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U Ottawa L'universiw Canadienne Canada's University FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES ^=1 FACULTY of GRADUATE and ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES u Ottawa L'UniversiW canadienne Canada's university FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES ^=1 FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES L'Universitc canathenne Canada's unh'ersity Matthew Gerald marc Mongrain AUTEMDElXtWsF/TUTHORWTHESIS M.A. (English Literature) Department of English TAOJLTETlCClO'EPARTEWNTrFMi Light from Canada: The Poetics of James Schuyler TITRE DE LA THESE / TITLE OF THESIS David Jarraway DIRECTEUR (DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS SUPERVISOR CO-DIRECTEUR (CO-DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS CO-SUPERVISOR Bernhard Radloff David Rampton Gary W. Slater Le Doyen de la Faculte des etudes superieures et postdoctorales / Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Light from Canada: The Poetics of James Schuyler Matthew Mongrain Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Matthew Mongrain, Ottawa, Canada, 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-73877-1 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-73877-1 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1*1 Canada ii Abstract This thesis discusses the poetics of James Schuyler as they relate to three major concepts: his "painterliness," his technique, and his treatment of things. In the first chapter, Schuyler's "painterliness" is argued to be a way to discuss the idea of representation in both his prose about art and his art-inspired poetry. In the second chapter, Schuyler's technique, notable for its innovative lineation, is explored using the postmodern philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is argued that Schuyler's purposeful lineation has the same ends as Deleuze-Guattari's project to expose the artificiality of systems of signs and allow ideas to connect more freely with one another. In the third chapter, the treatment of things in Schuyler's poetry is argued to be emblematic of Schuyler's poetry itself, and another way that he explores in his verse the meaning of the individual sign in relationship with subjectivity. iii Acknowledgements This thesis was made possible by constant support and kindness from both David Jarraway and Alison Pearce. I thank them with all my heart. IV Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1 The Bright Invisible: James Schuyler, Fairfield Porter, and "Painterliness " 40 Chapter 2 Revenge of the Giant Face: Nothingness and Faciality 11 Chapter 3 It Is Just the Thing: "A Stone Knife " and Object Matter 109 Conclusion Convergences 116 Works Cited 1 Introduction Evangeline, our light is scoured and Nova Scotian and of a clarity that opens up the huddled masses of the stolid spruce so you see them in their bristling individuality. —James Schuyler, "Lightfrom Canada" There has never been a better time to come to the work of James Schuyler. With the March 2010 publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux of Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, the student of Schuyler now has every poem that survives in two thick, handsome volumes, which join his letters, diaries, and novels to form a scintillating trove of verbal treasures. As I write this, the current issue (June 7th, 2010) of The Nation has a a feature article by Ange Mlinko, "Scoured Light," praising Schuyler's poetry. And now that the New York School has, against all odds, gone mainstream (hit TV series Mad Men used the poems of Frank O'Hara as a plot point in a recent episode), one can only hope that the sudden explosion of interest in their poetry will shed some small light on a man who has 2 been until recently a poet's poet, standing quietly off to the side while friends and contemporaries accepted curatorships and met presidents. It's not that Schuyler is an unknown poet. After all, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his late collection The Morning of the Poem. But, somehow, in narratives of the New York School of which he was a member, he seems overshadowed by the other primaries: Kenneth Koch, whose razor wit and affection for children made him one of America's most treasured teachers of poetry; Frank O'Hara, whose infectious joie-de-vivre and untimely death made him a folk hero; and John Ashbery, who stands within the very highest rank of poets currently writing in America. Paul Hoover characterizes the dynamic: In the New York School ages of man, Kenneth provides the uproarious infancy;... Frank the excitable guest perpetually in his twenties; John the eloquent philosopher deluging the Abyss; and Jimmy the baffled uncle whom the children trust and love—no card tricks, just an absorbing walk with an interesting man. Not that he's a poet of senescence; he simply grows on you, like light from Canada. (19) Schuyler, unlike his friends, never made much of a name for himself during his lifetime. This is partially because he was rather late to the game. His first major collection, Freely Espousing, was published in 1969. Meanwhile, Koch saw his Glascock Prize-winning Poems published in 1953, Ashbery's Some Trees had won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1956, and O'Hara's breakout Meditations in an Emergency was released in 1957. Tardiness does Schuyler's work no harm. Even though the poems are unmistakably rooted in a place and an age—New York City in the latter half of the twentieth century— 3 their trademark niceness of detail combined with the breadth of their subject matter causes them to overspill their context and remain achingly relevant. It is a cliche to call poems timeless, but Schuyler's poems seem to exist along a different plane of time entirely. They exist at the moment they are read, as in this present-tense stanza from A Few Days'1 % "Thursday": A summer dawn breaks over the city. Breaks? No, it's more as though the night —the "dark," we call it—drained away into the sewers and left transpicuity. You can see: buildings, dogs, people, cement, etc. The summer city, where, I suppose, someone is happy. Someone. {Collected 311) Though the "summer city" is New York, it is at once Chicago, Washington, Southampton, Ischia, Great Spruce Head, and every other place in which Schuyler—and, by proxy, we his readers—may have worked and lived. From the specificity of his poems grows a powerful generality, and we feel that, even as Schuyler is revealing his most intimate details, it is, in fact, our secrets that he is revealing. *** James Marcus Schuyler was born November 9th, 1923 in Chicago, and raised in the nearby suburb of Downer's Grove, a town now famous for its large number of Sears 4 Catalog mail-order houses. There his father, Marcus Schuyler, ran a small newspaper before the family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1929 for Marcus to take a job with the Washington Post. Soon after they moved, Schuyler's mother Margaret Connor divorced his father, and two years later she married building contractor Fredric Ridenour. Schuyler describes his life in Washington as something out of "a novel by Dostoyevsky" (Letters xi); William Corbett relates that "the senior Ridenour so disliked his stepson's love of reading that as punishment he denied him a library card" (xi). It was during this time, too, that Schuyler discovered both his homosexuality, the exuberant celebration of which can be found everywhere in his poems, and his desire to become a writer. He recounts the tipping point in a 1980 interview with Contemporary Authors: One day in my tent in East Aurora, N.Y., when I was about fifteen, I was reading Unforgotten Years by Logan Pearsall Smith. He described how Walt Whitman visited his home outside Philadelphia when he was a child, and how one day when he was hearing the poet sing "Jim Crow" in the bathroom, the thought dappled his mind like reeds that he might be a writer someday, too. I looked up from my book, and the whole landscape seemed to shimmer.
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