This is a poem, "February" by James Schuyler. Schuyler is considered by almost everybody to be a member of the New York School First-Generation, and it's a remarkable poem. What I'm going to do is take this cup, this ModPo, and I have your names in here. So I'm going to ask a question first. So you'll all be racing to think about it, and then I'll pick someone out, and that person will respond. But I want to say at the beginning that Davy Knittle has thought, I'm going to safely assume more than any of us, because he's working on this as a major project about queer urban spaces in the way poets and poetics teach us about that. This poem is such a beautiful classic example of a way of looking at it. So I really want to start with the following question which is, specifically what is the point of view? By that, I mean nothing metaphorical, I mean literally what is the subject position? Where are we looking from in this poem? Now, there's not just one singular spot, and the second part of this question is how would this POV be different from a O'Hara poem in the city? I think the is answer is fundamental here. So who is the lucky person? It's Allie Castlemann. Hi, Allie. Hi. What's the point of view? Where are we looking from? I think, and I'm trying to scan to find the line. I think he's at his desk. Seems to be. Writing. What's the view from the desk? There's a chimney breathing a little smoke. There's noise of traffic. Where are we? We're in New York on Second Avenue, I'm assuming. Let's just say on the East side. Yeah. East side. Great. It's very late February, maybe the 20th. Yeah. So we know a lot about the point of view. We want to throw it open to anybody to respond to the question of, now that we know this very particular place of scene, how does that differ from other New York school of strategies? I think, I know Davy has something to say about this. Why don't we hear first, and then I'll turn to you from some else, Amber Rose. One way that I characterize some other New York school poets' poems are that they're moving through space, and that they're moving through commercial space. This is a neighborhood scene, it's a domestic scene. He's inside one house looking over into other houses, over other houses, and isn't really giving us that, I'm moving through, I'm leaving, I'm bobbing, I'm buying things, I'm stopping. So this takes us into an East neighborhood. Yeah, I love the point about it being noncommercial. So much of O'Hara is incidentally commercial, it's almost like product placement. Whereas the product placement here is the United Nations, which when this was written, there was still some hope that the United Nations could be a public service to the international community. Davy O'Hara, there's such a fundamental difference here. Can you explain it? Yeah, so something that I think about with this poem, is that Schuyler wrote this poem when he we still sharing an apartment with O'Hara on 49th Street. Amazing. To think about them writing from or in coming back to the same locations. So O'Hara would say, "It's noon, I'm going to walk around, and give that POV, and Jimmy is like, "I really I'm tired. I think I'm going to sit at my desk." Sure, and one big distinction between the two of them is that O'Hara's certainly read ass, and I understand O'Hara to be an able bodied and able minded poet, and Schuyler is a neurodisabled poet. Schuyler is a poet who's bipolar, in his later years he's physically disabled. Schuyler's relationship to the city is certainly marked by the ways that he accommodates how the city is available to him. So there's something to me really radical about this poem of like, the way that I feel most comfortable, the way the city's most available to me as if I write about it from my desk, but here's all the stuff that's part of the city. In a O'Hara poem, a woman with a baby in a window is not the thing a domestic scene that becomes public because you're seeing it across public space that it's part of a portrait of the city, that would never happen in O'Hara poem. What constitutes New York in 1950s is so different for Schuyler and O'Hara, which is part of what's exciting about slashing out what kind of New York does the New York School care about. We get a lot of information of that here. Yeah. So, more than superficially, it is a New York school poem. But fundamentally, it's place of seeing and it's private to public seeing is very different. Gabe, you look like you have something to say. Yeah. One of the dynamics that comes with that specific POV that we're talking about, and being in a stable position in looking out from one's house is how much frames matter in this. I mean quite literally that frame in the sense of that line about the woman coming to her window, and how it all works in together. But as I mean, this question of like the way something is framed or the way something is changed by what's around it. So we have that line, is it the light that makes the baby pink. So there's a real attention here. What is he asking? I think he's asking how is what I perceive affected