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Eric Lindstrom on James Schuyler ("February")
2k Plays2 years ago
"I can't get over / how it all works in together." That's the poet James Schuyler, towards the end of today's poem, "February," a favorite of mine, which I had the great fortune to talk about with an old and beloved friend, Eric Lindstrom.
Eric is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2022). He's also the guest editor of two collections of essays: Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism (Romantic Circles, 2014) and Ostensive Moments and the Romantic Arts: Essays in Honor of Paul Fry (Essays in Romanticism, forthcoming in March 2023). His essays have appeared in such journals as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Criticism, Modern Philology, and Modernism/modernity. His most recent article, "Promethean Ethics and Nineteenth-Century Ecologies," published and available open access at Literature Compass online, was co-written with Kira Braham. Eric is completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, and, from the gleanings of that project, assembling an uncreative, marginally scholarly commonplace called "'Now and Then': A Poetics and Commonplace of Intermittence."
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Cameron Javidizadeh. And boy, am I thrilled to be making this call today because I am the person I have on the other line is one of my oldest friends, one of my dearest friends.
00:00:16
Speaker
someone I love and someone whom, if you don't know, I think you'll see why I love over the course of the next hour. Our guest today is Eric Lindstrom.
Eric Lindstrom's Academic Profile
00:00:28
Speaker
Eric is a professor of English at the University of Vermont. And before I tell you all about his marvelous publications and accomplishments and so on, let me also mention that the poem that Eric and I will be talking about today
00:00:46
Speaker
is a poem called February by the great 20th century American poet James Schuyler. This is one of my most favorite poems, and I have, I fear, strong-armed my friend into talking with me about it.
00:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's the shortest month while it was still on. We're squeezing it in. We'll talk more about months and time and Schuyler in a minute. But as a reminder, you can find the text of the poem through a link in the show notes.
00:01:26
Speaker
If you want to be looking at it, you can also look at the newsletter that comes out with the episode for links to information about Eric, other links to things that come up during the episode.
Influence in Literary Criticism
00:01:44
Speaker
But let me tell you more about Eric Lindstrom. Eric is the author of two books. His first book was called Romantic Fiat.
00:01:53
Speaker
demystification and enchantment in lyric poetry. And that was published by Paul Grave in 2011. And then more recently, Eric was the author of a book called Jane Austen and Other Minds, Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
00:02:16
Speaker
In addition to those two monographs, Eric has guest edited two collections of essays. The first called Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism, which came out with Romantic Circles in 2014. And then a special issue of Essays in Romanticism
00:02:39
Speaker
which is due out next month. Though I guess, you know, with podcasts, you may be listening to this at a time in the future when next month has already become your past. It's all very confusing. In any case, a special issue of essays and romanticism due out in March, 2023, called Ostensive Moments and the Romantic Arts, essays in honor of Paul Fry.
00:03:05
Speaker
Paul Fry, it occurs to me, is a name that has come up before on this podcast. A teacher of mine, Eric's mentor, one of his most beloved teachers.
Recent Works and Friendship Reflection
00:03:21
Speaker
And so that's sure to be a very important and lovely special issue. Yeah, joyful. Yeah, joyful.
00:03:35
Speaker
So in addition to those books and those edited collections, Eric has also written many essays and articles. They've appeared in such journals as ELH.
00:03:46
Speaker
studies in romanticism, criticism, modern philology, modernism modernity. If you toil in our fields of literary academia, you'll recognize these journal titles as some of the most impressive and important and storied places for academic literary criticism that exist. I'm astounded at the productivity of my dear friend.
00:04:14
Speaker
Eric's most recent article, which is published and available open access at Literature Compass Online, is called Promethean Ethics and Nineteenth-Century Ecologies, and that was co-written with Keira Brown. He's also completing a third book, most relevant, I suppose, to our conversation today, called James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention, Romanticism Inside Out.
00:04:41
Speaker
And then these words, which I am about to speak into my microphone, come directly from Eric's email to me, most recent email to me. From the gleanings of that project, he's been assembling an uncreative, marginally scholarly commonplace called Now and Then, a Poetics and Commonplace of Intermittence. And I love that. I love that.
00:05:09
Speaker
description of that project, which I think sounds like the kind of thing that we need more of in our world, things that are uncreative, marginally scholarly. It occurs to me that maybe this podcast is one such thing. But I've now alluded a couple of times to my friendship with Eric. And let me say just a word more about that, because I think it will give you a flavor
00:05:38
Speaker
of a taste of the person that we're about to be talking to. So Eric and I started graduate school together. We were in the same cohort of graduate students back now over 20 years ago.
00:05:56
Speaker
And ours was a kind of unusually close and socially affable group of graduate students. I remember thinking back then, oh, everybody told me graduate school would be such a dark time, and it's so fun. There were dark days, no doubt, but I am someone who just had the luck, I think, to meet some of my closest and dearest friends.
00:06:23
Speaker
When I began my graduate study, Eric was one of them. Eric felt unusual to me and to us as a group, I think, of students in those days. In as much as more than was true of any one of us, he seemed to be someone whose life was just suffused with the study of literature. He arrived
00:06:49
Speaker
in the fall of that year with what seemed to me like a sense of purpose and dedication to the course of study that we were all entering on that was kind of awe-inspiring to me. And I don't mean when I say that his life was suffused by the study of literature that Eric didn't then or doesn't now have other interests
00:07:16
Speaker
or that he and I would only ever talk about literature or literary criticism of all things. No, that was not at all the case. But what I mean instead is that when Eric and I talked about, well, we're both basketball fans,
00:07:36
Speaker
And when we would talk about basketball, my beloved Los Angeles Lakers or Eric's intense passion at the time. We're fleeting, right? Not as home-based, fugitive passion. That's right. That's right. For Alan Iverson,
00:07:57
Speaker
It felt to me like we may as well have been talking about poetry. That is to talk with Eric about something like that was to be talking about poetry in some way.
Interest in James Schuyler
00:08:08
Speaker
Fast forward the clock. Many years later, our topics have changed somewhat. If we're talking now about Eric's daughters, who I think are by now, we're recording late at night.
00:08:24
Speaker
So this is my nighttime voice. Eric's daughters or mine, I think all of them by now asleep, you know, we talk about them with the great love that parents have for their kids. It also sounds not too dissimilar to me in talking to Eric about
00:08:50
Speaker
our children, not too dissimilar from talking about poetry. This is the way Eric's mind works. This is part of the great pleasure of being Eric's friend.
00:09:06
Speaker
Tonight, as I say, poetry is our real subject, of course. It's our direct subject. And, you know, Eric and I both, neither of us back then, when we first met, knew that we were interested in James Schuyler. I mean, we weren't yet, I don't think. Both of us sort of fell for Schuyler recently, within the last several years, few years.
00:09:35
Speaker
And it's kind of curious and beautiful and interesting to me that this has happened to us independently, and we live far apart from each other now. We talk not as often as we should. This was really an independent development in each of our lives, and we sort of tracked it happening to the other from a distance.
00:09:55
Speaker
This will be our first chance to have a real conversation about Skylar. Now, when I started the podcast, I knew, of course, I'd want to have Eric on at some point and he at some point suggested to me, oh, maybe let's talk about Skylar. And then it occurred to me much more recently within the last few days, to be honest. That goes Tuesday. That doesn't convey it. That's perfect.
