James Schuyler

 

Schuyler's poems can sometimes stop readers in their tracks - not because of any infelicitous choice of word, or the dull drop of a participle, but from sheer and joyful surprise (“I keep my Diamond necklace in a pond of sparkling water for invisibility”). A master of the sudden and unusual intrusion (of another state of consciousness, a flamboyant character, or an elegant twist of fate), Schuyler was a postmodern nature poet, who wrote convincingly of the weather, of garden flowers, and of “malevolent argeratums,” carefully noting “a too pungent salad” and “the smoke blazing over Jersey.” Everything and everyone in his sometimes skinny poems is clearly, tenderly observed: “All things are real/no one a symbol.” Schuyler was also a careful observer in a meditative way of living life in the city: 

The Morning

breaks in splendor on 
the window glass of
the French doors to
the shallow balcony
of my room with a 
cast iron balustrade
in a design of flowers,
mechanical and coarse
and painted black:
sunburst of a coolish
morning in July. I
almost accept the fact
that I am not in
the country,, where I
long to be, but in
this place of glass
and stone-and metal,
let's not forget
metal-where traffic sounds and the day
is well begun. So 
be it, morning.

As an observer, Schuyler partakes of a postmodern type of buddhist, or quietest christian calmness
and hope in the face of no hope: 

Things should get better as you
grow older, but that
is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to handle.
-----from "A Few Days