James Schuyler​ gave his first public reading on 15 November 1988. People queued around the block to get a seat, and at the end he received the longest, most unconsciously glad applause Eileen Myles had ever heard in New York. ‘As for my moment in the spotlight,’ Schuyler reported to a friend a couple of days later, ‘well, truth to tell, I was a fucking sensation.’ The sensation had been a long time coming. Auden based a character in The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, on Schuyler: Emble is a young man given to watching others with ‘a covert but passionate curiosity. What makes them tick? What would it feel like to be a success?’ Just over forty years later, Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation by John Ashbery, he read from his newly published Selected Poems, on the back cover of which Ashbery’s blurb declared: ‘Schuyler is simply the best we have.’

He began the reading that night with the first poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 shortly after he’d come under the spell of Frank O’Hara (of whom he later wrote: ‘So witty, so sad,/so you: even your lines have/a broken nose’). ‘Salute’ runs:

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

The brokenness of ‘gather-/ing’ is witty and sad, but ing-ness is part of the point: the word plays at being both noun and gerund, object and activity, and gestures towards the performative event of the poem itself (in a sense, he never did it, yet he’s doing it right now). Schuyler once spoke of action painting as ‘an autobiography whose past is the present of its creation, a now whose linkage to the past is often reduced to a series of repudiations’. Part of what’s repudiated here is any song of the self that sits in isolation from the variousness it courts. The line-ends say it best: in the shift from the hypothetical coolness of ‘one’ to the more vulnerable gambit of the first person, and in the double life of that person himself (‘one of each I’). As the ‘I’ moves from being unstressed (‘of one of each I/planned’) to taking just the hint of an accent (‘I salute’), the lyric coaxes the concentred from the wistful; missing out is the way you know you’ve opted in. What has Schuyler made of his life? He’s made this.

In his absorbing Life, A Day like Any Other, Nathan Kernan begins by noting that this isn’t a critical biography, before adding that, after the details have been absorbed, he would like the reader to remember the caveat Schuyler offers in ‘Hymn to Life’ about the taxonomy of his beloved roses: ‘After learning all their names – Rose/de Rescht, Cornelia, Pax – it is important to forget them.’ To remember this caveat the reader would, ideally, have sought out the poem itself, where the names are not forgotten but cherished. And in the act of saying them over, Schuyler pays homage to the world outside (as he once said to Myles: ‘I think anything that’s all poetry is boring, don’t you, babe?’). Any hymn to this man’s life needs to keep two things in play: the facts and the experience of them.

Kernan has tracked down everything from Schuyler’s baby book and first-grade report card to his psychiatric records and US State Department papers. He has also conducted more than a hundred interviews. What emerges is the fullest picture we are ever likely to have of Schuyler’s life, though information about his childhood years remains scant, partly because Schuyler didn’t want to go into the details. He was born in Chicago in 1923 to parents from Midwestern farming families. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said of his father, ‘he was an enchantingly wonderful man. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler, which my mother found rather hard to take.’ They divorced when Schuyler was five. His father makes fleeting appearances in the poems – ‘heavy, jolly, well-read man, you’ve/been gone a long time’ – and stands in marked contrast to a man Schuyler would come to loathe: Berton Ridenour, a non-jolly, non-reading construction engineer (aka ‘old book burner, my stepfather’). The family moved to Washington DC and then to East Aurora, New York during the Depression. By the time Schuyler entered adolescence there was terrible friction in the house; one of his friends remembered his stepfather being ‘quite nutty and very cruel’. When asked by an interviewer what his home situation was like, all Schuyler would say was: ‘Listen, you’re asking for a novel by Dostoevsky.’

