Discovering James Schuyler

I picked up James Schuyler’s Selected Poems at the Brooklyn Central Library because the cover was beautiful. It was a watercolor painting of a man sitting on a yellow couch, gazing at something unseen with his head against his hand. The man is pensive and polite, but his eyes are far away, like his thoughts have better places to be than the cover of a book.

I took the collection home and the next morning, I carried it outside to read. My stoop doesn’t get any sunlight so I crossed the street and sat on a stranger’s instead. As I opened to the first page, a man opened the door behind me. I froze. “I’m sorry, I’m reading poetry,” I said, as if the fact that I was