Life, Death and Other Dreams
“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.
“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
In the garden. Sun
on the river
flashing past. I
Dear Kenward,
What a pearl
of a letter knife. It’s just
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
A thin brown stain
down the white brick wall
I guess yes
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
In northwest Worcestershire
in eighteen-sixty
Samuel Dawkes installed
It’s time again.
Tear up the violets
and plant something more difficult to grow.
“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.