Selected poems

Plot

"[James Schuyler's] poems are seldom 'about' anything in the way poetry traditionally is; they are the anything. To reread him is to live, as though life were an experience one had just forgotten and been newly awakened to." In James Schuyler's Selected Poems, we are able to experience the full range of his 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 gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud. As Howard Moss wrote, "[He was] one of the original poets in America . . .[with] the knack of making the lyric dynamic." Book jacket.