00:10:21
Speaker
It occurred to me that if we struck while the iron was hot, as it were, we'd get a chance to talk about what is one of my favorite poems by Schuyler in a way that felt topical and tied to the moment on the calendar when the podcast would come out. So if I play my cards right here, this episode will be published essentially the day before
00:10:51
Speaker
the day that the poem memorializes in one way or another. Now, that may not be quite the right way to think about it. And I think that's an interesting question and one that we might address. But part of my reason for wanting to talk about this poem now is that it feels timely, but maybe not timely in the way that word is normally used, timely in a way that Schuyler seems to manage to be in his poetry.
00:11:20
Speaker
And I'm interested in that. And Eric said to me, well, I'm not speaking for himself that he wasn't as inclined as it seemed I was to be to be quite so literal about dates and Schuyler. I think there's a kind of pleasure in it. And I'm happy to play the literal straight man here to Eric's more interestingly figurative, nimble mind. And lazy. So well.
00:11:49
Speaker
We'll hear the poem in a moment, but first let me properly welcome Eric Lindstrom onto the podcast. Eric, it's late. How are you feeling? I'm feeling good. I'm with you. I'm with James Skyler's poetry, and it's a pleasure to hear your voice and to see you as listeners at home. It's always a delight to see come on everybody.
00:12:09
Speaker
And I want to say that, you know, it's just a lovely, what you're doing here. And I hope our installment of it is just a lovely way to do critical work and special to me. It's an exciting way to do friendship. So thank you. Yeah. Well, gosh, that means a lot. Yeah. You know, it's, um,
00:12:35
Speaker
I don't know, I'm the kind of writer who, well, I'm not nearly as productive as you are. And part of the struggle for me is that I, not that you don't do this, again, speaking just for myself, I am the kind of writer who can labor over each sentence, trying to make it what, not that I succeed in this, but sort of crystalline and perfect and sounding just right.
00:13:01
Speaker
And of course that way of thinking only gets at part of the pleasure I take in reading poetry and thinking about poetry. It misses all the beautiful stops and starts and false starts and wrong turns and
00:13:19
Speaker
self-corrections that come and talk. And we get some of that in the best classes that we're in or that we teach in conversations that we have with friends. And I guess one goal of this project was to make that kind of thing available more broadly to the public. And I'm so thrilled to get to share the microphone, as it were, with you tonight, Eric. Thank you.
00:13:48
Speaker
Let's listen to James Skyler read the poem.
Introduction to 'February'
00:13:54
Speaker
Our listeners might
00:13:57
Speaker
You know, people who don't know Schuyler's work at all or well, listeners who were where you and I may have been, I don't know how many years back you'd need to go five years ago or 10 years ago before we'd really turned to Schuyler ourselves. For me, it's really more like three or four years, I'd say at this point. Might benefit from hearing just a couple of dates and sort of having a couple of things in mind. So Schuyler was born in 1923.
00:14:26
Speaker
He seems to have written the poem that we're discussing today in 1954 or 55, so would have been in his very early 30s, let's say. Wouldn't publish the poem in book form until several years later. And the recording that we're going to hear is from many years later, is from 1988. So
00:14:51
Speaker
34 years after he wrote it, he's reading it publicly. And Schuyler, unlike so many of the poets from his generation, poets that he was friends with, but also just US poets more broadly, was not someone who was fond of or comfortable with giving poetry readings.
00:15:18
Speaker
The recording that we're going to hear is kind of a rare artifact and is a recording of a famous first public poetry reading that Schuyler gave very near the end of his life in 1988 at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. He was introduced
00:15:39
Speaker
on that occasion by John Ashbery, his lifelong friend, Schuyler, like Ashbery, and like Frank O'Hara, who is a poet who's been covered our first episode, right, with Brian Glavy on O'Hara's having a coke with you. It was great.
00:16:00
Speaker
Oh, thanks. And Kenneth Koch, these four poets and then others, many others besides, form the core of what is often referred to now as the New York School of Poets.
00:16:14
Speaker
Maybe we'll have occasion to talk about how Skyler does and doesn't fit into that group in a moment. But so right, this reading was a great public coming out very near the end of his life and towards the end of a long and interesting career.
00:16:35
Speaker
for Schuyler. And I'll make a link available so that people can listen to the whole reading. And I highly recommend that you do. I'll make a link available in the show notes or with the newsletter as well. But let's listen to Schuyler read and then we'll talk about the poem. Here's James Schuyler.
James Schuyler's Reading and Style
00:16:57
Speaker
February. A chimney breathing a little smoke.
00:17:01
Speaker
The sun I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink are five tulips at 5 p.m. on the day before March 1st. The green are 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,
00:17:30
Speaker
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 and white.
00:17:53
Speaker
A gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. They're just going over the hill. The green leaves are 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.
00:18:17
Speaker
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-sized lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
00:18:48
Speaker
It's the shape of the tulip. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. It's a day like any other. Eric, I love listening to Skyler Rita's poems.
00:19:16
Speaker
And I wonder if you could just share a thought or two about what it's like for you to listen to this poet read. I love listening to Skylar read.
00:19:29
Speaker
He's really pleasing to me, and that's not an even though, but it's in recognition of a kind of gruffness in his voice. Yeah, this is three years before he died in 91. Maybe you can hear that he's had dental work. More importantly, you feel a body that has lived, and he kind of aspirates the poem in a way where, not to overdo it, but it's embodied, it's measured,
00:19:59
Speaker
It's an informal reading style, but it's one that I think knows the measure of the poem. And it's wonderful to have the Penn Sound Archive of Schuyler readings, just listen to all of them. Yeah, those are a few of my thoughts.
00:20:17
Speaker
When you make that remark, Eric, about the measure of the poem, you know, my ears prick up a bit and I'm curious about what that term means for you. I mean, in a moment, obviously, we will want to dive in and work our way through the poem, you know, start at something like it's beginning and end at something like it's ending. But, you know, it also
00:20:45
Speaker
Maybe you are like me in this way. I don't know. I don't think we've had this particular conversation before where, you know, I do think that I have become or have always been the kind of reader who looks at a page that a poem is on.
00:21:03
Speaker
and feels like I know something about it, you know, I know something about it even before I've begun to read it. Maybe this is one of the ways in which a poem can be a little bit like a painting, which I know is an interest of yours, and an interest of yours with respect to Schuyler more generally, you know, how poems, and of course as a preoccupation of New York school poetry more broadly, but you can,
00:21:33
Speaker
you can do with a poem what you can't do with a novel, which is to look at all of it at once, if it's short enough, I guess, anyway. So for listeners to the podcast, Eric, that either don't know Schuyler's work well at all, or happen not to be looking at the text as we talk about it,
00:21:56
Speaker
What impressions of itself does it give to you just at a glance on the page? And maybe how does that impression fit in to what Schuyler's poems can look like more generally?
00:22:15
Speaker
strikes me that he's a poet who writes some poems that are very skinny and some poems that are very fat. Skinny and fat, it's an Yves Sedgwick kind of thing, not to bring in fury and close readings. But yeah, the Mighty Line, which the later long poems especially, he said were only sort of contained by
00:22:35
Speaker
the typewriter, and our Whitman-esque, and then the skinny. This poem is in between the two, isn't it? It's not one of his skinny poems, like he's got one called Buttered Greens, I think, where you barely get more than two words per line. It's in between, and maybe we can talk more about that. This is a kind of medium-sized Schuyler poem. My feeling as much about the measure was about temporality.
