Mysterious Poet Revealed

On September 6, at 5 pm, The Cornwall Library presents Nathan Kernan, celebrated author of the new A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, in conversation with Alice Quinn, Columbia professor and past poetry editor at The New Yorker. The talk is followed by a book signing.

Kernan’s is the long-awaited definitive biography of Schuyler, a great American poet (1923-1991) who, along with Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, was an original member of the so-called New York School of poetry.

The biography traces the tumultuous arc of Schuyler’s life and work. He came to New York City in 1944 but later spent time in Southampton, Long Island, living with Fairfield Porter and his family, and spending summers in Maine. Subsequent years in New York were marked by poverty and mental illness, yet it was during this time that he wrote some of his greatest poems. After moving to the Chelsea Hotel in 1979, his circumstances began to turn around, and when he died, at sixty-seven, his life was stable and fulfilled.

Schuyler’s poetry embodies the quiet beauties of the natural world and the mundane stuff of everyday existence, even as his own life was often messy and troubled. Kernan explores this and other paradoxes of Schuyler’s singular life within the vibrant milieu of mid-century New York’s poets and painters.

Here’s what the critics are saying about "A Day Like Any Other":

• Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker hails Nathan Kernan’s “intrepid” biography, “this filigreed and astute presentation” of a poet “whose reminiscences form the core of several poems that rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature.“
• Evan Kindley in The Nation calls the book “engrossing” and “invaluable” and the poems of James Schuyler “one of the permanent joys of American literature…..Drawing from dozens of original interviews alongside reams of unpublished archival material, Kernan provides a wealth of detail about a figure who, while hardly unknown, has long retained an air of mystery.”
• Angela Ball at bestamericanpoetry.com says “We have long hoped for a biography of James Schuyler. Now, thanks to Nathan Kernan, who also gave us The Diary of James Schuyler, we have it. Not only is it worth the wait, but also a biography truly worthy of its subject: his humility and pride in accomplishment, his extraordinary ordinary life.”

In 1992, Nathan Kernan collaborated with painter Joan Mitchell on Poems, published by Tyler Graphics. He edited The Diary of James Schuyler, published in 1997, and has written numerous art reviews, catalogue essays and monographs. 

Attend in-person only. Registration requested: https://cornwalllibrary.org/events/