Schuyler’s first book, a novel called Alfred and Guinevere (1958), contains flickers of people from his childhood: his mother, Margaret Daisy, and his ‘gentle Grandma Ella’, who taught him about the natural world and nurtured his literary interests. Schuyler claimed that the grandmother in the novel was the only character based on life. Still, as Kernan points out, ‘references to divorce and family separation, as perceived (or misperceived) by young children, float over and through the seemingly soufflé-light novel.’ There are also intimations of violence, and Schuyler said that ‘a fear (an animal fear, one might say) of death’ ran through the story. Daisy sometimes expressed a worry that Schuyler had inherited some sort of ‘weakness’ from his father, so when Guinevere confesses that ‘there is a curse on our family and it came out in me,’ we wonder what she’s referring to and what might yet come out.

Alfred and Guinevere is that rare thing, a masterpiece of a debut written in a form that its author would leave behind. Everything is related from the perspective of the children: we eavesdrop on their conversations (‘I dreamed Daddy said, “I’ll teach you how to swim.” Then he picked me up and threw me out of the window into a big lake’) or look at Guinevere’s diary over her shoulder (‘married people should have vacations from each other. It is the modern up to date way’). Throughout, the children try to deal with what’s happening to them by means of fabulation: ‘I will tell him the one about the husband who was so glad to see his wife he hugged her too hard and she dropped dead and one other.’ That ‘and one other’ shows Schuyler’s pitch-perfect ear for the to-be-continued and his love of the tellingly untold. He originally wrote the book with ‘child’ and ‘adult’ chapters interspersed before deciding to cut the latter, and he resisted his publisher’s demands for a more dramatic or conclusive ending. ‘One has to go to the really best poems of our time to find writing with as much skill,’ Kenneth Koch claimed in his review. ‘Mr Schuyler has transferred the excitements of poetry to his prose; something (witty or prosodic) is happening at every second … his language makes one aware not only of what it describes, but also of language itself – of the word as a word among words, as poetry does, or should.’

Other things had to happen before Schuyler could devote himself to the excitements of poetry. Kernan tells the story of his twenties in vivid detail, a quarter of the biography dealing with this one decade. In 1942, just as Schuyler was flunking out of college, his father died of a heart attack. He joined the navy and a year later, while on leave in New York, he got drunk, missed curfew, panicked and went AWOL. Looking back, he said that he had a kind of breakdown. He also had a memory of himself as a ‘cute sailor found-object’ (‘I grooved with a nifty soldier … I can feel those dog tags this minute’). After his homosexuality was revealed to the authorities, he was sent to a navy prison on Hart Island, where he was woken at 5.30 each morning to do six hours’ manual labour, before being discharged a few months later as ‘Undesirable’. As Kernan writes, the whole ordeal was deeply traumatic and shameful. Schuyler kept it from pretty much everyone who knew him in later life.

After his discharge he moved to New York and landed a job working at NBC for the Voice of America. He also began a stormy relationship with Bill Aalto, to whom he confided in an unpublished poem: ‘You promised we could make a kind of hell/for each other, and we did.’ Many years later Schuyler linked another love affair to his stepfather’s treatment: ‘B’s cruelty to me caused me to have a three-year sado-masochistic episode. Chains, whips, burns, a needle and dental tape. As a matter of fact pain doesn’t hurt; it’s a sensation, like a kiss.’ Sometimes things weren’t consensual. Aalto’s drinking fuelled the violence, and if the relationship wasn’t quite at an end when he smashed a grappa bottle over Schuyler’s head, it was definitely over when he picked up a carving knife and advanced towards him round the kitchen table. ‘He was serious and so was I,’ Schuyler recalled.

He was also getting serious about writing. Chester Kallman was a vital supporter (‘the person who most encouraged me to write’), as was Truman Capote, who offered detailed criticism. Schuyler’s work was published for the first time in 1951 – three short stories in Accent – and later that year he wrote his first known poems. Part of his apprenticeship had been served under Auden, for whom he had helped prepare Nones for publication in 1949. Schuyler learned a lot from typing it up, but later remembered being overawed by the technical intricacy, the skill, the rhymes, the metre. ‘Well, if this is poetry,’ he thought, ‘I’m certainly never going to write any myself.’ But, as he well knew, poetry could take several forms. Ashbery and O’Hara would gain Auden’s attention when he was judging the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955, and just after Schuyler made his own debut in print he met them. ‘Both John and Frank were very encouraging and made me feel that I wasn’t just a poet who was being tested but that I was a poet. That was perhaps one of the most, if not the most important moment of my life; to be accepted by people of whose work I was absolutely certain.’

