to Schuyler's work, Guest refers to Schuyler as an "intimist," saying:
...for me Jimmy is the Vuillard of us, he withholds his secret, the secret thing until the moment appears to reveal it. We wait and wait for the name of a flower while we praise the careful cultivation. We wait for someone to speak, And it is Jimmy in an aside.Schuyler's move to Italy, as Auden's typist, was accompanied by his intention of writing. In 1981 he was said to have recalled "that he found Auden's elaborate formalism 'inhibiting.'" This was likely an influence to his own "conversational style and proselike line."
While living in New York, Schuyler found inspiration in the art world. From 1955-1961, he was a "curator of circulating exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art." He was also an editorial associate and critic for Art News. While working as an editorial associate, Schuyler wrote criticism about a large amount of art. In an interview that was published in spring 2002, he said, "I did learn an awful lot during those years, and then went on in the 60s writing occasional articles about specific artists and their specific strategies. Partly it was to make money, and partly because I wanted to write about painting, about art." His time as an art critic, then, became a major inspiration to his work.
From 1961 to 1973 Schuyler lived with Fairfield Porter and his family in Southampton, Long Island. Porter became an influence for Schuyler as well, and he dedicated his first major collection, Freely Espousing to Anne and Fairfield Porter.
Schuyler is also noted for his distinct ability to take things that are "normal," and bring out their greatness. He takes a look at things that many people may not see, or care to take note of, such as individual raindrops. He evaluates the ordinary and the way they work in relation to other things: "It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in./ It's a day like any other."
Schuyler was also responsible for writing Frank O'Hara's elegy, "Buried at Springs". Schuyler recalls Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism, and uses nature to express himself in the elegy. Schuyler also has several works that are about, or that reference lists.
In his Diary, Schuyler says that he is "more of a reader than a writer," and "everything happens as I write."
Schuyler received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem. He also coauthored a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with John Ashbery in 1969. Schuyler also received the Longview Foundation Award in 1961, and the Frank O'Hara Prize for Poetry in 1969 for Freely Espousing.
Schuyler was a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the American Academy of Poets.
His poem The Morning of the Poem is considered to be among the best long poems of the postmodern era.
Burial: Little Portion Friary Cemetery, Mount Sinai, Suffolk County, New York, USA, Plot: Little Portion Friary Cemetery
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Schuyler
James Schuyler at the Chelsea Hotel - NYC, 1989/90, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1082003)
American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)
Further Readings:
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 15, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374532699
ISBN-13: 978-0374532697
Amazon: Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems
A COLLECTION OF UNPUBLISHED POEMS FROM ONE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE POETIC VOICES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
of an evening real as paint on canvas.Other Flowers brings together 165 unseen poems from James Schuyler, one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed writers. This carefully arranged edition presents a broad range of Schuyler’s work, spanning from the early 1950s until his death in 1991. These poems exhibit Schuyler’s virtuosity in drawing from real life, interpersonal history, nature, and pop culture to create reverberant portraits of the everyday. To read these poems is to rediscover the fresh clarity and grandeur of even the smallest things. Other Flowers confirms Schuyler’s status as one of the most important figures in contemporary poetics.
The kind that makes me ache to have the gift
for dusting off clichés:
not, make it new, but, see it, hear it, freshly.
The context (good morrow, haven’t we met in this context
before?)
in which, squelch, a brush lifted a load
of pigment from the thick glass palette, and, concentrated,
as though he saw neither the work in hand nor the subject,
the painter began. —from “A Blue Shadow Painting”
More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices
This journal is friends only. This entry was originally posted at http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/2834489.html. If you are not friends on this journal, Please comment there using OpenID.