"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)"
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Schuyler pushes back against the romantic myth of poetry as a visitation from elsewhere. He is not denying surprise or wonder, but objecting to the idea that a poem must begin in a realm inaccessible to ordinary life. If readers imagine the origin of poems as alien to their own experience, they place poetry on an unreachable pedestal and estrange themselves from the very materials out of which poems are made.
His work offers the counterexample. As a central figure of the New York School, Schuyler built poems from weather, conversation, the look of flowers on a table, a day unfolding in small increments. A diary-like attentiveness, shifts of mood, and the associative drift of thinking are the engines of his writing. Poems such as Hymn to Life or The Morning of the Poem gather the present moment without solemnity, letting perception and syntax discover their form. The genesis, then, is not an occult spark but a habit of noticing, a willingness to be porous to the ordinary and to arrange it into language.
There is a democratic ethic in that stance. By insisting that the beginnings of poems lie within common experience, he invites readers to trust their own senses and memory rather than reaching for esoteric codes. It also reframes reading: not as decoding a secret transmission, but as recognizing familiar motions of mind and feeling, the ways a day layers itself into meaning.
The qualifier sometimes matters. Mystery is not banished; it is relocated from a remote elsewhere to the play of attention, chance, and connection. Schuyler learned from painters like Fairfield Porter how seeing can be an art, and from friends like O Hara and Ashbery how talk and culture mingle with lyric impulse. He suggests that poems are made in the same place we live: in the textures of time, rooms, weather, friendship, and thought. The sphere of poetry is not outside experience, but within it, where anyone can begin.
His work offers the counterexample. As a central figure of the New York School, Schuyler built poems from weather, conversation, the look of flowers on a table, a day unfolding in small increments. A diary-like attentiveness, shifts of mood, and the associative drift of thinking are the engines of his writing. Poems such as Hymn to Life or The Morning of the Poem gather the present moment without solemnity, letting perception and syntax discover their form. The genesis, then, is not an occult spark but a habit of noticing, a willingness to be porous to the ordinary and to arrange it into language.
There is a democratic ethic in that stance. By insisting that the beginnings of poems lie within common experience, he invites readers to trust their own senses and memory rather than reaching for esoteric codes. It also reframes reading: not as decoding a secret transmission, but as recognizing familiar motions of mind and feeling, the ways a day layers itself into meaning.
The qualifier sometimes matters. Mystery is not banished; it is relocated from a remote elsewhere to the play of attention, chance, and connection. Schuyler learned from painters like Fairfield Porter how seeing can be an art, and from friends like O Hara and Ashbery how talk and culture mingle with lyric impulse. He suggests that poems are made in the same place we live: in the textures of time, rooms, weather, friendship, and thought. The sphere of poetry is not outside experience, but within it, where anyone can begin.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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