Schuyler once told an interviewer that he didn’t write the kind of poetry that attracted critics. ‘It’s too easy,’ he added, with a laugh. It wasn’t easy, though, to arrive at his kind of ease. He’d sometimes spend up to a year tinkering with a poem: ‘I settled for “hides”, but I think the long i sound spoils the effect of “blind” in the next line.’ A Schuyler poem might seem just talk. He will say ‘oof’ or ‘uhm’ as he shoots the breeze about ‘the this, the that’ and ‘the said to be boring things’. But he also chooses words like ‘lanceolate’ or ‘Favrile’, or ends a lyric: ‘Silver day/how shall I polish you?’ Just as you’re settling in to the same old same old (‘Everything just sitting around’), suddenly a truck passes, ‘perceived as a quick shuffle of solitaire cards’. The poems are something-nothing spaces in which anything might happen, and they frequently end with a feeling of incipience, readying themselves for a change in the weather: ‘It’s high/time for crocuses, bloodroots, hepaticas/and other nascent what-have-yous.’

Schuyler enjoys having his poems tease Poetry – ‘you can’t talk about the weather/it’s like saying my lady’s damask cheek’ – but he knows that poets have an enduring love affair with what’s allegedly outmoded or said to be beneath them. His own style was fed by a curious amalgam of classical and contemporary influences: Dante and Leopardi, whom he translated; Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet’; Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese (Tu Fu in particular); Apollinaire, whose ‘Hôtel’ was one of his favourite poems. What comes out of this is a feeling for clarity itself as a kind of mystery, and for the lyrical as a gentle shock. Here’s ‘Closed Gentian Distances’:

A nothing day full of
wild beauty and the
timer pings. Roll up
the silver off the bay
take down the clouds
sort the spruce and
send to laundry marked,
more starch. Goodbye
golden- and silver-
rod, asters, bayberry
crisp in elegance.
Little fish stream
by, a river in water.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the timer’s ping, Schuyler’s poems leave you in a hush. Yet the sounds within them guide your gaze. Take the shift in scale from ‘bay’ to ‘bayberry’ – a quiet revelling in the eye’s freedom of movement. Or the understated way the rhymes imply that states of matter – solids, liquids or gases – exist to keep one another company (‘silver’, ‘asters’, ‘river’). There’s a ghost of a sonnet here too, with a volta at ‘Goodbye’, and a closing couplet. The magic of the couplet owes something to Schuyler’s decision not to say that little fish ‘swim’, so that for a split second ‘stream’ might be a noun, a giddy delirium of vision.

Where are those gentians? Somewhere, nowhere, everywhere. Schuyler once praised Jane Freilicher’s paintings for their frequent adjustments of perspective, testament to ‘the small shifts the eyes make in moving the gaze from object to object to undiscriminated distance’. A poem like ‘Closed Gentian Distances’ – partly abstract, partly figurative – takes its bearings from his passion for the New York art scene. ‘New York poets,’ he wrote in 1959, ‘except I suppose the colour-blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.’ Like O’Hara, with whom he shared an apartment on and off for most of the 1950s, Schuyler sometimes collaborated with artists. He also succeeded O’Hara as reviewer for Art News and worked at the Museum of Modern Art. By the end of the decade he was referring to himself as a ‘director of special exhibitions at the museum, an editorial whosis for Art News – a writer !?@* and now and then a human being’. His art reviews contain some of his finest writing (there’s an excellent selection edited by Simon Pettet) and shed light on his poetry’s particular ways of seeing.

