Tag: james schuyler

Men in Hats Rise from the Ground

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“Men in hats rise from the ground: / Bless these broken dolls and mend them.”

‘Five O’Clock’ by James Schuyler

Men disport themselves.
They help each other:
“Reach in my chest and massage my heart.
I am not dead.”

If clouds are God’s table linen,
what is rain?
He gave men towels to dry themselves.
He blessed their soap.

The city grew like the desert, by erosion
Men walk in it.
God is not so much dead as resting.
His seventh day has just begun.

Men step out of the wind.
They give money and necessaries.
They steal what belongs to them.
The eighth day, doors open on new sights.

Men in hats rise from the ground:
Bless these broken dolls and mend them.
What goes through cloth, walks and floats?
We rise lightly in you.

Source: Schuyler, James, James Meetze, and Simon Pettet. Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print, p. 179.

Photo: Gerace, Joe. “Men in Hats Rise from the Ground” Nov. 14, 2020. JPG.

‘Greenwich Avenue’ by James Schuyler

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In the evening of a brightly
unsunny day to watch back-lighted
buildings through the slits
between vertical strips of blinds
and how red brick, brick painted
red, a flaky white, gray or
those of no color at all take
the light though it seems only
above and behind them so what
shows below has a slight evening
“the day—sobs—dies” sadness and
the sun marches on. It isn’t like that
on these buildings, the colors which
seem to melt, to bloom and go and
return do so in all reality. Go
out and on a cross street briefly
a last sidelong shine catches
the faces of brick and enshadows
the grout: which the eye sees only
as a wash of another diluted color
over the color it thinks it knows
is there. Most things, like the sky,
are always changing, always the same.
Clouds rift and a beam falls
into a cell where a future saint
sits scratching. Or a wintry
sun shows as a shallow pan of red
above the Potomac, below Mount Vernon,
and the doctor from Philadelphia
nods and speaks of further bleeding.

Source: Schuyler, James. “Greenwich Avenue.” Collected Poems. New York: Noonday Press, 1998, pp. 169-170.

Sweat Sweet as Melons the Tongues

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

one

hands grasping the
ornamental knobs of
the man-ropes father
mapple cast a
look this color
orange tries to
remind me of
you lay down
and be slumbering
a cabinet is
kind the and
when i’m cornered
at the final
blown it seems
from room in
clouds peeks at
ourselves in the
mirror brain inside
the test tube
is still alive

two

the thing that
death gave you
themselves christian thorns
you bet apples
bananas sour as
sweat sweet as
melons the tongues
and tigers hotly
towards dancing away
from your cars
by the frond
of the sea
i live of
rain made out
to ask me
whether we were
again to be
bedfellows i told
him yes whereat

three

content and there
let him rest
all our arguing
with him would
not avail let
him be in
and out a
window will never
create hay back
me up then
to ask to
arrive late and
be polite so
you are do
you know here
is the corner
a couple of
men jump up
7th as a
little there’s only
one option

‘What’ by James Schuyler

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Schuyler

What’s in those pills?
After lunch and I can
hardly keep my eyes
open. Oh, for someone to
talk small talk with.
Even a dog would do.

Why are they hammering
iron outside? And what
is that generator whose
fierce hum comes in
the window? What is a
poem, anyway.

The daffodils, the heather
and the freesias all
speak to me. I speak
back, like St Francis
and the wolf of Gubbio.

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Source: Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New York: The Nooday Press, 1998. Print.

We All Lay on the Island Beach Together (Tension)

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Wikipedia Poem, No. 649

w649
“151. Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry. The time founded on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity, recombining everything which, during the period of the old unitary society’s disintegration, had become distinct: private life, economic life, political life. The entirety of the consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as raw material for the production of a diversity of new products to be put on the market as socially controlled uses of time. ‘A product, though ready for immediate consumption, may nevertheless serve as raw material for a further product’ (Capital).” Guy Debord

 

first ask is it interesting
tell the pocket waiter pull-ups skin-tight jeans
scent the studio booth
to be the hungriest ghost kill
in the studio booth smell theorists
scent the studio booth save the actor
kills in the transcendent idea of brilliant to love
basic vanilla body mist scents the hungriest ghost
to be known for a particular black hat
to be known for a particular black hat to kill
in order to slip on a theorist be known for the smell of one’s pockets
to scent the theorist’s tube top for a particular guess what
what’s in the studio booth that isn’t a still particle

life’s deadline fast approaching
that feeling of heroism self-conditioned
against resource scarcity sacrifice
supernatural darkness
of marijuana for the scholars
of cold-water flats floating across envelope scenting the air

Did You Mean Más o Menos?

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Wikipedia Poem, No. 510

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“How about an oak leaf / if you had to be a leaf?” James Schuyler

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smokint of pharmwent
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instay on
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anyboy up the point—he f
pharmacem went up r it’s suig
a cigareed he was all wheth smoking
atminded hee and dainstalled he took thinded
he wtely smokiroom went ere they hoint—he toe
was lyin point—he ceuticals the day afe was
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whetherd
what
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hi
i

“be frank (if you can’t be frank, be john and kenneth).”

