James Schuyler's Poems an Urgent Morning Experience
We're a day late but who cares! At Locus Solus, Andrew Epstein writes "James Schuyler’s 'June 30, 1974' and the Poetics of Everyday Life," which looks at Schuyler's poem, written 42 years ago yesterday.
In an essay on 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.”
Before closing, I would like to consider briefly another hymn to an ordinary morning, Schuyler’s “June 30, 1974” (Collected, 228). 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.
Such a great post. More here, and in Epstein's new book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, pictured above.