Or, better – and as Kernan elegantly puts it – they share the poetry’s ‘not seeing, or more accurately “un-seeing”, in that it appears to record the sensation of seeing something without the usual set of assumptions that allow us to know what it is.’ This comes to the fore in Schuyler’s romancing of colours, which often take precedence over objects: ‘three greys,/sky, road, path’; ‘a pinprick of blue’ becomes ‘a child running’. Commenting on the influence on him of the American ‘greats’ in 1959, Schuyler said that William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens inspired greater freedom than the others. The freedom of Schuyler’s red isn’t quite the concretion of Williams’s red wheelbarrow, or the dream of Stevens’s drunken sailor catching tigers in red weather. It exists somewhere between or beyond these poles, as surface, relation or changeable state: ‘red brick’ becomes ‘brick painted/red’; a bird is ‘the red touch green/cries out for’ or ‘a red that leaps from green and holds it there’; flames in red glass pots are ‘unlikely flowers, a spot of light that jumped’. Colours are also important to him as an intimation of time, not just a clarification of space. They seem to bloom, to melt, to come and go, to hint at an absent presence: the leaves of the maple are ‘an undreamt of butter’, a greyness becomes ‘a colour/called drained-of-blueness’, the eye sees grout only ‘as a wash of another diluted colour/over the colour it thinks it knows/is there’. Schuyler’s poetry deals with what you think you know as akin to a sensation, or to a state of feeling. Seeing is believing, but believing is a close cousin of surmising.

By the time his first book of poetry, Salute, appeared in 1960, Schuyler had become close to the writer and painter Fairfield Porter, who was the first to write about the New York School poets and artists together, noting of Schuyler that his writing ‘tends towards a deceptively simple Chinese visibility, like transparent windows on a complex view’. A well-chosen simile, because Schuyler views transparency itself as miraculously complex: he speaks of windows ‘lashed into life’; one in an attic is ‘like a wink’; raindrops on another ‘spell out untranslatable glyphs’. Schuyler wrote about Porter’s paintings on many occasions, singling out his gift for catching ‘the nuance of vacancy’. Looking through the House was ‘an intimist masterpiece … in which feeling brings to cohesion window frames, barely discriminable islands, the pomegranate bottom of a lantern’. ‘Intimist’ is the word that the poet Barbara Guest used to describe Schuyler himself, and, for both, intimacy appears to nurture independence – not just of objects, but of the medium that represents them. Here’s Schuyler writing about Porter:

Within a descriptive area, a single stroke can have the aliveness that an abstract painter would demand or need … the paint has its own movement, as brushed, stirred and rippled as the windy grass, trees and water it describes. The paint is not, however, merely a vehicle for description … the paint is itself a palpable fact that holds an imprint of life and infuses life into the image … What we are given is an aspect of everyday life, seen neither as a snapshot nor as an exaltation.

Schuyler is holding up a mirror to his own art too. Years later, when asked by an interviewer whether he wrote poems about Porter’s paintings, he replied: ‘No, but I tried to write poems that were like his painting.’

That discrimination is in tune with Schuyler’s penchant for simile. A gathering of similes from across his writing life – all of which connect the natural and the human-made – gives a sense of the facture of his palpable facts:

The big yellow maple is now
skimped of leaves, precisely
like a cab driver who says,
‘I can’t change that.’

Bumblebees, like little flying bears, are
     floating up and down the stalks of the
          hollyhocks as smoothly as elevators.

                                         tears
sliding out of me like oil
out of an over-oiled electric fan

Have you ever swum at night in water so cold
     it’s like plunging into a case of knives, your quickly
Moving limbs dripping with moonstones, liquid moonstones?