by the things around the objects, not like the natural state of the baby, but the light that is coming onto the baby makes the baby look like this. So I think there's a real. He connects the baby's color to the whole question of a poet seeing in a city at, is it sundown? It's 5:00 PM. Yeah, It's at 5:00 PM. So, I think Bernadette Mayer who's commented on this poem feels the same way. There is something very naturalistic. This is like a nature poem from the city in a way. Go ahead. What I was going to say is that it's really attentive to artifice as well, that's what's so great about that line, the greener the tulips stands and leaves like something I can't remember. There's a lot of testing of what happens when I set an object next to or frame it in a specific way? What's going to happen to it if I say, "this reminds me of a thing that I don't remember." There's a lot of tests about framing in. My next question is, and it's going to be, we use the random selection machine here. When you get to the line, I can't get over how it all works in together. If you hear the performance, and Schuyler read publicly twice. Three times. Three times. So it's very rare. The one that you'll hear in ModPo was his first reading introduced by John Ashbery at DIA. When he gets to this line, if you listen carefully, you can hear the audience, mostly consisting of friends, gasp. I just want to ask somebody about that gasp. I can't get over how it all works in together. There's something spectacularly important about that moment. You know it, when you get it, and most poets that we admire don't pause to say, "By the way, this is really good shit. This is working the way I want it to." I think that Schuyler gets away with it, and I guess I want to ask somebody about this. The person I want to ask, Gabe already just spoke. I'm sorry this system doesn't really work, and that's Arl, he's not going to answer his own question. Okay. This is Emily Arnett who's not here. The system is not working. System is breaking down. It's breaking down. Amber Rose Johnson. That line, I can't get over how it all works in together. Are you moved by that? I am moved. But it's simultaneously very subtle and completely overwhelming feeling of being moved. The line that it actually makes me think of, which is one of my favorite lines in this poem, is it's the yellow dust inside the tulips. There's also something about being able to pause in a city like New York, that's always moving so quickly that we think of as loud, and like metal, and steel and movement, to pause and see something beautiful and delicate that really you could put perhaps some definitions of physics or science or these other things of how this thing got there. But something about the magnificence of colors, and our ability to pause and see color, and to spend time with it, and to be moved by it's sheer beingness is a gift. I think that it's a gift that many poets give us and Schuyler just does such a great job of exemplifying it. Yes, very well said. Thank you. Max, why does the speaker say that they can't get over it? Can't get over what exactly? How would you paraphrase those two lines? I can't get over how it all works in together. It all. Yeah, it's intentionally ambiguous, I think, because he's trying to get it at this almost sublime feeling, this like there's a overwhelming recognition that everything is interconnected, intertwined between, as emeralds you are saying you have this dust on the tulips. So you have this very simple relation of objects and then he's just been looking out of his window and seeing these ever-larger relations of objects and systems that seemed somehow to all be in harmony, to the point that he's even seeing the UN building and thinking of all potentially, or where the reader is invited to imagine like the heads of states all gathering there or something. So you have even this- It's a big evening after all.It's a big evening. Big meaning. A big evening at the UN. Yes. But also a big in the sense that the sunset is magnificent. Sure. When you have the view of the UN from below, it has a certain modern monumentality. But also big in the sense that there's some hope there. Yeah. I know for sure. There's just this incredible way to his eye or his perspective as being drawn out into these very abstracted realms like to the global almost, with the presence of the UN there. Yeah. One last question then we're going to ask David to offer an extended foreign word if he wants to on this poem, which is marvelous. We talked about this a minute ago, Amber Rose heard of, it's the yellow dots inside the tool, it's the shape of the tool, it's the water in the drinking glass tubes around, it's a day like any other. What's the it that is? Is it thing the reason I write, the reason I overcome my own complex relationship with this city in this world. What is it? Here comes the answer. The answer comes from Lily Appelbaum. Lily has this. She always has it. Thank you so much. Something I want to say to start is, I really like pairing the line that we just talked about. The line "I