Abstract
This chapter explores James Schuyler’s idiosyncratic use of the parenthesis as a grammatical-rhetorical device capable of opening up syntactic space and producing haptic engagements with the text. Comparing Schuyler’s use of the bracket with his poetic rendering of windows, I argue that through the parenthesis Schuyler translates something of his precarious existence into his poems. Yet, rather than read precarity as a necessarily negative state, I suggest that Schuyler’s parenthetical poems transform it into a utopian site of queer futurity, which is activated through openings or apertures into what Lauren Berlant calls the ‘precarious present’. As I demonstrate, in the attempt to locate the body in the spaces created through parenthetical punctuation, Schuyler’s poems ask the reader to think about how and where we position our bodies, both in the constructed spaces of the built environment and in relation to the poetic text.
Int: Did your parents encourage you to write?
JS: No, I had wanted to be an architect rather than a writer.
—‘An Interview with James Schuyler’, 1993.
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Notes
- 1.
James Schuyler, The Diary of James Schuyler, ed. Nathan Kernan (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), p. 175.
- 2.
Barbara Guest, ‘James Schuyler: The Vuillard of Us’, undated, Barbara Guest Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 1185, Series II, Box: 84, Folder: 1482, p2.
- 3.
‘vagary, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/221010?rskey=L7HgTL&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed 11 April 2023.
- 4.
I adapt this phrase from Howard Moss who notes that the colon is ‘the poet’s favourite device’, Howard Moss, ‘James Schuyler: Whatever Is Moving’ in The American Poetry Review Vol 10, No. 3 (May/June 1981): p. 15. In The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman also comments on Schuyler’s use of the colon, when he notes that: ‘Only A. R. Ammons among contemporary poets has relied so heavily on the colon as a means of emphasizing the connections between clauses in constant postponement of closure’, D. Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), p. 246. The parenthesis, however, is overlooked in almost every study of Schuyler’s work.
- 5.
‘vagary, n.’, OED Online.
- 6.
As Anne Porter remarked: ‘Jimmy came for a visit and stayed 11 years’. Quoted in: Timothy Gray, ‘New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher’ in Genre 33: 2 (1 June 2000): p. 175.
- 7.
Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 81.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 9.
Schuyler, The Diary of James Schuyler, pp. 27; 277.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 11.
I discuss Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘impasse’ and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ‘straight time’ in greater detail towards the end of this chapter.
- 12.
John Wilkinson, ‘Jim the Jerk: Bathos and Loveliness in the Poetry of James Schuyler’ in On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, eds. Sara Crangle & Peter Nicholls (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), p. 73.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Mark Silverberg, ‘James Schuyler’s Poetics of Indolence’ in Literary Imagination Vol. 11, No. 1 (2008): p. 28.
- 15.
See: Timothy Gray, Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010).
- 16.
Properly speaking, the term ‘parenthesis’ refers to ‘A word, clause, or sentence inserted as an explanation, aside, or afterthought into a passage with which it has not necessarily any grammatical connection’ (OED). The grammatical marks that surround this afterthought can differ but, for the purposes of this chapter, I take a parenthesis to be the text contained within round brackets or ‘lunulae’, properly termed.
- 17.
Kernan in The Diary of James Schuyler, p. 17.
- 18.
John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 242.
- 19.
Robert Grant Williams, ‘Reading the Parenthesis’ in SubStance Vol. 22, No. 1, Issue 70 (1993): p. 56.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 58.
- 22.
Lennard, But I Digress, p. 243.
- 23.
Williams, ‘Reading the Parenthesis’, p. 64.
- 24.
Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 239. For more on the vexed influence that Olson had on New York School poets, see Chap. 1, pp. 35–36.
- 25.
In relation to mental health, there is a point to be made about the term ‘hinged’—or, rather, ‘unhinged’—in the work of a poet who sometimes removes brackets from their hinges through his typical ‘failure to close parentheses’. David Bradshaw makes a similar point in his introduction to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway—another writer attuned to the subtleties of the parenthesis, and a writer whom Schuyler loved. Bradshaw writes that ‘the reference to taking doors off their hinges in the second and third lines of the novel most evidently relates to the preparations for Clarissa’s party, but it may also be a cue to readers to ask themselves which character or characters, if any, are “unhinged” (as a verb meaning “to unsettle, unbalance, disorder in mind, throw into confusion” (OED), unhinge had been in use since the early seventeenth century) in Mrs Dalloway’. David Bradshaw in Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3.
