The Matrix of Poetry: James Schuyler’s Diary

Abstract

In his essay Mikołaj Wiśniewski presents an unpublished 1962 diary entry and two chapters from an unfinished novel found by the author when conducting research in the James Schuyler archive of the Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD. Wiśniewski goes on to show how Schuyler experimented with the diary form long before he started keeping a diary in the late 1960s (the published Diary of James Schuyler starts with 1967) and how the practice always served him as a starting point or “training ground” for other projects, be it a novel or the late long poems of the 1970s and 1980s. The author also comments on Schuyler’s poetics of the quotidian and the boring, contrasting it with Frank O’Hara’s focus on moments of exceptional emotional and perceptual intensity.