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Seeing and Saying

In the 1950s and 60s, just after the Beat poets took the Big Apple, another creative Manhattan group ushered in an additional artistic renaissance. Like the Left Bank literati in Paris during the 1920s, the New York School Poets forged a style of writing based on theories of seeing, being, and painting.

CBU’s Associate Professor of American Literature Mark Silverberg specializes in poetry and visual art and has written about these vanguard poets-cum-art critics-cum-curators as they collaborated with various contemporary painters. In his forthcoming book The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (Ashgate Publishers) Silverberg examines the impact the whole group had on modern culture. And in a recent essay published in Literary Imagination, the journal of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, he focuses on a specific member of the New York School, James Schuyler.

Silverberg argues in “James Schuyler’s Poetics of Indolence” that the writer forsakes the adversarial Beat or “shockingly” personal Confessional modes of his contemporaries. Instead, Schuyler dedicates himself to quiet observation and the attempt “merely to say, to see and say, things/ as they are.”

Other New York School poets like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery were drawn to certain ways of doing art usually associated with the fiery gestures of Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting or the cool irony of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art. Schuyler inclined more to the quiet, meditative, thoughtful mode of Realists like Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter. Silverberg believes this made a big difference in the kind of artistic verse Schuyler produced because the still life painters who influenced him were less concerned with the avant-garde credo to “make it new” and more inclined toward the demands of nature itself for a kind of ethical observation and representation.

“While ‘merely seeing and saying’ may sound straightforward,” adds Silverberg, “Schuyler was well aware of the theoretical complications of such a task, since the observer/recorder inevitably affects, alters, or distorts the observed.” The challenge is therefore to have the poet (Schuyler) perform and the critic (Silverberg) theorize a method of observation and representation so that the world is encountered in its “alterity.” Defined as an openness to new exchanges, the practice of alterity sees the writer/painter and the reader/viewer alike switching their singular perspectives for that of the “Other.”

As Silverberg puts it, the aim of this kind of writing is to present the world that exists outside the conscious mind as a thinking and feeling entity too, thereby giving an “otherness” such as nature its own subjectivity—its own language. “Ultimately,” Silverberg suggests, “Schuyler applies to nature an ecological and ethical imperative: to “see” this non-human abstraction with precision, and to “say” it with compassion.”