A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, book review

A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler

Nathan Kernan
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025

Finishing A Day Like Any Other is like saying goodbye to a dear friend. Indeed, it is over 450 pages of a LIFE. A life like no other.

Really. I used to think that Jimmy and I were a lot alike, that we could have been friends—had I gone to NYC in 1982 instead of Chicago. Instead, I met a lot of people like Jimmy. But, no, after reading the book, I see we are not at all alike.

I think it’s the poetry I could relate to. So accessible. That made me feel I was sitting there in his SRO having a chat, the noise from the busy NY city streets floating up to us through a dingy window. His city poems, the ones describing flowers, his pastoral ones from Vermont, Great Spruce Head Island, etc. The ease of the “Morning of the Poem”, which, according to the biography took many mornings. Just like the long poem “A Few Days” was composed over several months.

I need to keep the biography—not a critical examination but more of a memorial, as put forth by Kernan at a recent reading live streamed  @192books—side by side with the Selected Poems and Collected Poems I own. The background or at least overview of what was going on with Schuyler at different periods really illuminates the poems. Sort of like how as a kid I’d listen to a song and come away with my own interpretation—only to find out later what it really meant. Often, disappointed. I liked my own set up better.

The book also sheds light on the surrounding cast of the New York School and other players. There was a stratum to the poets, musicians, artists, and lovers around him that I needed some context in order to see how they fit into the composition of his life/his art. Another reason to keep A Day Like Any Other Around—to decode exactly what is memory and what is actually the morning in “The Morning of the Poem” or “A Few Days”, etc. The weary journey done. Schuyler developed the prose poem or the narrative poem before there were words to describe the style.

Kernan helped fill out Anne and Fairfield Porter, true friends. They housed him—at times a real strain—for 11 years. He was as much a part of the family as he allowed himself to be, even going with them on vacation to Great Spruce Head Island and when Fairfield had a teaching residency at Amherst College in Massachusetts. This was found family before it became a thing. As well as the lively circle of friends that encompassed Jimmy on up till his death—some more confident in the friendship than others—for a span of forty years.

I am now the same age as he when he died. I’ve had friends and accomplices for over 40 years, who also come and go. I’ve also known found family. Maybe after a few more poems, I’ll again believe we could have been friends too.