The Morning of the Poem
by James Schuyler
Summary
The Morning of the Poem takes its shape from a single long poem that fills most of the book, a day by day record James Schuyler kept from his bedroom, moving through weather, the paintings and painters he thought about, letters from friends, and the slow business of getting older. The poem runs for dozens of pages without a plot to drive it forward. Instead it accumulates: what the sky looked like that morning, a memory of a friend, a line from a letter, a joke, laid down more or less in the order they occurred to him. Shorter poems fill out the rest of the collection, working the same way in miniature, a few lines given to a single observed thing, a garden, a room, a passing mood, treated with the same unhurried attention the title poem gives to an entire season.
Schuyler writes in a loose, conversational line that reads closer to talk than to conventional verse, and he moves by association rather than argument, letting one observation lead to the next without explaining the connection. He had spent years working as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art before turning fully to poetry, and that training shows in how precisely he names color, light, and composition even in a poem about nothing more dramatic than a morning at home. He also credited his early years as W. H. Auden's secretary with teaching him what he did not want: Auden's elaborate formal schemes struck him as confining, and the loose, prose like line of The Morning of the Poem reads as a direct answer to that formalism.
Reading it means giving up on momentum and accepting the pace of an actual morning, actual weather, an actual friendship, rather than a story compressed for effect. It suits a reader drawn to poetry of close, patient noticing, the kind that finds a whole life's worth of feeling in a description of rain on a window, and it rewards anyone willing to read a long poem the way Schuyler wrote it, a little at a time, without hurrying toward an ending.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Schuyler the 1981 Prize for Poetry for The Morning of the Poem, choosing it over two finalists, Richard Hugo's The Right Madness on Skye and Mark Strand's own Selected Poems, eighteen years before Strand would win the prize himself for Blizzard of One. Schuyler belonged to the loose group of poets known as the New York School, alongside John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, though he published far less often than they did and worked for years at the Museum of Modern Art before poetry became his main occupation.
Schuyler's poems withhold their real subject until exactly the right moment to reveal it, a habit that fits the patient unfolding of The Morning of the Poem. Schuyler received the Whiting Award in 1985, later recognition for a body of work that by then included the title poem, widely counted among the best long poems of the postmodern period. He died in Manhattan in 1991 after a stroke.