Free Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann Page A

Schuyler’s, to the effect that while his poems were usually the product of a single occasion looking out a window (his version of the unities!), the poem in question (I think it was “Haze”) departed from this, by using more than one window and more than one occasion. “I do not normally permit myself such licence,” the poet sternly ends. This stood out: for its idiosyncrasy and scrupulousness, for its thoughtful rebellion against unthinking unassumingness, for its (I am somehow convinced) borrowed plumminess. There’s something enjoyably performed and bewigged about it. That was in 1994. From then I date my public espousal of the “poem out of the window”—though that’s an old cause with me—and a little later, I finally began to read Schuyler.
    It was on a morning in Manhattan, the book was The Morning of the Poem (typically, I don’t know how it came to be in my possession), and the poems that convinced me (it’s unusual to remember even this much) were a little sequence of eleven short pieces called “The Payne Whitney Poems.” Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital—in the same way I knew from reading Malcolm Lowry’s little book Lunar Caustic that Bellevue was a New York mental hospital—and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside that, or Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue” or his sequence “Hospital.” Intact records of damage, frail hints at a central neural mystery, words newly out of bandages:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Arches
    of buildings, this building,
    frame a stream of windows
    framed in white brick. This
    building is fireproof; or else
    it isn’t: the furnishings first
    to go: no, the patients. Patients
    on Sundays walk in a small garden.
    Today some go out on a group
    pass. To stroll the streets and shop.
    So what else is new? The sky
    slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
    A gray in which some smoke stands.
    Typical of Schuyler are the adjustments and corrections—like Bishop’s, only more sweeping (and yet somehow just as mildly carried out, “no, the patients,” “slowly/swiftly”). Also the small thoughts and whimsical half-experimental notations, before they are countermanded: “This / building is fireproof,” “Today some go out on a group / pass”—this last reminding me unfortunately of someone’s altogether more robust sneer (is it Berryman?), “nuts in groups about the room.” There is a clear and real external scene, a view or “subject,” and yet always stronger is one’s sense of the poem as being made, like a painting: the quick, nervous applications of paint, and the quick taking of it back. Schuyler is at once a painterly poet, descriptive and objective, and at the same time he uses all the subliminal, microbial quirks of language.
    The poem attempts perhaps to find something to affirm, but everywhere there is either fear or envy (of the patients on their exeat) or a crippling feeling of fatuity. Something as “normal” and ordinary as “To stroll the streets and shop” can rarely have sounded as hesitant and borrowed and speculative as it does here. The infinite wistfulness of the infinitive. To know her is to love her. To walk and chew gum. To pass through the eye of a needle and enter heaven. No wonder it takes them straight out of the poem—leaving the speaker with the self-interrogation which, one senses, he has been avoiding as hard as he could. One infers that the speaker, from shame, from weakness, from “shakiness”—a condition referred to in one of the other poems—or perhaps from lifelong aesthetic preference, would prefer to stick to external, middle-distance things. His speech feels like remedial speech, the words sound odd