August 11, 2025 Issue

I’m delighted to see Dan Chiasson back in the magazine. He’s been gone four years. I’ve missed his perceptive, original reviews. He’s a protégé of Helen Vendler. Like her, he’s keenly attentive to style. In this week’s issue, he reviews Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other, a biography of poet James Schuyler. Chaisson likes the book. He calls it a “filigreed and astute presentation" of Schuyler's life.

Chiasson is a fan of Schuyler’s work. He says that several of Schuyler’s poems “rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature.” He writes,

Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman. 

My favorite line in Chiasson’s piece is his comment on Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem”: 

Schuyler’s celebration of the damaged body and its persistent joys, including a free jukebox inside the brain and a soft-core-porn channel that we call the imagination, made “The Morning of the Poem” the best keep-profane-the-Sabbath poem since Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

Chaisson has written about Schuyler before. In “ ‘A Hat off a Yacht ...’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010), he reviewed Schuyler’s posthumous Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. In that piece, he said,

Schuyler’s brilliant trick was to translate things, even throwaway things, as little as possible, as though testing the innate power of disposable reality to withstand the test of time. 

In the earlier review, it’s the seeming artlessness of Schuyler’s poems that fascinates Chaisson. In his new piece, Chaisson praises Schuyler for his “brilliant use of embodied attention to contour time, when everything off the page was turbulence.”