“I love all beauteous things, I seek and adore them...” “No wonder the old grouch got to be such a crab. He was travel tired: footsore, weary and blue.” “Footsore? English shoes really are very well made.

 

“It’s hard to believe it wasn’t built to look that way,” Alice said, turning her back on the Forum. “Listen, Marshall, I want you to write to them about that furnace. I refuse to spend another winter like the last one.”

on Greenwich Avenue 
staring down Jane Street 
into the sunset 

Look, Mitterand baby, your telegram
of condolence to Yves
Montand tells it like it is

. . . and the curtain rose in that theatre so long ago
and the music is playing
the first song I fell in

are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass 
too quickly 
out of breath. Don’t dwell on the grave which yawns for  

In the garden. Sun
on the river
flashing past. I

Dear Kenward,
                              What a pearl
of a letter knife. It’s just

an orange devours
the crusts of clouds and you,
getting up, put on

Then I do not know what
to paste next in the
Trash Book: grass, pretending

twas the night before Columbus Day, ’70
and the humidity gave a semblance
of warmth to a day not unchilly, even somewhat clammy.

The sky is pitiless. I beg
your pardon? OK then
the sky is pitted. The yard

A thin brown stain 
down the white brick wall 
I guess yes 

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach
Eye-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all

In northwest Worcestershire 
in eighteen-sixty 
Samuel Dawkes installed 

It’s time again. 
Tear up the violets 
and plant something more difficult to grow. 

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late

“The Dog Wants His Dinner,” a poem by James Schuyler, first appeared in our Winter 1972 issue; it’s part of his collection The Crystal Lithium. Schuyler was born on this day in 1923. He died in 1991. for Clark CoolidgeThe sky is pitiless. I beg
your p…

In bohemian postwar Manhattan, poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch) naturally gravitated to painters (Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers) whose work they appreciated on its own terms. Certain poets were lauded for their perceptive, unbiased eye; some painters instinctively sensed a resonant poem. Painter Helen Frankenthaler and poet James Schuyler had such a mutual appreciation. Their run-in during the 1954 Venice Biennale was memorable enough to open Schuyler’s poem “Torcello” (they must have met previously to have recognized each other, though it is unclear when). In any case, they kept circling: Schuyler reviewed Frankenthaler’s shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1957 and at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1960.