In Schuyler’s hands, simile is revealing and outlandish. ‘A wedding of disjunctions’, he calls it elsewhere, one that acts as a guarantor for a world in which each thing is very much its own thing – not sequestered, but not wholly conjoined (I’m reminded of Douglas Crase’s memory of being in his company: ‘Jimmy sat unbudging in a kind of genial secrecy’). Porter once spoke of ‘an elementary principle of organisation in any art that nothing gets in anything else’s way, and everything is at its own limit of possibilities’. In response to a painting Porter gave him, Schuyler wrote a poem called ‘A Blue Shadow Painting’, in which he delighted in his friend’s depiction of the sky ‘set against, no, with, living with, existing alongside and part of,/the helter-skelter of rust brown, of swift indecipherables’. This is a vital part of the way Schuyler wanted – needed – to see the world, and himself within it. Watching the snowflakes from his window one Christmas Eve, he observed that ‘there’s a lot of twisting, turning, gusts and indecisions, all about to settle when they rise up like an alarmed flock from a field – how odd, that they seem never to bump into each other.’

Schuyler wrote​ ‘A Blue Shadow Painting’ in the same place he’d started writing poetry a decade earlier: a psychiatric ward. Porter visited him in hospital several times in 1961 and when he was released drove him to Great Spruce Head Island, where Porter and his family were spending the summer. Schuyler was soon living with them (as Anne Porter put it, ‘Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years’). Kernan writes with great sensitivity about this time, and Schuyler remembered it as much the happiest period of his life. But he wasn’t the easiest man to be around. He struggled to hold down a job, and colleagues were sometimes enlisted as carers (‘God knows, I tried to get out of bed, but … it just wasn’t possible. And, darling, if you do come to visit, would you bring me a cherry Coke?’). He’d started therapy in the mid-1950s – ‘as soon as I found a psychoanalyst I sort of fell apart,’ he recalled – and his love life was often complicated. So was his relationship with drink. ‘I’ve been on a bender since I was sixteen,’ he confessed to Bob Dash later, at a time when he was drinking almost a litre of vodka a day.

Throughout his adult life Schuyler suffered from depression and psychotic episodes. On the way to hospital on one occasion, he turned to Ashbery: ‘John, you do believe that I’m the Resurrection and the Life, don’t you?’ ‘Sure,’ John said. What’s for Dinner? (1978) – a novel Alice Notley summed up as ‘a comedy of manners all about alcoholism, insanity, adultery, drugs, moderate incest and death’ – draws on Schuyler’s time in mental hospitals, and one late poem mentions Thorazine, Placidyl, Antabuse, ‘seven Sleepeze, two Nembutal … three/antidepressant pills, a red pill that controls the side effects of the antidepressants’ and so on. Another lyric tells the story of the year 1977 in under twenty lines: pneumonia; diabetes; a fire in his room after he passed out while smoking in bed; skin grafts for third-degree burns; severe poisoning as a side effect of a new drug; two months spent learning to walk again; then another breakdown, followed by four weeks in a different hospital.

Still, as Schuyler conceded in an early poem, ‘We must observe the amenities/even if we are going nuts.’ One of the striking things about his life is that his four strongest books, published between 1969 and 1980, coincide with his most severe mental health difficulties. Kernan is careful not to read the work as mere symptom, noting that ‘even at his most deranged, he could appear, and perhaps be, calm and rational in his writing.’ When Myles arrived in his apartment to find him looking ‘as though he was about to burst’, he started to write a lyric. ‘It seemed to be that he was composing a universe of calm out of complete franticness … Those kind of calm beauties that he assembles were such a construction of his needs.’ As he wrote to Porter, ‘insofar as a work is a work of art, the neurosis is transformed, not just sublimated, but brought into the scope of the possible and actual world.’ The possible and the actual aren’t complete rhyming partners, though, and this gives the poems their air of vulnerability – or, rather, of achieved vulnerability.

‘The Payne Whitney Poems’, a series of lyrics written while Schuyler was in a psychiatric hospital in New York in 1975, are delicately sane salvage operations. Here’s ‘Sleep’:

The friends who come to see you
and the friends who don’t.
The weather in the window.
A pierced ear.
The mounting tension and the spasm.
A paper-lace doily on a small plate.
Tangerines.
A day in February: heart-
shaped cookies on St Valentine’s.
Like Christopher, a discarded saint.
A tough woman with black hair.
‘I got to set my wig straight.’
A gold and silver day begins to wane.
A crescent moon.
Ice on the window.
Give my love to, oh, anybody.