00:23:05
Speaker
He's often praised for the kind of, not sublimity necessarily, but the just rightness, you know, capturing a quintessence that seems ordinary that another person might not see or attend to and that another poet might not get just as right.
00:23:22
Speaker
and this is a kind of medium-sized Schuyler poem which in that way makes it wonderful to kind of pull out if we're going to have one discussion of his work. He's been compared in some ways to an almost
00:23:40
Speaker
He never invokes this, but an almost kind of Zen-like or Buddhist kind of writer who captures time in his poetry. And I often picture Schuyler, even though his writing is very scribbly.
00:23:57
Speaker
He calls it scribbles as almost writing like calligraphy, you know, the line drops and you have a certain kind of image of grace with how he lineates and that's kind of what I meant by measure a sense of The poem taking time and being a container of time but not in a way that sort of masters it rather in a way that transpires the time of the poem and the time in the poem transpire together and
00:24:24
Speaker
like the time of the enunciation of the poem and the time of the text sort of coming together in some way. And the time passing in the poem. One of the things that interests me in this that will I'm sure get to later
00:24:41
Speaker
It's really indicative of a Schuyler poem, but it's handled in a way that's sort of muted here in, you know, rifulgent here, things happen in Schuyler's poetry. So I work on romantic poetry, one of the most things I'm working on Schuyler. Spontaneity is a thing, of course, that the New York school have and the romantics have, and things happen in Schuyler's poetry.
00:25:09
Speaker
And the poem becomes a way of Quicksilver-like responding in time to that. Let's look at the first few lines of this poem because I think they might give us a kind of testing ground for some of the ideas that you've just been describing. And I'll read the first, what is it, six lines of the poem again so we can have them fresh.
Close Reading of 'February'
00:25:39
Speaker
Well, first the title, February, and then 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 5 p.m. on the day before March 1st.
00:25:59
Speaker
So time is present here. Maybe it's not the kind of time that you were, or the sort of sense of temporality that you were just describing, but it is present. Are things happening here? I don't know. Talk to us about these first few lines, Eric.
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah, Skylar's great at process and gerunds and ING verbs. And here you get the chimney breathing. So the respiration is given over to a non-human thing, an object.
00:26:36
Speaker
though it's exhaling something that humans have been doing, right? Yeah, this is an Anthropocene cold poem, but I mean, you know, it's winter, right? The chimney's doing work, that verb that comes up later and breathing a great kind of word, of course, for poetic, not even voice yet, just respiration. So there's that, there's that sense of,
00:27:00
Speaker
taking in and giving out and letting out that I think is indicative of Schuyler. He doesn't so much corral and form in that way as he takes in and lets it back out and that's what breathing does.
00:27:16
Speaker
The title, of course, too, right? Skylar is kind of famous for date poems. Almost like each date is its own birthday and he's celebrating that. So he's got December 28th, 1974, or June 30th, 1974. He has two or three poems that are just a month in the same collection freely espousing. There's a great poem, December
00:27:42
Speaker
But, you know, December, you kind of cover the whole month, right? It's the holiday season. And in that poem, he talks about shopping at Bonwit Teller in New York City, you know, mid to... February is a different month to take in whole. He's writing at the very end of February, whenever that is. Yeah. The day before March 1st. So it could be a leap year. And that is interesting. And then also, like, I've been noticing this as a human lately.
00:28:12
Speaker
The end of February is very different from the beginning. The change in the light becomes strong. I mean, in New York, I'm in Vermont. You feel a kind of return of light in the late afternoon, in late February. And he's writing a poem where February is about to leave. So he's celebrating February.
00:28:34
Speaker
Um upon its exit and not as I think most of us would do february time hastening its end Right. Most of us just want to get through certainly after whatever we do to get through valentine's day You just want to get through the back end of february, right? And skylar's tearing with it Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's interesting right because
00:29:01
Speaker
You would think, given the poem's title, and given what you just said about Schuyler's propensity to not just place a poem in a month, but to give it a date, you would think that a poem called February
00:29:20
Speaker
I mean, it feels a little odd that the poem itself, that the month that's named in the poem is March, actually. Even though we're not there yet, you know? March 1st. Right, and I think that there must be, and well, and there's an hour, the pink of five tulips at 5 p.m. on the day before March 1st. So this is the last light of February. Right, and it must be significant that
00:29:49
Speaker
February is the one month that has an unstable number of days.
00:29:58
Speaker
So I've seen it written that the people think the poem is written in 1954, and so that sounds like it might be a leap year, but actually it wasn't. That's not a leap year. 52 and 56 were. Maybe it was written in 55, you were suggesting, but in any case, it seems not to be a leap year. But the poem doesn't give that away, right?
00:30:23
Speaker
And it seems conspicuous to say the day before March 1st in a month where that doesn't settle what the date is. So maybe that, I don't know, does that, on the one hand, we're naming the hour and we're being very precise about the day. And on the other hand, we're what? Like exposing the indeterminacy of our way of accounting for the passage of time. There's a bunch of great things in that.
00:30:54
Speaker
Skyler writes these exact words in a later poem. He refuses a compliment. He says, a clunk head said to me, your poems are growing more open. I don't want to be more open, but to see and say things as they are. Right. And that's a wonderful phrase. It makes you think maybe of, you know, no ideas, but in things. But
00:31:16
Speaker
But in Schuyler, things allow a kind of indeterminacy. They're not the sort of modernist red wheelbarrow kind of erratic, clear-edged object. Usually, although these tulips are pretty clear-edged, they allow indeterminacy. And so in general, the play in Schuyler between a kind of
00:31:36
Speaker
a kind of direct relationship to fact and naming and description. He's a very descriptive poet, which is post-romantic poetry that's treated pejoratively, and Schuyler is a descriptive poet. But that fulsomeness about just naming things literally co-exists with indeterminacy in a way that is often striking in his work. In February, I think brings that out at the level of a month.
00:32:07
Speaker
But maybe it's maybe also, oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, it's always tricky. Yeah, my only thought is like reading Schuyler, close reading, writing on Schuyler, you're drawn to say more and think more, but you don't want to overwork it. That verb is critical to this poem. But he is, Douglas Crace is the great writer and critic of Schuyler's strong relationship, in particular to American transcendentalist thinkers, and to, you know, really like moral
00:32:39
Speaker
moral wisdom and rightness in odd ways. And so Emerson, I think, comes up here. There's this great line in experience, I think it is, where Emerson says, and forgive me for having a note on this, some heavenly days must be intercalated somewhere. To give us a sense of heaven in our quotidian lives, we need to have some day that doesn't belong on the calendar. And if you're writing a poem about that,
00:33:04
Speaker
you drop it in the indeterminate day of February 29th or not. It could just be that Skylar's point is that you don't need that leap year to make this the day. It's a day like any other, but it's the day. And that makes this poem quite, I think, ambitious in its relationship to how the ordinary and the exceptional and beyond that, something more
00:33:35
Speaker
you know, potentially quietly glorious can happen. That's great.
