Sitting here in Chicago, the city where he was born, I’m thinking about James Schuyler as we approach November 9, 2023—the day that would have been his one hundredth birthday. The New York School poet died in Manhattan in 1991, predeceased by Frank O’Hara and survived by John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch. His poems often speak quietly to a close circle, but their magic is the way they welcome readers—any readers—into their intimacy. Schuyler’s work turns strangers into confidants. Another of his friends, the writer Douglas Crase, characterizes him as a poet of “almost democratic charity” who helps us “learn to love reality.”[1] Crase means that Schuyler attends frankly and tenderly to the commonest experiences—watching sunlight on a balcony, stepping in “doggy pooh,” feeling nervous or humiliated among friends—things that we often either miss or turn away from. Schuyler’s attention is “democratic” in two senses: anything seems as noteworthy as any other, and he wrote as though any and all of us might have a share in this world.
Elsewhere, Crase calls Schuyler a poet of “the everyday,” and goes on to sharpen what that means: “We call it the everyday, when it is more likely that experience is the one thing that is not commonplace, the one source of the saving distinctions that give us lives.”[2] I agree, and I can think of few poets who make finer distinctions or attend more finely to the distinction-making process itself than Schuyler does. Curiously, for Crase, distinction-making means eschewing simile. Discussing Schuyler’s late poem “A Few Days” (1985), he notes “the near total absence of analogy in its ordinary sense,” and asks: “Where are the similes, where are the words like and as that usually identify what we think of as descriptive writing?”[3] Crase takes the absence of simile as a sign of Schuyler’s commitment to unadorned “reality.” In fact, there are numerous similes in “A Few Days,” which Crase briefly acknowledges while claiming nevertheless that Schuyler’s poetry “emphasizes distinctions, rather than analogies.”[4] But why should we have to choose?
Likeness is not identity. Similes ask us to mind not only what two things share but also the crucial differences between them. A good simile articulates the uncanny flickering of likeness and difference, a sense of simultaneous familiarity and freshness. Here I think of “February” (1969), one of my favorite Schuyler poems, an early one that’s pinned together by six instances of like. Consider the poem’s first three similes:
A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can’t see
making a bit of pink
I can’t quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can’t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we’d gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They’re just
going over the hill.
Schuyler’s distinctions are scrupulous in those first six lines. He teases out a barely visible shade of light from the sky’s blue, distinguishes that distant “bit of pink” from “the pink of five tulips” near at hand, and makes sure we don’t assume that the last day of February is the 28th. His first simile, in line eight, is as elusive as that pink light, and he’s as modest about his memory as he is about his vision: “The green of the tulip stems and leaves / like something I can’t remember, / finding a jack-in-the-pulpit / a long time ago and far away.” Isn’t memory a simile that often almost fails? To be reminded of one thing by another is to glimpse a ghostly likeness across time, to feel the presence of something we can no longer quite see. We move briefly into a remembered space of sun and sea, maybe the Mediterranean, until another like draws us back to New York and the poem’s present, where the idyll’s palette is reconfigured into a surprising image of the UN Building (a temple of what?), visible perhaps from this East Side apartment window (a view Schuyler would revisit years later in “This Dark Apartment”). And then we’re remembering again, among far-off almond trees, but only for a moment, before the third simile plays the warmth of blossoms against sudden snowflakes back in New York, the sky still swapping colors as past and present keep swapping places. Or as they seem to. In remembering—in recognizing likeness—we can’t help but remember that there really isn’t here. Schuyler quietly reminds us to think again: the trucks might look as though they’re floating away, but “They’re just / going over the hill.”
By now it’s clear that this poem moves almost entirely by logic of likeness, and as it proceeds, it becomes a meditation on likeness itself:
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
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 her baby in her arms.
She’s so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.
It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It’s a day like any other.[5]
One quick simile gives us a glimpse of grass against skin, a few seconds of intimacy and warmth before the poem zooms out again to the bigness of the evening sky over Manhattan. The poet is astonished by “it all,” and that capaciously unspecified it keeps expanding, filling up with precisely distinguished particulars. Does the next like signal a simile or an example? Here Schuyler works with the colloquial blur of “like” into “such as,” as though analogy itself might become a kind of pointing, a way of saying this. This is it. It is the window, the mother and child, the weather, the tulip’s pollen, the form of the tulip, the fluidity of water taking the shape of a glass. Finally “It’s a day like any other,” which is to say both “It’s nothing special,” and “Each day is this astonishing.” Schuyler’s similes give us the form of a constantly differing commonplace—not quite a democracy, but an almost democratic disposition, a sort of weather within which we all might sometimes find ourselves. His charity is to address us all as fellows in this common astonishment. For Schuyler, every day was an occasion, and every occasion was something we might recognize together.
Notes:
[1] Douglas Crase, Lines from London Terrace: Essays and Addresses (Brooklyn: Pressed Wafer, 2017), 20.
[2] Crase, Lines from London Terrace, 129.
[3] Crase, Lines from London Terrace, 17.
[4] Crase, Lines from London Terrace, 18.
[5] James Schuyler, “February,” in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993), 4–5.