James Schuyler

One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.

Alfred and Guinevere

John Ashbery

The insular tranquility of a group of suburban New Yorkers is shattered by two vivacious sisters from Paris in a comic novel about the pretensions of America's upper-middle-class by two of America's foremost poets.

A Novel

A Nest of Ninnies

James Schuyler's utterly original What's for Dinner? features a cast of characters who appear to have escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting to run amok. In tones that are variously droll, deadpan, and lyrical, Schuyler tells a story that revolves around three small-town American households. The Delehanteys are an old-fashioned Catholic family whose twin teenage boys are getting completely out of hand, no matter that their father is hardly one to spare the rod. Childless Norris and Lottie Taylor have been happily married for years, even as Lottie has been slowly drinking herself to death. Mag, a recent widow, is on the prowl for love. Retreating to an institution to dry out, Lottie finds herself caught up in a curious comedy of group therapy manners. At the same time, however, she begins an ascent from the depths of despair—illuminated with the odd grace and humor that readers of Schuyler's masterful poetry know so well—to a new understanding, that will turn her into an improbable redeemer within an unlikely world. What's for Dinner? is among the most delightful and unusual works of American literature. Charming and dark, off-kilter but pedestrian, mercurial yet matter-of-fact, Schuyler's novel is an alluring invention that captures both the fragility and the tenacity of ordinary life.

What's for Dinner?

This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize. "Schuyler's subject is his life, and his poems often read like elegant journal entries." - Publishers Weekly

Collected Poems

Frank O'Hara

Kenneth Koch

Barbara Guest

Alejandro Morellón

Juan F. Rivero

Ojeda, Mónica

Carlos Recamán

Leonor Saro

Antología

La escuela poética de Nueva York

The Morning of the Poem

The search for ways to contain the evanescence, fragility and ephemeral beauty of the moment has preoccupied lyric poets from Catullus and Herrick to James Schuyler. For Schuyler, indeed, discovering and glowing in the ineffable contingency of the moment was both theme and goal. Nowhere in his work is this more true than in that marvelous celebration of the miracle of impermanence, his remarkable Diary, here made available in full for the first time. "The Diary", editor Nathan Kernan has noted, "is a work of art; it is, in a large sense, a poem. Stylistically it is of a piece with Schuyler's poems: it is cut from the same cloth, or is, in places, the cloth from which the poems were cut... The Diary's peculiar combination of fragment, meticulous description, literary allusion, commonplace book and remembrance is beautiful in its own right, and very much a window into the mind that wrote the poems". Nathan Kernan's extremely thoughtful, scrupulous and informed editing provides this long-awaited volume a scholarly care it deserves. Kernan's editorial glosses and biographical sketches on the cast of characters, placing Schuyler in a rich social context of poets, artists and friends, provide what amounts to a handy thumbnail history of the New York School.

The Diary of James Schuyler

Poems

Freely Espousing

The Home Book brings together many of James Schuyler's unpublished or little-known works written between 1951 and 1970, including nature poems, absurdist plays, stories, diaries, meditations and a cantata.

Prose and Poems, 1951-1970

The Home Book

Schuyler's new collection has at its core a nearly book-length poem in which the elements of letter writing, autobiography, and fable combine to transfigure poet and audience, past and present, and suffering and pleasure

The Crystal Lithium

A Few Days

Hymn to Life

Pulitzer Winner and first of New York Poets (Ashbery, O'Hara, Kock, Guest) have letters published.

Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991

Just the Thing

In Selected Poems, we experience the full range of James Schuyler's achievement, confirming that he was among the late twentieth century's truly vital and distinctive poetic voices. One of the most significant writers of the New York School--which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others--Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

Selected Poems

Harry Mathews

III-IV.

Locus Solus

May 24th Or So

A Sun Cab

'The New York Poets' gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler.

James Schuyler

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