- 26.
Olson ‘Projective Verse’, p. 239.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 245.
- 28.
Which raises the question of how one might read this poem out loud.
- 29.
The specificity of Schuyler’s childhood home is significant here—as he noted in an interview with Carl Little in 1986, the composition of ‘The Morning of the Poem’ ‘was so involved with being in the place—being in my mother’s house’. Schuyler in Little, ‘An Interview with James Schuyler’, p. 178.
- 30.
Kenneth Koch, ‘Fresh Air’ in The New York Poets: An Anthology, ed. Mark Ford (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 111.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 114.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 112. The fresh air that Schuyler lets into his poem has a distinctively Gertrude Steinian flavour: the ‘sweet, sweet, sweet smell of morning rain’ echoes Stein’s ‘Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea’ from ‘Susie Asado’. Gertrude Stein, ‘Susie Asado’ from Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 549.
- 33.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in The Selected Poetry & Prose of Shelley (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002), p. 401; William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 390.
- 34.
John Keats, ‘To Autumn’ in Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 219.
- 35.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 122.
- 36.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2007), p. 10.
- 37.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1998), pp. 66–67.
- 38.
According to Maggie Nelson, a ‘tendency towards excess’ is ‘a crucial part of the New York School legacy’—and it is through excess that Schuyler’s poetry ‘repeatedly awakens to this “moment of being” via an intense attention to the physical body and its surroundings’. Nelson, Other True Abstractions, pp. 78–81.
- 39.
Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 15; 22.
- 40.
David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), p. xvii.
- 41.
Douglas Crase, ‘A Voice Like the Day’ in Poetry Vol. 163, No. 4 (Jan 1994): pp. 228.
- 42.
Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘The Literary Present’ in ELH Volume 85, Number 2 (Summer 2018): pp. 369; 371.
- 43.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 27.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid. That the nail scissors should comprise a punctum is especially apt, given that, for Barthes, the punctum is so often figured through an attention to fingernails: ‘One of them holds a gun that rests on his thigh (I can see his nails)’; ‘many of the men photographed by Nadar have long fingernails’; ‘the grace of the punctum, is Tzara’s hand resting on the doorframe: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean’; ‘Warhol […] offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails’. Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 25; 35; 45.
- 46.
Williams, ‘Reading the Parenthesis’, p. 59.
- 47.
Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 379.
- 48.
Note Schuyler’s interest in the usefulness or utility of words here, which also conditions, as I have been arguing, his experimental attitude to the parenthesis.
- 49.
This follows a tradition of placing death in parentheses. In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, several of the main characters’ deaths are stowed in bracketed asides—‘(Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty)’—and, in Nabokov’s Lolita, the death of Humbert’s mother is famously registered as, simply, ‘(picnic, lightning)’. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 105; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 8.
- 50.
Moss, ‘James Schuyler: Whatever Is Moving’, p. 15.
- 51.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 3.
- 52.
Ibid., pp. 191–192.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 196.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 199.
- 56.
Ibid., pp. 5; 195.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 199.
- 58.
Saint-Amour, ‘The Literary Present’, p. 378.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 379.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 382.
- 61.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 4.
- 62.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York & London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 25.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 198.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 383.
- 66.
Schuyler also logged an entry in his diary on this day, which reads (in its entirety): ‘Little Portion / May 10, 1988 // at midnight I will rise to give you thanks… // Noon office’, Schuyler, The Diary of James Schuyler, p. 219. The elliptical note signals just how fluid the distinction between diary entry and poem are for Schuyler, whose poems often offer a comprehensive account of the events of a day, and whose diaries often read like poetic fragments.
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Losasso, M. (2023). Aperture: James Schuyler’s Precarious Parentheses. In: Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_5
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