A Day Like Any Other - by Nathan Kernan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

The long-awaited biography of the mercurial, troubled, brilliant poet James Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize winner who helped shape the New York School of poetry in the 1960s.

Nathan Kernan's A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler is the definitive biography of the great American poet 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. Opening with Schuyler's legendary first public reading in 1988, Kernan goes back to trace the tumultuous arc of the poet's life and work.

Born in Chicago in 1923, James Schuyler grew up in Washington, DC, and upstate New York before moving to New York City in 1944, where he fell into the social orbit of the poet W. H. Auden. After two years in Italy, he returned to New York in 1949 and began to publish his first poems. There he met fellow poets O'Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Koch. For many years he lived outside the city in Southampton, Long Island, in a close relationship with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family, and spent his summers in Maine. Schuyler's subsequent years in New York City were marked by poverty and mental illness, yet it was during this time that he wrote some of his greatest poems. After his move to the Chelsea Hotel in 1979, the poet's circumstances began to turn around, and when he died, much too soon at sixty-seven, his life was stable and fulfilled.

In praise of Schuyler's poetry, John Ashbery wrote: "To reread him is to live, as though life were an experience one had just forgotten and been newly awakened to." Schuyler's work 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. A Day Like Any Other, Kernan's absorbing biographical study, explores this and other paradoxes of Schuyler's singular life within the vibrant milieu of mid-century New York's poets and painters.

Review Quotes

"I discovered James Schuyler's poems fifty years ago and the charm and the mystery of his poems has made him always my Number One. Now Jimmy's life, so warmly and astutely told by Nathan Kernan, is here for us, a page-turner and a queer and passionate, glittering literary gem." --Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"

"The most pastoral, and the most everyday transcendental, of the New York School poets, James Schuyler gifted us with iced-tea skies, gentian distances, and steampipes knocking like a metal heart. He looked unremarkably like a bus driver yet wrote like one of Rilke's angels. At last, in A Day Like Any Other, we have a record of this mad, sad, modest, bemused, and passionate life, as well as meditations on the sublime poetry that tune into Schuyler's frequency with crystal clarity. Nathan Kernan has written a perfectly pitched and masterly biography of one of our finest poets." --Brad Gooch, author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara

"James Schuyler's poetry is a celebration of the American language--the plainness with the layered depth, the rhythms of speech. This poetry may not change your life, but it does stop time. Nathan Kernan's book is like being there. It's a supreme accomplishment." --Alex Katz

"Nathan Kernan's passionate five-star biography of James Schuyler affords the reader an inti - mate look into the life of the truant poet of the so-called New York School, who seemed to have dropped in from 'otherwhere.' The biographer's consummate skill in drawing telling inference from compelling implication matches his subject's exacting method. A necessary book for all sent 'otherwhere' by poetry." --James McCourt, author of Lasting City

"How fastidiously and imaginatively Nathan Kernan sounds the depths of James Schuyler's genius, while leaving its ultimate sources beautifully mysterious! Because of Kernan's magnificent biography, with its profound interpretations of individual poems and its graceful recounting of Schuyler's ups and downs, we can appreciate how seemingly without effort his masterpieces floated freely above the stark, fitfully glamorous events, inner and outer, of the poet's rocky existence. Kernan's lucidity and tenderness, combined with a welcome objectivity, allow Schuyler's strange life to seem at once melodramatic and contemplative-- a quietness, sometimes storm-tossed, befitting the profane saint he secretly was." --Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Stubble Archipelago

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