Sheer Beauty in Schuyler's "The Bluet"

My favorite line in the movie “City of Angels,” is when Meg Ryan is eating a piece of fruit and Nicolas Cage asks her to describe what it tastes like. She responds, “Don’t you know what an orange tastes like?” Get ready. Here it is. This is IT…THE Line… “I don’t know what it tastes like to you.” That line gets me every time. It’s so tender, so caring, and so full of generous, attentive love.

The answer to that line could well serve as the mission statement for the New York School of Poets and Painters. Each painting and each poem is the embodiment of a particular moment in time seen through the lens of the artist. These men and women (probably breaking out of the post war “one-size-fits-all-June-Cleaver-ideology) suddenly say no to the strictures surrounding society, literature, and art. They are brave, courageous, forward thinking, and in the right place at the right time. Like an explosion, their “in and of the moment’s transcendence” is behind each image—written or painted. They collectively “see” how important transient, random moments are…that living, breathing art just IS. There needs to be no definitive line between the art and the artist—nor the art, artist, and receiver. These poets and painters seem to hold almost a collective consciousness in their friendships, their support, and their unity in projecting these vivid images via the pen or the brush.

Schuyler’s “The Bluet” is a perfect example of “painting” a moment with words. We are watching this scene emerge with him…as if we are sitting just inside his eyes. He brings to life this tiny, blue flower, “So small /a drop of sky that / splashed and held, / four-petaled, creamy / in its throat.” We “see” the brown woods, brown leaves, “gray trunks of trees” juxtaposed against the wonder of this blue flower. We “feel” the “air crisp as a / Carr’s table water / biscuit” that “smells” of cider. We can almost “touch” the “frozen apples” on this late October day. With him, we lift our eyes to the hills where the leaves are vibrant in “oriental rug colors.” Then he brings us back to the focus, that single bluet—freeze-framed against all the other images he has framed for us. He tells us nothing matters but this image in time, nothing before “last spring,” or after “next spring.” He not only takes us into the moment with him, but he takes us into the heart’s moment… “unexpected / as a tear when someone / reads a poem you wrote / for him: ‘It’s this line here.’” God! I love the New York Poets!