00:33:46
Speaker
What I was going to say was, you know, about the, you know, as you describe Schuyler as a descriptive poet, which I think is right. I mean, and in this way, though maybe not in others, it makes sense to me that I love Schuyler so much because, you know, the other poet that I love so much who's more or less contemporary with him, she's a bit older, is Elizabeth Bishop, you know, who's often also called the descriptive poet. Now maybe description works.
00:34:15
Speaker
differently in the two of them. But one thing I'm noticing in the opening lines of this poem, and I feel as though I hear it elsewhere in Schuyler, I know I see it elsewhere in Schuyler, is on the one hand, he seems to, you know, he's interested in describing the colors of things. But his palette seems awfully
00:34:36
Speaker
limited or something here. You know, it's the sun I can't see making a bit of pink. I can't quite see in the blue the pink of five tulips. You know, it's not these aren't these are
00:34:48
Speaker
These are names for colors that are on your starter set of Crayola crayons. He's not reaching for exotic colors or anything. Repeating rather than reaching. That's right. Yeah. And here it's also, twice in the first six lines, he's telling us what he can't see. Yeah.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah, I thought about that once I got this assignment and turned toward it. And I found myself almost trying to come up with smart readings of why he can't see. You can't look at the sun, right? You can't look at it directly.
00:35:32
Speaker
Well, I think here also he's looking out the window and it's hidden behind a building or something. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. I think it's just a kind of contingent kind of fact there. Imagination always can't quite see or can't quite
00:35:46
Speaker
close, determinately, the link between perception and the object. And that's what gives it its fursona and friction. It makes me think of Stevens, right? Make the visible a little hard to see while in Stevens. But Schuyler wouldn't make anything. He's the poet who lets things happen and be. But yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, the palette of this poem is gray.
00:36:12
Speaker
And it is a color poem, but colors only stand off against that gray, the wonderful changing gray that somehow later becomes gold in Chile, or the gray hush, which is the synesthesia of gray.
00:36:27
Speaker
So it's a pastel palette. And in terms of painting, if I can go there, it's not an expertise of mine, but like one has to talk about it with Schuyler. He reviewed painting and other arts for Art News. I think the apartment where this takes place, although he doesn't tout it at all, is the one he shared with Frank O'Hara in the 1950s on 49th Street. But the painters he most loved
00:36:52
Speaker
were figural, muted painters like Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicker that don't overwhelm you with their avant-garde sensibilities, or always with color. I mean, Porter often painted in a kind of pastel palette too, and you see that on the cover of some of his books, Skyler Books.
00:37:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The sense in which the poem is rooted, well, perhaps our ability to, as we've been saying, our ability to plant ourselves on a particular date at a particular time is limited or that we're sort of frustrated as we attempt to do that. Nevertheless, the poem seems to be
00:37:41
Speaker
you know, time, time stamped for us at its beginning. But then almost immediately, that sense of time gives way to a memory that takes us to another time and I guess another place, which is less determinant. Yeah. Why it was December then.
00:38:01
Speaker
Sorry, but I'm skipping actually the green of the tulips stems and leaves like something I can't remember finding a jack in the in the pulpit, which is a Kind of what a flower a plant, right? Yeah It's a very green plant that has a bit like a tulip kind of a pugmaceous stem, but it's growing in the ground and not in a
00:38:21
Speaker
in a indoor pot. And then it has like a kind of a hood and the flower pops up out of it. So the name comes from kind of the old image of like a preacher in a pulpit up and kind of looming over. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great. So so so then, you know, if if we're
00:38:42
Speaker
if the beginning of the poem puts us in the place of the poet is maybe looking out of his window and making things out and not making things out, he can't see the sun, but he can see the light the sun makes and so on. Then suddenly we're transported back to a different place and time and a memory that's present in this poem because it gives what a kind of point of comparison to the observations that are being made now. And what do you make of that?
00:39:13
Speaker
embedded kind of memory in this poem, or at this moment in this poem, Eric. Yeah. The entree of that too through like something I can't remember. And in this regard, it's Wordsworthian. Wordsworth famously says in Tintern Abbey, the famous unremembered acts of kindness and of love. He's activated by something that he can't fully remember, but then it's so vivid.
00:39:43
Speaker
The like is interesting. You know, Schuyler is not a poet of metaphor in the same way that he's a descriptive poet, he doesn't often use metaphor. And when he uses like, and I expect we'll come back to this with like a woman who just came to her window, he often
00:40:01
Speaker
has this very low grade distinction between whether that like is assimilate and introduces a kind of figural register, or whether it's another kind of association, whether it's just additive.
00:40:18
Speaker
his poetics is very horizontal. So even though here you definitely got a moment of kind of recollection from another place far off, I think we know from sources and from I think Andrew Epstein's blog Locust Solas that he's remembering Italy, I think it's Palermo, and he had gone there on a trip with I think his lover, the pianist Arthur Gold,
00:40:42
Speaker
Um, he had been to Italy once before with, uh, in the company, mostly with Auden and Chester Kalman. Um, so pretty famous literary company, but this was a later trip. And this is a cheat, especially in a close reading podcast, but, but Epstein really helpfully says in a letter that you and I may want to look at in a bit confirmed that Skylar had gone to Italy and had come back.
00:41:08
Speaker
Relatively recently, the trip was like December, January, now it's February. And he's trying to write a poem he says in this letter. Sorry, let's back up for a second. Tell us, because it's such a fascinating letter. So the letter that Eric, maybe I can ask him to read a bit from it to us. It's collected in a volume called Just the Thing, selected letters of James Schuyler, 1951 to 1991.
00:41:35
Speaker
which I can provide a link to. And it seems as though a woman about whom we know nothing, really, at least the editor of the volume of Schuyler's letters attest to knowing nothing about her, must have written him a letter with comments and questions about this poem that Schuyler responded to at great length, except maybe didn't, because I notice also in the back of the book
00:42:04
Speaker
that the letter was found among John Ashbury's papers, and it wasn't signed, which suggests it was never sent, which is fascinating, all of which is fascinating. Because he says, I don't respond to fan mail, which is a fascinating thing for Skyler to say, because I don't think he was getting a lot, a wonderful poet, but you had to know him. And however I liked your letter,
00:42:27
Speaker
So read us maybe just a passage or two from the letter because Schuyler sort of goes on the record, as it were, about the genesis of the poem and some of what's interesting to him about it. The Oracle speaks. The Oracle speaks, that's right. I'm trying to pick just the best
00:42:45
Speaker
But it is a wonderful letter and even the fact that it's to a Miss Beatty in Vancouver really makes it specific. So asking about intention, Miss Beatty wants him to talk about religious intention and he's resisting that. However, intention needn't enter in.
00:43:01
Speaker
And if the reader sees things in a religious way and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way. I'll move on. He says, I really can't see the purification comes into it. Somebody has been reading T.S. Eliot, late T.S. Eliot, and wants to read Schuyler like that. Part of the point would seem to be that junk like the trucks and the lions and things that matter like flowers, the sea, a mother and her baby,
00:43:30
Speaker
in an ascending scale of value. That's creating a great chain of being in this poem. I hadn't thought that have each its place.
00:43:38
Speaker
and that it is the world in its impurity, which is so very beautiful and acceptable, if only because one has so little choice. That's really interesting in the larger contour of Schuyler's life, where he often had little choice over his rooms. And I'll just read a little bit on the next page. He gives the evidence that I was just bringing up. It was like February and I had recently returned from Europe, et cetera, and names all these specific places in Palermo.
