Schuyler, James (Marcus)

Schuyler, James [Marcus] (1923–91)Chicago‐born author associated with the New York school of poets, including Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara was on the staff of the Museum of Modern Art. His first poems, Salute (1960), part of a series to which the other members of the school also contributed, showed their close relation to painting by being issued with prints that are not intended to be illustrative but are just as important as the texts. Later poems, generally underplayed and quietly observant of particulars, pastoral and urban, appear in May 24th or So (1966), Freely Espousing (1969), The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poet (1980, Pulitzer Prize), A Few Days (1985), and Selected Poems (1988). He also wrote experimental plays and collected prose and poetry in The Home Book (1977). Alfred and Guinevere (1958) is a short novel about the summer holiday of a boy and his sister; A Nest of Ninnies (1969) is a novel written with Ashbery that comically travesties the lives of suburbanites; and What's for Dinner? (1979) is an amusing but serious novel about middle‐class suburbanites, some “normal,” others institutionalized as mentally troubled.