About the Book
Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler is the definitive biography of the great American poet who, along with Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, was one of the original members of the so-called New York School of poetry. Kernan opens with Schuyler’s legendary first public reading in 1988 and goes back to trace the tumultuous arc of the poet’s life and work.
Born in Chicago, Schuyler grew up in Washington, DC, and upstate New York, before moving to New York City in 1944, where he fell into the social orbit of the poet W. H. Auden. After two years in Italy, he returned to New York in 1949 and began to publish his first poems. There he met O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Koch. Schuyler struggled periodically with mental illness and was hospitalised several times. From 1962 to 1973, he lived outside the city in Southampton, Long Island, in a close relationship with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family, spending summers in Maine, a period during which Schuyler’s great affinity with the natural world (and Porter’s paintings) was most in evidence in his work. The subsequent decade living in New York City was marked by extreme hardship, stemming from physical and mental illness and poverty. Yet during this tragic low point he wrote some of his greatest poems. With his move to the Chelsea Hotel in 1979, and especially after his last mental breakdown in 1985, Schuyler’s life began to turn around, and when he died, much too soon at sixty-seven, his life was happy and fulfilled.
About the Author :
Nathan Kernan is the editor of The Diary of James Schuyler. He lives in New York.
Review :
"[A] filigreed and astute presentation of [Schuyler's] life." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"A biography truly worthy of its subject: his humility and pride in accomplishment, his extraordinary ordinary life." --Angela Ball, Best American Poetry
"[Kernan] deftly incorporates brief explications of Schuyler's poems that illuminate his life. . . This narrative is a page-turner of the best kind. . . Kernan describes Schuyler with a frank compassion, explicates his work incisively, and displays a deep historical knowledge." --John Skoyles, Commonweal
"Insightful . . . Kernan's excellent A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler compels us to delve further into James Schuyler's oeuvre." --Michael Londra, The Arts Fuse
"[Schuyler's poetry] is one of the permanent joys of American literature, carved out of a life that had more than its portion of misery. Kernan's invaluable book gives us a fuller sense of just how unlikely that miracle was." --Evan Kindley, The Nation
"I discovered James Schuyler's poems fifty years ago and the charm and the mystery of his poems has made him always my Number One. Now Jimmy's life, so warmly and astutely told by Nathan Kernan, is here for us, a page-turner and a queer and passionate, glittering literary gem." --Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"
"The most pastoral, and the most everyday transcendental, of the New York School poets, James Schuyler gifted us with iced-tea skies, gentian distances, and steampipes knocking like a metal heart. He looked unremarkably like a bus driver yet wrote like one of Rilke's angels. At last, in A Day Like Any Other, we have a record of this mad, sad, modest, bemused, and passionate life, as well as meditations on the sublime poetry that tune into Schuyler's frequency with crystal clarity. Nathan Kernan has written a perfectly pitched and masterly biography of one of our finest poets." --Brad Gooch, author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
"James Schuyler's poetry is a celebration of the American language--the plainness with the layered depth, the rhythms of speech. This poetry may not change your life, but it does stop time. Nathan Kernan's book is like being there. It's a supreme accomplishment." --Alex Katz
"Nathan Kernan's passionate five-star biography of James Schuyler affords the reader an inti - mate look into the life of the truant poet of the so-called New York School, who seemed to have dropped in from 'otherwhere.' The biographer's consummate skill in drawing telling inference from compelling implication matches his subject's exacting method. A necessary book for all sent 'otherwhere' by poetry." --James McCourt, author of Lasting City
"How fastidiously and imaginatively Nathan Kernan sounds the depths of James Schuyler's genius, while leaving its ultimate sources beautifully mysterious! Because of Kernan's magnificent biography, with its profound interpretations of individual poems and its graceful recounting of Schuyler's ups and downs, we can appreciate how seemingly without effort his masterpieces floated freely above the stark, fitfully glamorous events, inner and outer, of the poet's rocky existence. Kernan's lucidity and tenderness, combined with a welcome objectivity, allow Schuyler's strange life to seem at once melodramatic and contemplative-- a quietness, sometimes storm-tossed, befitting the profane saint he secretly was." --Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Stubble Archipelago
