“It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated Birthday to James Schuyler by Ben Lerner
I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but 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 tiny, beloved “Salute”—which is not the poem that I mean to discuss—both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn’t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler’s enjambments—at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal—are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before th