490
Wigging in, wigging out:
when I stop to think
the wires in my head
cross: kaboom . How
many trips
by ambulance (five,
count them five),
claustrated, pill addiction,
in and out of mental
hospitals,
the suicidalness ...
PARTISAN REVIEW
What with schizophrenic episodes, the vicissitudes of penury, alcoholism
and drug-addiction, and the hard luck of his homosexual love life, Schuyler
certainly has every bit as much to confess as Lowell or Berryman or Sexton
did . But there is a difference here, one of approach rather than of content.
Confessional poets are actively seeking shock value, intent on borrowing the
impact of appalling incident to give their poetry its power. Schuyler, though
he is as frank about himself as any confessional poet, presents his unhappy
case as merely one aspect of the wild profusion of this life. Why should be be
unduly fascinated by our own extravagance, he asks, when the whole of
existence is so beautifully extravagant and endlessly fascinating? This, he
concludes a series of poems written from the asylum with some typically
low-key lines that function as both a hymn of praise and a poetic credo:
... What is a
poem, anyway.
The daffodils, the heather
and the freesias all
speak
to
me, I speak
back, like St. Francis
and the wolf of Gubbio.
Deft and deceptively simple as this passage is, it illustrates only part of
Schuyler's range. Confronted with the classic American quandary ofwhether
to leave it all out or get it all in, New York poets, and Schuyler especially,
have a hard time making the choice. Or rather, they are too open-minded to
admit the necessity of such a choice, and so tend to oscillate from one ex–
treme to the other. Reading Schuyler's work, one finds poems as narrow as
one or two words per line which confine themselves to a single emotion or
gesture or observation, and one finds other poems that swell to the margins
and extend for fifty pages and consist of virtually everything that has oc-