00:44:06
Speaker
You knew that it was a different place because he's talking about temples. Yeah, right. And talking about- The temples we'd gone to see. And almond trees with their blossoms that are compared, I think, here figuratively to snow, not the actual snow that's in New York City, but the snow that would be a figure of imagination in Italy. And then he ends, and this is the part that I think is just really a pearl. Back in the letter, you mean?
00:44:31
Speaker
Yes, the last two short paragraphs of the letter I'll just read to close. It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is. By that, I perhaps mean that they think of it as something outside their own experience. Often a poem happens to the writer in exactly the same way that it happens to someone who reads it.
00:44:55
Speaker
So again, that kind of openness, which I was trying to suggest by saying there's just a super low gradient in terms of the privileges of sort of figuration and access in a Schuyler poem. It makes me think of another writer who amazingly evoked his
00:45:12
Speaker
poetry is like stepping into a puddle that is almost the same temperature as the day, the air of the day. It's this deliciousness of a minimal gradient of difference. And then getting back to the letter, as for stimuli, I hope you won't perceive a similar response. He's quoting the letter writer, Miss Beatty. In this instance, since what stimulated me to write it was the apathy following on the disappointment of a wasted day.
00:45:41
Speaker
Now that's a signal thing too. And then he ends, however, what seemed like waste then may have been a warming up. Who knows? Not me. Yeah, you know, it's funny is that this is not to get totally meta and peek behind the curtain here.
00:46:00
Speaker
but Eric and I had one or two false starts in trying to get this recording off the ground. We were frustrated, we were having internet connection difficulties. A warming up. Yeah, maybe that was all just a warming up. You've picked some of my favorite moments in the letter to read, Eric, but part of what might be useful to have in mind too is that Schuyler describes in the letter wanting to write one poem and failing to do so,
00:46:30
Speaker
And as he was struggling with this, he sort of looked out the window and saw, oh, this ordinary day, not the European day that I'm trying to evoke through memory, but the ordinary day before me is also worthy of my attention or has something in it for me. And to bring it back to the poem for a moment,
00:46:56
Speaker
When that memory comes up, he says, so 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 violent sea like the UN building on big evenings, green and wet while the sky turns violet. So I just want to observe a couple of things. For one thing, three consecutive lines end with the
00:47:21
Speaker
the sound, though not the word, sea. So the sun was on the sea, S-E-A. By the temples we'd gone to sea, S-E-E. One green wave moved in the violet sea, S-E-A again. So sea, sea, sea. There's something kind of dizzying about that, and it's establishing, it's sort of planting a stake for me.
00:47:48
Speaker
on the right-hand side of the margin that's like cinching all of these places together. But we're moving back and forth. We are. And so, right, so he's in New York looking out the window and remembering this trip to Europe. And then he's saying that the sea there in Europe reminded him, a wave in that sea reminded him of the UN building.
00:48:17
Speaker
It's like figure and ground keep switching places in a way. Yeah, I think that that's exactly what's happening. And again, I think he often does that. It makes me think of his
00:48:32
Speaker
background, his coextensive interest in painting. If you're looking at a painting abstract or not and just trying to describe it, to see and say things as they are, you're likely to describe the surface of it. And this gets at theoretical debates we're having in our humanities about what is surface and how to engage in ways that are less about depth and so forth.
00:48:57
Speaker
But if you're looking at a painting and describing the surface, you're apt to use metaphor right away. That's the initial experience of describing a figural work. Now, that's figural painting that Schuyler's looking at, but he's using it in terms of rhetorical and grammatical figures, and he often describes things
00:49:21
Speaker
in ways that blur metaphor and literal. He's got a later poem where he's describing a change of weather. It's his poem, The Morning of the Poem. And Schuyler's a gay man, so this is a great queer moment where he describes a change of weather in northern New York.
00:49:36
Speaker
like a gray-haired, attractive man striding through the supermarket. And that's how he introduces this almost epic simile about a change of weather. But then in the poem, Schuyler, there's no point using the poetic speaker as a crutch, cruises this guy.
00:49:58
Speaker
And that's the metaphor, but you're like, no, that was his life. That was the literal. So here, I think what you get is this sense of the merge of these levels. So if the story is the basis of the poem, he meant to write about Italy.
00:50:13
Speaker
but was in a sense like translucently, wonderfully distracted by actual New York. But then in the poem, he's writing about New York, but in a sense is sort of distracted by Italy and ends up writing about the Italy that he wasn't able to get in the previous kind of more formally conceived poem. So it's delightful. So you might think ordinarily in a poem that
00:50:42
Speaker
All right, you have the thing you're describing and then figurative language.
00:50:47
Speaker
refers to a kind of different order of reality and that those two worlds don't actually overlap if what you're doing is using metaphor maybe in particular. That's sort of like, sorry, I'm going to use maybe a jargony sounding word here, but ontologically, sort of like at the level of their reality. Being, right. At their being, right. They exist in two different places. If I say,
00:51:14
Speaker
even in a simile, if I say, Oh, my love is like a red, red rose. You know, on the one hand I've got, I understand that what I'm describing here is this woman I love, and the red, red rose is sort of present in the poem, but not in the same room as the woman. Yeah, not like the UN building. Right. And here it's as though, you know, when
00:51:40
Speaker
Like I love what you said earlier about the kind of ambiguity of the word like, which seems to just put things side by side, sort of cheek by jowl, and then they switch places and kind of flow into each other. They have this flow in commerce exactly, so that not to jump ahead, but we may be there. Yeah, we can jump a little. You know, the lines where you realize that this is something like a revelation.
00:52:10
Speaker
I can't get over how it all works in together like that word, like a woman who just came to her window and stands there filling it, jogging her baby in her arms. So I think there's a lot to say about that. I mean, I can't get over. It's, of course, a statement of wonder. It's also a statement that he can't get over it.
Themes of Wonder and Memory
00:52:32
Speaker
So one thing that attracts me about Skylar being the kind of human that I am is that he's not anti-intellectual, but he's open to the
00:52:39
Speaker
truth of the notion that the things that move us most might not be reduced to like, intellectual. And so he's just saying, I can't get over it. It's a simple thing that's mysterious and powerful, and the like there, right?
00:52:56
Speaker
like a woman who just came to her window. Well, is that a simile? He seems to sort of just be saying, and also, or into the scene, which he's just said is the all that works in together. There's this other supplement. For me there, yeah, sorry, the like there is almost like a for example. Exactly.
00:53:17
Speaker
But it's a forex example. I can't get over how it all works in together. Like take for instance, the woman who just came to her window. But she just came to her window.
00:53:27
Speaker
I'm tempted to read it as this assemblage. I think that's a word that's good for this poem because things are all different levels, right? Like to get to the end, the dust, the shape, the water, the day, those are all conceptually different levels. Those all somehow make this refulgent assemblage that is just the all that works in together.
