Free Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann Page B

and insecure. Having asked his question—doesn’t it sound like a visitor’s, easy to ask, hell to reply to, that he’s unhappily parroting to himself?—he heroically interposes “The sky,” perhaps so as not to have to offer information about himself. Unluckily, “The sky” sounds like a play on the poet’s name, and the predicate may perhaps offer clues about his condition (and I have seen both the following ascribed to Schuyler): the schizophrenic “slowly/swiftly,” or else the bipolar “went blue to gray,” a past verb—more, painful, relearning of language—suggesting the change—which of course the speaker has no hope of quantifying—from depressed, “blue,” to medicated, “gray.” “A gray,” the information carries on, in a rather unlooked-for way, “in which some smoke stands.” The last word, wholly unexpected, makes the poem. Not that one had any doubts about the poem being made—it makes itself throughout—but such an ending, dutiful, dominant, at no stage in the poem seems remotely within its reach. Here is the unlooked-for affirmation, a new physics in which smoke “stands” while windows “stream” and brick is “white” and “fireproof; or else / it isn’t.” And of course, platitudinously, “no smoke without fire” and the patients are the first “to go,” and where this one, humorously, has “gone.” “Some.”
    What looked like a static scene—a view out the window!—is instead a little drama. The interest of the poem—fully held by the minutely controlled to-and-fro, paint-and-scrape of the sentences, its terrible, casual sensitivity—is in its naked tact and its secret optics. The form of the arch (it is hard to know where to say this) had [the suicide] Kleist’s admiration for being kept up by the desire of every individual part of it to fall. “Arches” is the poem of someone with his glasses off, or his brain decoupled, of the infinitely delicate return of matter, manner, humor, humanity. What we call way, Kafka said, is wavering or dithering. The Payne Whitney poems ( pace Heaney) waver into sense. They take very small steps tremendously irresolutely. At the beginning of “Arches,” the speaker recognizes or discerns nothing (by the end, he sounds wise). Not just that, he seems to be under very low pressure. There is painfully little forward momentum. Most rhetoric is based on repetition; Schuyler uses repetition that is only repetition, that is without rhetoric. The title—ironically—falls into the poem, and the poem shuffles from “buildings” to “building,” from “frame” to “framed,” from “the patients” to “Patients.” It sounds potentially tremendously powerful—if Lowell or someone had written within such parameters, it would have had tremendous power (say, “tops of the moving trees move helter-skelter”)—yet no power accrues to it here. Rather, the miracle is that the frailty, even the lightness of the thing is not impaired. It is someone taking these tiny steps, backward and forward, and not treading on anything, not hurting anything.
    However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, as it were, however low, is merriment. The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a kind of low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire. It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary—and I have come to think that Schuyler is everywhere literary. It seems to me not inappropriate to be reminded of other poems and poets by “Arches,” by the