can't get over how it all works" in together with the final line "It's a day like any other." So I think from that point to the end, a loop gets created for me at least, of like there's astounding wonder and I get to see it every day from my desk basically. It's both something I can't get over and it's something that happens every day. It's a day like any other. I think that like you were saying it could be the city, it could be the month of February since that's the title of the poem, it could be that feeling of not being able to get over the weight all works in together, but yeah I see this is constantly looping. This kind of amazing way that the sun creates this city loop, that one person sitting in one place and looking and dreaming outward can continue. Thank you. Before we turn to Davy, a little game we are going to play which is a multiple game. I call on you and you toss out very briefly a characteristic, a quality, a way, in which this poem does align with the New York School sensibility and mode. Does align not does not, but does, okay? All right. Who goes first? Hannah, one little thing, it's got to be quick. I would say the observational quality. The quality of just making the city as much a subject of your poem and a speaker of your poem as much as a person as a speaker. Dave, New York School. First-person perspective, I can see the little faces. There's a bit of I do this I do that about it. Molly? It's a day like any, it's a daily poem. Max? Association of ideas and objects. Allie? Yeah. Rubbing here is internal between time, between season, between place, whereas externally rubbing on the street. Ambrose. I was also going to say marking time, but marking time in both precise and imprecise way, 5 pm the day before March 1st. Before we turn to Davy, I'll just throw one out for me, this is a little complicated. The way that these poets use the word "like" is really very contemporary, you wouldn't see that in the twenties and thirties and forties. But these people they are a new American, seemed iterations of beads, they really use the word "like" in a very wonderful informal. It's a multi-purpose word. Sometimes it's just transitioned. So the analogy to a woman who just came to her window, I can't get over how it all works together, "like a woman who just". We're not supposed to think that that like in here is working like a simile. Like that the coming together and working together is in some kind of literal figurative way. That's a bad way to put it literally figurative. This "like", this is what I'm now thinking about, it means magnificent. O'Hara is very good at it as well and Vector O'Hara has a poem called "Like" which is out of this world fantastic. Davy, extended final thought. You've really thought about this poem, we want to hear what you think. Something that makes this poem emblematic of the New York School for me, is that when I read it's like a really bit temptive, generous relationship to urban transformation, that this is a poem that is so amazing in part because the poem written in the 1950s where Skylar is like, "I'm going to set in my window and I'm going to wash up, change, and I'm going to say that that's beautiful." This is in a city that's undergoing massive urban renewal. So large sections of the city are being raised, Manhattan's population from the fifties to the seventies is decreasing despite the fact that the population of New York overall is growing. That this is city experiencing a lot of tremendous physical rupture, and it's like immensely redemptive gesture to be able to say "I'm going to look out the window and find forms of urban change that I can claim for my own, that I can not equate urban change only with rupture and clearance and demolition, but that cities are always constantly changing and every tiny moment, and I'm going to sit at my desk or whatever it is, 10 15 minutes and from the moment that I sit down to the moment that I finish this poem, things are going to change. The city is not going to be the same city it was when I started writing the poem and I'm going to find something useful about that, as a way of thinking about ways that individuals like all of us living in cities can claim urban change for something other than district admins. Would you be able to connect the sense of disability to what you just said about urban renewal? It's very difficult connection to make, but you are capable of it. Yeah. I think that that connection the way that I think about is in terms of obsolescence and there's a relationship between saying like, "My body is part of the city and the way that I see this city is part of what constitutes on urban frame even though it was unusual for the New York School and the way that you might imagine a normative structure obsolescence. You might imagine obsolescence that is punitive, itself no longer being the reality. You might imagine a space for the city and everyone in it can be there and take up space the way Skylar is allowing himself take the space by reading the setting." Thank you, David. Thank you all. This was great
