The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara
Schuyler, James45 USD
Date
2006
Category
Poetry
Description
Poet Mark Ford has described the letters of James Schuyler as “witty, graceful, sophisticated, and gossipy.” Particularly poignant are these Schuyler letters to fellow poet Frank O’Hara. Entertaining and transcendently poetic, they are the portrait of a friendship between two great New York School poets.
Excerpt
This nonsense is only to tell you I love your
poems in Poetry; as always, in that cutting
garden of salmon pink gladioli, they’re as
fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always
makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches
(At last) from a mountain so I can finally
go sailing over all those valleys with their
crazy farms and towns. I always start bounc-
ing up and down in my chair when I read a
poem of yours like “Radio,” where you seem to
say, “I know you won’t think this is much of a
subject for a poem but I just can’t help it:
I feel like this,” so that in the end you seem
to be the only one who knows what the subject
for a poem is. James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara,
March 27, 1956
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