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.”

Postscript: Helen Vendler 1933 - 2024

Helen Vendler (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Helen Vendler died April 23, 2024, age 90.  She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. I first encountered her work in The New Yorker. I remember the piece – “On Marianne Moore” (October 16, 1978; included in Vendler’s great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us). I remember the line that hooked me: “Marguerite Young told, in a festschrift for Moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, how the poem ‘Nevertheless’ arose: Moore, seeing in a box of strawberries a misshapen green one, almost all seeds, said, ‘Here’s a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle,’ and found thereby a first line.” 

Here's a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle – I love that line. It belongs to Moore, not Vendler. But credit Vendler for including the circumstances of its origin in her brilliant essay. Vendler was always interested in the “how” of poetry – how it's conceived, how it’s constructed, how it achieves its effects. She was a formalist extraordinaire. Her writing taught me that style matters immensely. As she said of the poets she reviewed in her great Soul Says (1995), “Each has left a mark on language, has found a style. And it is that style – the compelling aesthetic signature of each – that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.” Her responses are among the glories of literary criticism. For example:

On Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man”: “Probe after probe enters the reclining figure’s unknown substance: Is he stone? Is he tough bird-tissue? Is he a gnarled root? The probes are successively visual and tactile, and are sometimes two-dimensional (“the grain of his wrists”), sometimes three-dimensional (“the ball of his heel”). The corpse, at this point, is still unressurected: it is stony, wooden, cold, alien, made of disarticulated parts. But as the similes turn to metaphors, the corpse begins to stir.” [The Breaking of Style, 1995]

On Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”: “The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.” [Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980]

On James Schuyler’s “Used Hankerchiefs 5¢”: “Hopkins would have liked this writing, with its exquisite texture of letters and sounds, its slippage from description to theory of style, its noticing of visual effects, both accidental (crush marks) and intended (cross-stitching). In this affectionate piece, Schuyler allies himself with an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade – with Stevens’ Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet, with Elizabeth Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute. 'Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?' says Bishop’s Crusoe.” [Soul Says, 1995]

Note that “exquisite texture of letters and sounds.” Vendler relished verbal texture. In her superb “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, she wrote, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.” It's the art of Vendler's criticism, too. She was a master of it.

Michael Hofmann's "Where Have You Been?"

This is just a quick note to say how much I’m enjoying Michael Hofmann’s new essay collection, Where Have You Been?. Hofmann isn’t a New Yorker writer. But his dazzling, delicious book connects with the magazine in several interesting ways. For example, it contains two excellent essays on Elizabeth Bishop, who contributed more than fifty poems and five short stories to The New Yorker. In “Bishop/Lowell Correspondence,” a review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Hofmann catalogues the differences between the two poets:

Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive, solicitous, moody, Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly productive; she is anxious, he when not shockingly and I think genuinely self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this is an understatement—"sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing"; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small-scale, barely worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed.

At one point, Hofmann says, “Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he's not sure).” In comparing Bishop’s and Lowell’s letters, Hofmann pulls no punches; he likes Bishop’s better: “Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention, interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him (even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down to something like focal length—his is about a foot.”

For a kinder view of Lowell’s letter writing, see Dan Chiasson’s "Works On Paper" (The New Yorker, November 3, 2008),  in which he calls Lowell’s recovery letters “among the most brilliant letters ever written, for the simple reason that the writing of them operates against such tragic stakes.”

Another piece in Hofmann’s collection that links with The New Yorker is “James Schuyler.” Schuyler contributed at least a dozen poems to The New Yorker and was the subject of a wonderful essay, called “Whatever Is Moving,” by longtime New Yorker poetry editor, Howard Moss. Hofmann mentions Moss’s piece in his essay. Regarding Schuyler, Hofmann says he is “at once a painterly poet, descriptive and objective, and at the same time he uses all the subliminal, microbial quirks of language.”

A third New Yorker connection came to mind when I read Hofmann’s piece on Zbigniew Herbert. The New Yorker published a number of Herbert’s poems, including the John and Bogdana Carpenter translation of "Mr. Cogito on a Set Theme: 'Friends Depart,' " (June 28, 2004), which Hofmann quotes, using the Alissa Valles translation. Hofmann rips Valles’s translation of Herbert, calling it, among other things, “slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect.”

And fourthly, reading Hofmann’s absorbing piece on Max Beckmann, I recalled Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker review of Saint Louis Art Museum’s “Max Beckmann and Paris” ("The French Disconnection," March 8, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s 2008 collection, Let’s See), which contains this memorable description of Beckmann’s great Quappi in Blue: “In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade.” Hofmann, in his “Max Beckmann," also notes the detonative character of Beckmann’s work. He says, “In its drama and clutter and burstingness, it regularly challenges the very idea of what can be done in a painting.”

All of these connections are worth exploring further. Where Have You Been? is a rich, spirited collection. I’m enjoying it immensely.