00:53:49
Speaker
But then the line right after that, I think something else comes into the frame. It's the woman who just came to her window and that is additive. It's not elevating, it's additive. And yeah, so for example, it's not a simile. Yeah, but Missa, maybe it's worth backing up slightly and then arriving again at those crucial lines. Yeah, because
00:54:16
Speaker
you know, we have been treating the I can't get over how it all works in together as addressing what follows those lines, but they may just as plausibly address what immediately precedes them. So
00:54:34
Speaker
a gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. I love that. I just love that. Because it's like the most ordinary kind of description of traffic moving up Second Avenue, which, you know, if you're right, and I think you are about where exactly Skyler is in Manhattan here, you know, Second Avenue does have a kind of gradient to it there. So from his vantage, it might look like, you know, the trucks are moving up
00:55:05
Speaker
the avenue and just sort of disappearing. They're just line break going over the hill, right? And there's this lovely kind of mimetic moment wherein Jammet is doing a kind of thing like the trucks are. You have to look over the line to see. Yeah. The green leaves of the tulips on my desk like, there it is, like grass light on flesh. What an image that is. Wow. What is grass light?
00:55:34
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I'm back to, um, I keep referring to poems that we've had on the podcast already. I'm back to Marvell and the garden, like a green thought and a green shade. I picture the Whitmanic low thing on the grass. If you get low, the grass is semi translucent, but you know, and it's flesh of course, but to call it grass light. Like grass light on flesh and a green copper steeple.
00:56:00
Speaker
So that's a copper steeple that has tarnished or whatever, right? Yeah, patina. And he's changing his perspective from up high. I forget what floor they're on. Actually, I think it was
00:56:15
Speaker
Yeah, whatever. I forgot what floor they're on, but he's changing his angle of vision throughout the poem. I actually, to take a second, because I know we don't have a lot of time. We have time. I'm not a New Yorker. Unless you don't have time. No, I do. I'm not a New Yorker, but I was just down after the pandemic for only the first or second time.
00:56:36
Speaker
And I feel like that description of Second Avenue is descriptively brilliant. As you're pointing out, my sense of walking New York, which I love to do, is that walking north-south is kind of like walking up a very low-rise mountain. You're always walking uphill or downhill.
00:56:51
Speaker
And then walking east-west, it's sort of like there are big swells, almost like it's a sea, and things kind of disappear. And he's kind of capturing, well, of course, the nature of New York, right? This is a nature poem. It's an urban nature poem or urban eclogue.
00:57:08
Speaker
And even the boxy trucks are almost like the caravels of a heart crane poem, kind of moving up and down. And of course, you know, I think others have pointed this out, like this is a poem of description and maybe simile, or invites you to think in terms of simile, but the boxy trucks are kind of a vehicle that invites metaphorical reflections in the most humdrum way, because what metaphor does is transport through the vehicle of trope.
00:57:37
Speaker
Well, with that in mind, I can't get over, which also, sorry, so the full phrase is, I can't get over how it all works in together. But in is interesting to me, but maybe come back to that. I can't get over, so the line break comes after the word over.
00:57:56
Speaker
Um, so that at least for the moment we have kind of isolated as a bit of language, I can't get over. I like how you link that back to the hill. Yeah. Well that, but also it, you know, it reminds me of like, well, if the trucks are, you know, vehicles that are transporting
00:58:15
Speaker
you know, things, tenors, their own tenors from here, from here to there. Skyler is doing work. Yeah. But Skyler is instead, you know, in his apartment and looking at things outside, but he's, um, he can't get over to what he sees, you know, like he, he's, um, he's stuck as an observer.
00:58:42
Speaker
Yes, writing a window poem, which he always does. Yeah. What I see out the window poem. Yeah, but not. But I feel like you're saying something. I feel like you're saying something as a concession. This is very Skylarian as a as a modesty trope, which is in fact like a brilliant big insight, which is that Skylar not getting over into the realm of metaphor is him at the very least.
00:59:10
Speaker
establishing where he is as a poet, which is his great, and people have tried, impossible to repeat feat. That Schuyler's, quote unquote, literalism of the imagination or scriptimism or his dwelling with the ready to hand there is maybe expressed as a failure, but that failure is wonderment. It's the poem.
00:59:38
Speaker
And maybe, I mean, you were the one who brought up Schuyler's, you know, queer, you know, the idea of the sort of queer poetics too. I'm always struck here by, and especially the way he describes it in that letter as like the, the highest rung on the, you know, he said that what was the phrase he used? These are in ascending order of importance. That's close enough. It's amazing that he says that. I'm shocked that he says that.
01:00:05
Speaker
The thing then at the top of that chain is the woman holding the baby, right? Which is also a scene he can't get over into. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a scene of reproduction or of, you know,
01:00:33
Speaker
of generational futurity or of intergenerational reproduction, rather, that is something he's observing, but apart from something that he can't get over into, but that he also can't get over in the initial sense, which, like I should just say,
01:00:59
Speaker
The thing that I was claiming that was dependent on the line break coming after over, I think is an interesting but secondary kind of reading. I mean, I think that the primary sense of that line is like, yeah, I can't get over it. It's wowing me or it's reducing me to
01:01:16
Speaker
But he always uses idioms with this kind of bivalency, like with the description in the first part of the poem, I noticed that he uses the phrase out of the blue looking pink in the light. Well, out of the blue there is actually, I think, used idiomatically, but it gains this richness. Meaning like out of nowhere, right? Yeah, and it gains a kind of wit because you're expecting him to be describing a color palette.
01:01:43
Speaker
So I can't get over, you know, we would paraphrase as I don't know, it's inexpressibly wonderful to me. You can't really say it better. But I, I think Skylar invites us to play with idioms with the kind of resourceful seriousness like you're doing. It also means I can't get over something means I'm stuck there. Right. It means like I can't move past it. Yeah. When do we say we can't get over something? We can't get over
01:02:13
Speaker
you know, first love, right? Or a heartbreak or something, right? Or you can't get over the loss of something. That is, it's a kind of
01:02:29
Speaker
uh stuckness we feel against our perception that time is moving along or wants us to be moving along but we've as it were sort of gotten stuck on something that we can't move past so you're offering a reading or at least an attitude at this moment or the poem where that's an impasse and i i think that's i you know it's kind of a fascinating blindsiding read i i
01:02:56
Speaker
Sorry. No, no, no. I'm thinking of other lines in Skylar. I want to hold on because I am a romantic. I am a romanticist because I am a romantic. I mean, romantic is sort of to claim as much as you can and meet reality when it hits you in the face.
01:03:14
Speaker
He has a moment later, and I think it's in the Crystal Lithium where he describes, this is his first Longish poem. It's not very long, like five pages, where he describes another such moment of wonderment, and the context is he's describing a petroleum slick kind of image, and then says it's like the person you love saying the one thing that is irreversible, unanticipated, and then goes on doing the dishes.
01:03:44
Speaker
And that makes me vibe with what you're saying, because it feels like it could be traumatic, like I can't get over impasse. But again, it has this quality of wonder, like there isn't anything further for a poem to get at is my feeling, that it is maybe not accelerating on or heightening on to anything further, but that there isn't anything more for a poem to process. The hardest thing is to process just that for what it is.
01:04:13
Speaker
But I certainly agree that the image of the woman with the baby jogging the baby in her arms is a really striking one. She's so far off. She's so far off. Is it the light that makes the baby pink? Yeah. So there's a distance.
