Pearl Without Price, First the worst: your five dollar check bounced. N'importe. I made it good, and you can pay me back when . . . the primroses come back to 49th Street. Poet Mark Ford has described the letters of James Schuyler as "witty, graceful, sophisticated, and gossipy." Particularly poignant are these Schuyler letters to fellow poet Frank O'Hara. Entertaining and transcendently poetic, they are the portrait of a friendship between two great New York School poets.
A landmark work of cultural history that tells the story of how four young poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world. Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry. A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School. The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.
The search for ways to contain the evanescence, fragility and ephemeral beauty of the moment has preoccupied lyric poets from Catullus and Herrick to James Schuyler. For Schuyler, indeed, discovering and glowing in the ineffable contingency of the moment was both theme and goal. Nowhere in his work is this more true than in that marvelous celebration of the miracle of impermanence, his remarkable Diary, here made available in full for the first time. "The Diary", editor Nathan Kernan has noted, "is a work of art; it is, in a large sense, a poem. Stylistically it is of a piece with Schuyler's poems: it is cut from the same cloth, or is, in places, the cloth from which the poems were cut... The Diary's peculiar combination of fragment, meticulous description, literary allusion, commonplace book and remembrance is beautiful in its own right, and very much a window into the mind that wrote the poems". Nathan Kernan's extremely thoughtful, scrupulous and informed editing provides this long-awaited volume a scholarly care it deserves. Kernan's editorial glosses and biographical sketches on the cast of characters, placing Schuyler in a rich social context of poets, artists and friends, provide what amounts to a handy thumbnail history of the New York School.
An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetry Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "To the Film Industry in Crisis," "In Memory of My Feelings," "Having a Coke with You," and the famous Lunch Poems—so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman. Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other—an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.
James Schuyler's utterly original What's for Dinner? features a cast of characters who appear to have escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting to run amok. In tones that are variously droll, deadpan, and lyrical, Schuyler tells a story that revolves around three small-town American households. The Delehanteys are an old-fashioned Catholic family whose twin teenage boys are getting completely out of hand, no matter that their father is hardly one to spare the rod. Childless Norris and Lottie Taylor have been happily married for years, even as Lottie has been slowly drinking herself to death. Mag, a recent widow, is on the prowl for love. Retreating to an institution to dry out, Lottie finds herself caught up in a curious comedy of group therapy manners. At the same time, however, she begins an ascent from the depths of despair—illuminated with the odd grace and humor that readers of Schuyler's masterful poetry know so well—to a new understanding, that will turn her into an improbable redeemer within an unlikely world. What's for Dinner? is among the most delightful and unusual works of American literature. Charming and dark, off-kilter but pedestrian, mercurial yet matter-of-fact, Schuyler's novel is an alluring invention that captures both the fragility and the tenacity of ordinary life.
"The flowers, trees, birds, clouds, and effects of light that Schuyler describes with such élan, even if only glimpsed from the window of his apartment, could easily be transposed to the poetry written in Japan or Persia many centuries ago. Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost to pass unnoticed, link his verse to other and larger traditions, as in this reflection on Baudelaire – clearly intended as an artistic credo of sorts ..." - Open Letters Monthly
This updated edition of James Schuyler's letters to three dozen intimates, published on the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth, offers delicious insights into the vital lives, friendships, and sensibilities that sprang from the influential New York School. On New York in the summertime: "Makes me think Thoreau was right and Whitman was wrong." On conducting himself post-breakup: "I would like to do it with as much silence and grace as a loose tongue and a trick knee permit." On his sister-in-law's antipathy toward the town beatnik: "His crimes against society seem to consist of long hair, tight pants and a Honda--I'm not sure which she minds most." Such effervescent and scathing takes on life, nature, love, and art are on joyous display in James Schuyler's letters to John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Barbara Guest, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, and many more. They paint an indelible picture of a charmingly self-deprecating gentleman with a deliciously wicked tongue. "Jimmy wrote letters for the most civilized of reasons," a friend of his once said: "to inform and to entertain." And that they do, in inimitable style. Peppering his aperçus with the occasional "tout de sweetie" and "pet noire," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Morning of the Poem holds forth on everything from Dante and Delacroix to travel and gardening to the delicate workings of his own poems and those of others. While his tone ranges from the lightly graceful to the racily profane, each letter is exquisitely tuned to its recipient. And they have only grown more savory and valuable with time.