This is characteristic of Schuyler at his best, pitched somewhere between the serene and the susceptible. Although the poem won’t say ‘I’ on its own behalf, other ‘I’s associatively recall its troubles (in the opening line of the series Schuyler confessed to ‘Wigging in, wigging out’). The second line flirts with woundedness but won’t confirm it, and suppressed identifications aren’t necessarily full ones: Valentine’s Day might make him feel discarded, but he’s hardly a saint. The weather ‘in’, not ‘through’, the window tells of a microscopic attentiveness that could evade emotion, yet eye and heart will go a-roving and there may be turn-ons too – piercings, tensions, spasms. All this comes through quietly. One reason that Schuyler didn’t always like poetry to be read aloud was because it made it ‘go by too quickly’, the voice distracting from what he referred to as the poem’s inner sounds (he once said that he consciously resonated off a single sound in many of his lyrics). The sung-unsung hero here is ‘o’, which catches at the ‘ow’ of that mounting tension and the ache of ‘old’ in ‘gold’ alongside the talk of waning. And then ‘don’t’ and ‘window’ ready the ear for ‘oh’, the poem’s reinvention of lyrical apostrophe, an off-key ‘O’ which brings the thing to a close with a surprise, or a smile, or a sigh.

Schuyler had a genius for salutation – especially goodbyes – and he often looked for ways to conduct them in slow motion (in ‘Sleep’, his most beloved item of experience, the day, only begins to wane). When the Porters finally asked him to leave in 1970, he replied: ‘I’ll think about it.’ Three years later, he agreed. He dedicated his first major collection, Freely Espousing, published in 1969, to Fairfield and Anne, and Porter is often present (sometimes by name) in a poem he wrote just as he was preparing to leave the family, ‘The Crystal Lithium’. ‘It seemed to break through into what I wanted. It was also a breakthrough because it was turning out to be one of my best poems. I was very aware of that.’ Porter agreed. Schuyler had always been a celebrator of the moment – more precisely, of ‘a flicked off bit/of a moment’. ‘The Crystal Lithium’ came to him after his rediscovery of Whitman; and, as one line break intimates, it heralded a sense of the now as something akin to the ‘now/And then’. Kernan writes particularly well on the way ‘the poem “happens” everywhere and in every time at once,’ and this effect is bound up with the way in which the present, which is always unprecedented, catalyses a feeling for duration:

among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream
Where kids in kapok ice-skate and play at Secret City as the sun
Sets before dinner, the snow on the fields turns pink and under the hatched ice
The water slides darkly and over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun
In a chemical yellow greener than sulphur a flash of petroleum by-product
Unbelievable, unwanted and as lovely as though someone you knew all your life
Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes

The tableau-like quality of the simple present tense is one way we know we are reading a lyric poem. Time stands still, even during ice-skating. But the frozen stream of lyric is still winding, and the ice is always ‘hatched’. It’s a domesticated miracle, in which the before and after of dinner act as a sponsor of epiphany, and as a release from it.

Schuyler’s love of dailiness was a way of keeping in touch with his past while also holding out for a future. Noting that many of Schuyler’s poems have dates as titles, and that they revel in the heterogeneous, collage-like nature of newspapers, Kernan writes that Schuyler’s father’s position as a Midwestern newspaper editor in the early 1920s put him in illustrious company. Schuyler was proud of his father’s job, mentioning it in several interviews, and on his own college transcript he listed journalism as his ‘Preference of Vocation’. His first reference to his father in the poems is to ‘Dad/with all his buttons on/back in the watch fob days’.