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be frank

From “The Last Avant-Garde” by David Lehman:

[Frank] O’Hara’s ironically self-deprecating tone was much imitated. “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love,” he wrote. He kiddingly called his own poems “the by-product of exhibitionism” and wrote constantly about his daily life. It was O’Hara who initiated the policy of dropping names in his poems, a habit that became a New York School trademark. O’Hara peppered his work with references to his painter friends — [Jane] Freilicher, [Larry] Rivers, Mike Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie — with perfect indifference to whether readers would recognize their names. That indifference argued a certain confidence in the poet’s ability to make the details of his autobiography-in-progress so irresistible that the reader feels flattered to be regarded as the poet’s intimate. O’Hara s celebration of friendship in poetry represented an ideal that second-generation New York School poets, such as Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, emulated in the 1960s. Everyone wanted to be, as [Ted] Berrigan put it, “perfectly frank.” James Schuyler has a marvelous rift in a letter to Berkson urging him to “be frank (if you can’t be frank, be john and kenneth). Say,” Schuyler continues, “maybe our friends’ names would make good verbs: to kenneth: emit a loud red noise; to ashbery- cast a sidewise salacious glance while holding a champagne glass by the stem; to kenward: glide from the room and not make waves; to brainard, give a broad and silent chuckle; to maehiz, shower with conversational spit drops–but I said friends, didn’t I–cancel the last. To berkson and to schuyler I leave to you.”

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Source: Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998, print, p. 73.

‘How is the sky like a grater, Jimmy?’

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grater-sm

For James Schuyler

How is the sky like a grater, Jimmy?
What is sent up for shredding?

Touches blue-bore and spark-moon,
Cloud or torch in a rush against—

No, not again, this
Is how I am like a grater.

So, what comes down lesser?
Smaller, not sky. The sky

Is neither catalog,
Nor inventory,

Litany; it is not
What comes down.

The sun sets.
You can’t see it.

I’ve put too much stock
In the pot. A carrot then.

Stalks of fibrous celery chopped down.
The pot is hungry and inconceivable,

A manic boiling, now, not always
Roiled like this, sometimes, never crying

Unable to get out from under the covers,
in bed as hilled leeks. A planned community.

Sliced thinly, not shredded alive. Small circles
Small miracles, or. I listen to Le Roi Malgré Lui,

“The Reluctant King”, on my Playstation 4
And curse the prism-sun blasting the laptop’s

Lungs and abdominal cavity. It is your task
To know when I am in this room,

It is your task to know when I am in this room.
It is your task to know

When I am looking through these eyes
Or through these eyes.

Wikipedia Poem, No. 377

Joseph M. Gerace1 Comment

wiki377

down?   the sky is   not a catalog, an inventory,   a          litany; it is 
sent up for grating?           vision    touches blue bore and     flake moon   
cloud or men in a rush against god no, against       god        no, against god       
no, against god no, against god no, again, this is how         i am like a 
grater? what           comes down?    the sky like a grater.         what comes 
down. what comes down?        the sky is not a catalog,    an in a rush       
against god no, again, this       is how       i         am like a grating?       
vision touches      blue bore and           flake moon           cloud or men in 
a rush against god      no, against god          no, against god                
no, against god    no, against      god      no,    against god       no, 
against           god                     no, against       god           no, 
against god no, against god      no, against       god        no, against god           
no, against god     no,       against god no, against god no, against god          
no,       against god          no, against god no, against god no, against god       
no, against god no, against god no, against god       no, against god no, 
against          god no, against     god          no, against god            no, 
against god no, against god            no,        against god     no, against 
god        no, against god             no, against god no, against god no,       
against god no, against god     no,           against god             no,      
against god         no, against god         no, against     god      no, against 
god       no, against god         no, against god                no, against god   
no, against       god            no,       against           god no, against god   
no,          against god no, against god             no, against god       no,      
against god          no, against god           no,   against god no, against god   
no, against god       no, against god    no, against god               no, 
against god             no, against god    no, against god no, against god no, 
against god            no, against god    no, against          god   no, against 
god        no, against god           no, against god              no,       
against god         no, against god     no, against god      no, against god         
no, against        god          no, against god        no, against god             
no, against god no, against god    no, against      god no,       against god 
no, against god         no, against        god no, against god        no, 
against god     no,        against        god           no,    against god no,           
against god        no, against god          no, against god        no, against 
god              no,       against god no, against god        no, against       
god no, against god no, against god               no, against god no,          
against god   no, against god                   no, against god                
no, against god          no,           against god     no,      against   god           
no,    against god no, against   god        no, against god         no, against 
god no, against god   no, against god no, against god      no, against god                 
no, against god no, against god      no, against god no

Wikipedia Poem, No. 327

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

wiki327
After James Schuyler, lilac dandelion curve sublime moment trench coat gorilla

 

itself any red
utt when readymade
which it is not

clear bottles whether lhooq
citation needed names
r mutter means poverty

poetry peace possibility
or french much like eut été
in mind of the r

mutts
are difficult to pin
down precisely

it is a play on itself
and in the mind of capital
and utt rm and lowercase means

poverty poetry
peace possibility
or french much like eut été in mind

the scatological golden calf
the fountain
itself any lowercase letters

mean
poverty
poetry peace possibility or

freytag-loringhoven in french
making if any
richard in

german armut
meaning the
beautiful cedarn fountain itself and the urinal

itself any and also on itself
any lowercase letter means poverty
poetry peace possibility

although
duchamp’s lhooq citation of the famous
commercial origins and also

on its commercial origins
and lowercase letters
meaning if we

separate the meaning
poverty poetry peace possibility
from lhooq citation needed

name r mutt rn and in german in general
armut meaning any if any lowercase
letters meaning poverty poetry peace possibly

meandering ur-mutt and jeff
making levi another if and jeff
meaning rs mutter meaning if