James Schuyler – Collected Poems

I first encountered James Schuyler in the Fall of 2026 during a NY School Poets seminar class with Dr. Ben Lee at the University of Tennessee.

Related reading: Epstein, Andrew. “Each Day So Different, Yet So Alike”: James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday.” Attention Equals Life (2016)

“Freely Espousing”

Observations from the room
- where does the news / collage come from
- what is going on with he quotations, italics, found language

Observations from me
- complete whimsy and coincidence: at my first reading of this poem, the SS United States is scheduled for sinking in a few weeks to serve as an artificial reef off the coast of Destin

”February”

Observations from the room
- excellent insight from Zuleyha: The repetitive “i can’t” until the final “I can” perhaps suggesting something about the search for attention or something like a noticing or an intention.
Coincidental kinship

Observations from me
- there is a difference in the way I read the poem using the cues on the page and the way Schuyler reads it himself in the recording. This has me think more about the mediation of the poem between the poet, poem, and reader.
- The “how it all works together” is followed by images of objects that are not functioning inside their own typical function

”Buried at Springs”

“The Crystal Lithium”

Observations from the room
- intimacy of criticism: this is an interesting idea to me. When we have an idea of what it means to criticize, to be critized; who gets to do that and what changes based on the intimacy level of those who are doing it?
Observerations from me:
- what the author wil tell us and not tell us – if there are some (one?) speaker tag, what do we make of the quotations without speaker tags? When the quotations are melded, how do we read that? Is it dialogue, snippets, conversations with oneself? I tend to value in all these ideas.

“The Bluet”

Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993. Noonday Press, 1995. 1998 printing.

Reader Interactions