Review: Anthony Domestico on James Schuyler
Finding a still place in a disordered life
The New York School poet James Schuyler wrote his first great poem, “Salute,” in 1951 during a stay in Payne Whitney Westchester, a psychiatric clinic in White Plains, New York. Like much of Schuyler’s best work, “Salute” is somehow both a marvel of linguistic compression (no line exceeds seven syllables) and an exercise in formal expansiveness (at fifteen lines, the poem is a slightly stretched-out sonnet).
Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.
Despite the biographical context, or perhaps because of it, the poem seems to achieve a remarkable stability. The language is solid and sturdy; we can’t help but feel that the speaker’s soul is, too, at least for the moment. In the past, the speaker didn’t gather and name the plants he had planned to. Now, in writing “Salute,” he has, and that, it seems, is enough: enough to make him well, enough to make him a poet. It’s as if, in finding the right aesthetic form, Schuyler had been able to hold off psychic disorder. (Shortly before composing “Salute,” he was declaring that he was Jesus Christ and that the end of the world was nigh.)
So much of “Salute” lies in its line breaks. The poem begins with the declaration, “Past is past”: what has happened is cordoned off, safely or sadly or a little bit of both, from what is happening now. The second appearance of this assertion, though, has the hiccup of a line break: “Past / is past.” As the eye moves from one enjambed line to the next, we hesitate. Maybe the past isn’t quite as past as we thought or hoped; maybe the stability achieved through writing will wilt like the clover. No modern poet considered temporal experience more interestingly than Schuyler. “I / started this poem in August and here it is September / nineteenth,” he writes in “A few days,” and duration isn’t just a topic of Schuyler’s poems but part of their texture. His examination of how time both grounds and eludes us already can be seen in “Salute.” “Past is past” sounds definitive. “Past / is past” sounds uncertain.