Schuyler liked reading journals, and Porter – a surrogate father to him, among other things – encouraged him to start keeping one. One of the things he recorded there was Porter’s comment on his poetry: ‘It disappears as it goes along.’ As Kernan noted in his edition of the diary, this echoes Porter’s description of his own work: ‘My paintings are more “unfinished” than ever, because I unfinish them as I paint.’ Somewhere behind this lies Porter’s fondness for Ingres’s comment that he ‘left it to time to finish his paintings’, and it’s this quality (or capacity) that goes into the making of Schuyler’s later work, particularly ‘Hymn to Life’ and ‘The Morning of the Poem’. These two poems are so magnificent that I’m wary of quoting them, not least because the time it takes to read them is a crucial part of what they are, so it’s hard to know when to stop quoting. Perhaps, then, just the start of ‘The Morning of the Poem’: ‘July 8 or July 9, the eighth surely, certainly/1976 that I know’. And its closing word, ‘goodbye’, which is gently unfinished by the final line’s first word – ‘Tomorrow’. In formation and in medias res, just the way he liked it – with a feeling not only for the way one makes sense of time, but for how one makes sense in it.

The spring​ of 1981 brought news that Schuyler had been awarded a Guggenheim grant and a Pulitzer Prize for The Morning of the Poem. Kernan covers the last decade of his life in just under forty pages. One reason for this brevity is that it’s a happy ending of sorts. Schuyler found a new doctor, Daniel Newman – ‘a lifesaver, literally’, as Kernan puts it – to whom he dedicated his Selected Poems, and who helped him to stop drinking, reduce his medication and change his diet. Although he did suffer another breakdown in 1985, he recovered, and his friendship with his assistant Tom Carey became a source of strength. ‘Tom’s enormous contribution to Jimmy’s life was allowing himself to be loved without going crackers in the process,’ the artist Darragh Park recalled. ‘It was one of those experiences that you see occasionally in life where really it does appear that love, a little love in somebody’s life, can really transform it.’ And Schuyler fell in love again too: as he incredulously told Ashbery soon after meeting Artie Growich in 1989, ‘I never thought I would get laid again in this lifetime.’ Added to this, there was the success of his public readings and of course more roses. Myles recalled their visits to a local florist: ‘He was completely in his element … It was like being in heaven with God.’

If pushed to choose one word that shows Schuyler in his element, I’d go for ‘just’. It tends to arrive at the edge of a run-on line, delighted by the double life it gets to live there:

          Free-
dom’s just
a word.

and I have a slight headache
on one side only just
enough for a drink

          And how have you come to know the just
Rightness when you see it

          What a pearl
of letter knife. It’s just
the thing I needed

          then there was the just-
before-morning electric storm

‘Just’ is a proximity or an almost, a devotion to the ordinary, a yearning for rightness and a sense that it has been achieved. My favourite ‘just’ is the first to appear in his poetry, in the lyric from which Kernan’s biography takes its title and which has often been celebrated as one of Schuyler’s very best. In 1955, he’d been trying and failing to write a poem about a trip to Palermo. To a correspondent he recalled ‘the apathy following on the disappointment of a wasted day’, before adding that what seemed like waste may have been ‘a warming up. Who knows? Not me.’ In any case, he looked out the window, and wrote this:

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can’t see
making a bit of pink
I can’t quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can’t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we’d gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A grey hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They’re just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can’t get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She’s so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It’s getting greyer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.
It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It’s a day like any other.

It’s those boxy trucks I want to stay with, as they roll up Second Avenue into the sky. Ah, no: ‘They’re just/going over the hill’. Even as Schuyler comes back down to earth after his hallucination, the trucks somehow stay strange, because they’re not merely doing something, they’re about to do it. This temporal tremor registers Schuyler’s knowledge of – or bid for – waywardness within the matter-of-fact. He ‘can’t get over/how it all works in together’ because, as he once put it in his diary, experience itself is an ‘extraordinary excess’ – something encountered, made and missed. Occasionally, a claim like ‘It all works in together!’ might refer to something that a person needs to get over (to recover from a manic state, say, or the madness of certainty, or a quest for everything to make sense). But here it registers a deep sanity, an awareness of just how much imagination goes into the making of the real. ‘Maybe I should get over the idea that the way to write a poem is to look out the window and put it all down,’ Schuyler wrote to a friend when preparing his first book for the press. ‘But I don’t see why.’