01:04:30
Speaker
The reading I would want to try is that it's already all working in together and into that kind of magically. Another thing comes, but that's still part of the all. And that the woman with the baby is more of a supplement than a sort of necessity. And that gives a space where the kind of heteronormative reading that somehow he's
01:04:50
Speaker
out of that picture is not the predominant one, that it's an assemblage and not a hierarchy, but that letter we've read in evidence. I also think of Stevens, and I don't want to make this intertextual, but in the Aurora's of Autumn, which is relatively recent, Stevens has Wallace Stevens. You mean recent to the composition of this poem. Yeah, like 10 years before. Right.
01:05:18
Speaker
What is it? The mother's face, the purpose of the poem fills the room, he says. And if I'm thinking of that, because I do feel like this poem is in dialogue with Stephen. Stephen says in his great short, short poem, The Poems of Our Climate, which is a poem about the days of winter when the afternoons come back. When afternoons return. And then he says, one desires so much more. Well, Skyler, I think, is saying, you know, this is enough.
01:05:48
Speaker
And this is enough. Yeah, this is enough. And the Stevens poem I just referenced, the poems of our climate, also starts famously with an image of flowers and a very kind of... Pink carnations, yeah. Yeah, a very kind of still life image which is resonant with this poem. But then if that is something we can play with,
01:06:08
Speaker
This isn't the mother's face, the purpose of the poem, filling the room. It's the silhouette. It's at a distance. It's kind of handled in a painterly way. And the relationship is not one that at least doesn't tempt me to a kind of psychoanalytical or other reading, but is more like a painterly compositional reading where the mother jogging the baby become an assemblage. Along with all these other things, which are
01:06:35
Speaker
non-human, different in scale, different in their ontology. Two dog-sized lions face each other at the corners of a roof. Dog-sized lions. And even the light. We think of babies as healthy and pink, and here it's like, is it the light that makes the baby pink? So the baby's participating in the poem's subject matter of the quality of light rather than in biological, human, whatever.
01:07:04
Speaker
Right. Right. Right. It's like babies conditioned by the quality of the light, just like everything else. Yeah, right. Like the tulips are or like like anything else's. So you've written something that I'm not going to try to quote it precisely here, but I want to get the gist of the idea because I think it's relevant to this moment. Which is that
01:07:28
Speaker
Schuyler is an ekphrastic poet. So that's a term for those who don't know ekphrasis or would be the noun and you can refer to an ekphrastic poet or an ekphrastic poem. An ekphrastic poem is a poem that describes
01:07:44
Speaker
a work of visual art, often a painting or a sculpture, in which there's often a kind of implied or sometimes explicit kind of rivalry or interest in the different
01:08:01
Speaker
affordances to use a word of our time that poetry and visual arts have and so on. So there are Schuyler poems that describe paintings, but I think you mean something more than that, which is that it's as though Schuyler is describing a painting. Have I got this right, Eric? It's as though Schuyler is describing a painting, even when what he's describing is what he sees out the window.
01:08:27
Speaker
It's a composition of the ordinary and the everyday. He was asked, because of course, the New York School really comes from the painters and then the poets have to respond to it. And this poem, February, appeared in a famous anthology edited by Donald Allen, later O'Hara's editor and other great writers.
01:08:48
Speaker
And it was one of only four poems published in that grouping. And then along with that, Alan really hectored people to write to give him prose kind of manifesto bits. And so O'Hara, again, Schuyler's roommate when he's writing this, gives him his famous Personism essay. I think that's when that comes out.
01:09:06
Speaker
And Schuyler writes this Poets and Painters Overture, I think he calls it. And he begins by saying, basically, if you're living in New York, you exist in this sort of crash of surf in which we all scramble, he says. And that's the painters of the day, the abstract expressionists, the New York school painters.
01:09:30
Speaker
I think Schuyler writes Echphrasis without even necessarily looking at a framed painting and is thinking about composition in terms of the unit of the day. He's a very diurnal poet, again, in that regard like Wordsworth rolled around in Earth's diurnal course. Without ever seeking stasis or anything, I think he's writing Echphrasis without putting a frame on reality first.
01:09:58
Speaker
So, you know, poetry is always trying to describe like what feeling is like, what reality is like. You know, it's really the least like gussied up sophisticated way to talk about poetry. And I think Schuyler celebrated rightly for kind of two reasons that go into that. One, he does seem to really convey in a kind of just rightness for those that enjoy his poetry, what a thing is like.
01:10:24
Speaker
And that could get kind of philosophical and out of hand and hard to pin down, but then he's always also indicating what it is, things as they are. And it's the play of those two things, one that seems super literal and just kind of pointing to it, indicating that the world is there, that it is, that we should attend to it. And the other
01:10:44
Speaker
evoking what it's like. And then that's the end of the poem. There's no frame around the it's. So in a painting, the it's is just a painting and no matter how complex it is, you can frame it, but there's no frame around the it's in the Schuyler poem.
01:10:58
Speaker
But OK, so put it put a pin in that for a second, because I want to I want to conclude our discussion by talking about the those last four lines of the poem that all begin with the word its I.T. apostrophe s. But before we get there, let me just sort of make an observation or ask you a question about something you said.
01:11:25
Speaker
just that, well, if I'm a poet and I'm describing a painting, or I'm describing, and let's say it's a figurative painting, it's a representational painting, it's, you know, and I'm describing the scene that's depicted in it. Well, in one sense, I can, I can describe the,
01:11:49
Speaker
the landscape and the figures I see in the painting and the, or if it's a still life, I can describe the pear and the skull and the whatever else it is. Right. But it's, but also everything I'm describing is oil paint or whatever, whatever the medium is. Right. Which means that
01:12:13
Speaker
even if in the painting I've got a piece of fruit and a bit of sky out the window, they're made of the same stuff. And somehow that flattens the kind of
01:12:29
Speaker
ontological hierarchy or the difference, you know, the differences in the things that are being represented. So if I'm a poet now like Schuyler, maybe he's sort of an ekphrastic poet
01:12:47
Speaker
even when I'm not describing a painting, then maybe that's just another way of describing what we were talking about earlier, which is his kind of muted version of what figurative language is doing, that when one thing is like another thing, it's not pulling something in from a separate realm. It's just kind of, it's somehow letting those two things exist together in the same space, which is the space of the poem.
01:13:16
Speaker
you know, or the space of the image that Schuyler has in mind that the poem is then recording or describing. But it's already been kind of flattened for him in his mind or something, usefully. I don't mean flattened in a kind of pejorative sense. I mean like,
01:13:37
Speaker
It's all fit together, how it all works in together. Yeah. I think there are a variety of ways to go with that. The formal one would be to say it all comes together in a poem. Phenomenological ones could just say it all comes together, as you pointed out earlier, with the confirmation or configuration of the perceiver and
01:14:02
Speaker
But yes, I agree. And I guess I'm going all Stevens in this reading of the poem. But like this thing that you said about the the paint, you know, the technique, the but the paint is is what Stevens would call the basic slate, the universal hue. Right. Like, you know, representation doesn't change the level of that. And, you know, I think this this poem gets closer to that still life composition, certainly.
Schuyler's Language and Style
01:14:33
Speaker
but still escapes it. And the it's, I think, suggests that stuttering and a kind of escape of the closure of composition as he tries to get at the thing. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog sized lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
01:15:02
Speaker
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.
01:15:16
Speaker
Yeah, help us notice, Eric, what you're noticing in those itses. Oh gosh. It's something to do with what you've written about as like, and I know this is in part an idea that you're developing from someone whom we named at the beginning of this. My teacher. Episode, your teacher, Paul Fry, something to do with the
01:15:43
Speaker
a kind of poetry or a mode that poetry can have that's about indication or something Paul Fry calls the ostensive moment in poetry. So I remember listening to Paul talk about the ostensive moment, you know, when I was in grad school and I remember sometimes thinking
01:16:09
Speaker
Oh my God, this is exactly what I'm interested in. It's so perfect. And then I remember there being other times where I felt totally flummoxed and like I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I think the flailing is internal to the understanding. So can you help us at the end of this conversation, you know, maybe using these lines as an occasion
01:16:34
Speaker
Because I think you're interested in them for some of the same reason I am. And actually, I'm sort of stalling here to give you a chance to think about your line of attack. But also, I just want to say this. I've been wanting to say it. Like I said, I fell for Skyler pretty hard maybe. It feels to me like it happened right when the pandemic started. That's when I really kind of went all in.
01:17:06
Speaker
Maybe that's not quite right, but anyway, that's my memory of it now. And it's hard for me to say, it has been hard for me to say sometimes like, to explain to somebody else what it is I love.
01:17:26
Speaker
I find that more than with other poems I love, what I want to do is just read a Schuyler poem to someone and say, like, point at it and say, you know? And so I'm not sure how eloquent I can be about what it is in this poem, but maybe that's sort of the point. This isn't an eloquent poem, though. Triple C, C-C-C. Three of those in a row hasn't been good poetry since Alexander Pope.
01:17:53
Speaker
I mean, I get the idea that he likes the way Tulip sounds when he says it, and that it has something to do with his mouth. I think he likes the turgor. Tulip stems are really something, right? They're not only green, they are upright.
01:18:18
Speaker
I've had this theory about him to life, which is this long poem that I love and that I know you love. It's a poem that sort of narrates the progress of spring.
01:18:32
Speaker
as he walks around. Yeah, it begins in March. May mutters why ask questions or what are the questions you wish to ask. So it's almost him to life season everyone, but not quite yet.
01:18:48
Speaker
But I've had this theory that he likes the way the word for Scythia sounds when he says it, and so he wants to get it into poems, you know? But okay, so I've stalled long enough. What's going on with those final four instances, and what does it have to do with Schuyler's interest, or maybe that's the wrong word, but his tendency
01:19:11
Speaker
for poetry to be indicative. And what does any of that have to do with this idea of the ostensive moment? I will try to say something on that, keeping in mind that Skylar, I think, is doing it. But I should give evidence for that. I want to rest with the poem. So Paul Fry, my mentor,
01:19:34
Speaker
in wars and your teacher, I think in ways that percolate through too, defines the ostensive moment in his book of defensive poetry from the 1990s.
01:19:46
Speaker
as the indicative gesture, so indicating toward reality, which precedes and underlies the construction of meaning. So it's not saying language can be meaning free, but that there's this gesture that I agree you kind of only have to get through often through befuddlement and excessive labor.
01:20:06
Speaker
that can show indication. And it's a moment that precedes that, in other words, meaning is going to happen. Not in a temporal sense. Paul's careful to say it's actually kind of a decadent, I'm tempted to say, kind of queer, wonderfully belated, rich moment that we might associate more with decadence than with origins or anything like that. I think that's a good way to start. But it's a moment in the philosophical sense that
01:20:35
Speaker
What does that mean, a moment in the philosophical sense? It's prior to the construction of meaning. It shows, like you said, the availability of language, the materiality of language, the co-presence of the human and their language, maybe the two lips, these affordances that sort of make us beings that can reveal not meaning, but our being here.
Final Lines and Conclusion
01:21:00
Speaker
in language, right? And I mean, again, that's what I would throw back to the image of the woman, like it's not so much the primacy of meaning, but the being there together.
01:21:09
Speaker
So the it's, it's the barest of subject verb, right? It is the copula. It is just, it is. So there's no figuration at all. And yet you feel like to read that he's bringing in very strong metaphor or something, but the grammar is just pure statement.
01:21:33
Speaker
you know, it's, it's, it's the Ilja in, you know, French. It's the thing Beckett gets at when he says, what is it at the end of the Unnameable? Like it is midnight, it is raining. It is not midnight. You know, like he's, he's, he's, he's really playing with that basic conjunction of the sentence. Is there some idiomatic sense in which what he's doing in that, in that those final four lines is that there's like a kind of implied
01:22:01
Speaker
thought that precedes them, which is
01:22:08
Speaker
I don't know, I'm too tired right now to put it out there, but something like this is amazing. What's amazing about it? I'll tell you, it's this, it's this, it's this. It is that because the part we haven't talked about, and I haven't seen other people talk about it exactly, is the how. I can't get over how it all works in together. So the how is the whatever, interrogative adverb or whatever how is.
01:22:32
Speaker
that would convey the work of how it all works in together. And this is kind of, yeah, picking up on that, I think. How does it all work in together? I'll tell you how. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips. I mean, maybe. Yeah, the list isn't determinative, right? It doesn't add up as in a recipe. But that's why I think it's so important that all the things are so different.
01:23:01
Speaker
yellow dust. It's interesting that it's dust and not pollen. It's not that regenerative shape. A totally different kind of order of thing. If you're a Plato, you don't like to put dust next to shape and build that. It's the water that lies in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
01:23:19
Speaker
And that kind of takes the drinking glass from some, I don't know, more privileged container to just this contingent thing. The tulips are in, right? It's been repurposed. Yeah. And then it's this category which
01:23:35
Speaker
it's the day, the category of the diurnal, the quotidian of the weather, of time. And I did read, I think that in his blog, Epstein points this out that the poem came to Schuyler under the title of a day like any other. So had he
01:23:59
Speaker
titled at that, this would be the moment where the kind of ringer of that kind of comes through and February ends and whether it's the 28th or the 29th, it's a day like any other. Well, and it occurs to me also that if at the beginning of the
01:24:13
Speaker
sort of implied articulating of this poem. It's 5 p.m. that maybe by the end of it, it's not quite the day anymore. You know, it's evening now or something. Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. All right, Eric, this has been such a fun, enlivening, and beautiful conversation for me, and I hope for other people too. And I think
01:24:36
Speaker
One thing that I would appreciate hearing just before we finish, unless you have any last notes you want to offer before we get here, is to hear the poem one more time. I won't interrupt, even though I'll want to say, oh, that's great. To hear the poem one more time, maybe you can read it to us this time as a way to say goodbye. I would be honored to, glad to.
01:25:04
Speaker
I'm changing to my clean copy. February. 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 5pm on the day before March 1st.
01:25:25
Speaker
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.
01:25:48
Speaker
green and wet while the sky turns violet. A few almond trees add 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.
01:26:13
Speaker
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?
01:26:43
Speaker
I can see the little fists and the rocking horse motion of her breasts. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog-sized 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.
01:27:13
Speaker
Well, Eric Lindstrom, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure, thank you. Yeah, thank you listeners for making it with us. Yeah, I'm struck in through. I have no idea. It's like a class of mine.
01:27:29
Speaker
I have no idea. I have to say what we sound like, how punch drunk we might sound at this hour. It's now it's after midnight. And I hope, if nothing else, that what's audible to the rest of you is how much we love this poem and this poet and talking to each other. Thank you all very much, everyone.
01:27:56
Speaker
Be well and we'll have another episode for you soon.