Dispatch from the Catskills

The ones who read this / and the ones who don’t.

I’m spending my spring break in the Catskills, in the woods outside a town called Bovina, pronounced Bow-VINE-uh, as I learned while watching a video that an artist who lives here posted to Instagram regarding her open studio. (That artist is Emily Johnston, and her drawings and paintings, which I had the pleasure of seeing in person, are subdued and evocative and relate to nature. Her new paintings are made using pigments she derives by grinding up rocks that she finds outside; she wants to collaborate with the place, not merely represent it. She also has a friend named Katie who makes a killer pine nut cookie.)

The cabin in which I’m staying is airy and warm. It’s decorated with old leather furniture in browns and ochres, thick red rugs. March is rainy and muddy, or at least this week it is.

Being here reminds me of growing up in Vermont. On our hourlong walk with the dog yesterday, we set out from the cabin and walked through woods, past a few houses, and down the side of a mountain. Just before the downslope began in earnest, a gorgeous view of the mountains in their winter blues opened up. Going and coming back, three vehicles passed us, a truck, a car, and a vehicle towing a big enclosed trailer, the sort that you might use to move livestock, though I didn’t see any vents for airflow, so quite possibly that was not what was being moved. Each of the drivers gave us what I think of as the Vermont wave. It’s when a driver lifts a hand off the steering wheel in friendly acknowledgment. Probably people outside of Vermont and the Catskills do this, but I’ve lived a lot of places and these are the only two where I’ve noticed it done with regularity.

In Brooklyn, there is no such thing. I was going to say “obviously,” but is it obvious? I suppose it is. Of course now I’ll probably notice it in the city.

While we’re here—“we” being me and Cam, my partner, and our dog, who is fourteen and a half and full of energy but nervous about descending the stairs to the loft, which is fair, because soft fur grows around his paw pads and he can struggle to get traction, so there’s been some encouraging, with one of us on the stairs above him to coach and one below to catch him if he falls, which he never has, though I’m nervous about the possibility, and some giving in and carrying—I’ve been trying to write but mostly reading. Usually, in a cabin, I read with a lot of focus, but this week, I’ve been a restless reader, beginning books and putting them down. James Schuyler’s THE MORNING OF THE POEM is the one book that I’ve finished.

I owe a debt to Kamran Javadizadeh for introducing me to Schuyler’s work, and specifically to his poems “February 13, 1975” and “Sleep,” from his Payne Whitney series, made up of eleven poems written while in the care of the Payne Whitney Clinic on the Upper East Side. (It was a psychiatric clinic, opened in 1932 in a building on East 68^th Street.) After reading the poems and reading about James Schuyler’s stay at the clinic, I was recently startled to go to my doctor’s office, and, as I scanned a directory, seeking to confirm which floor I needed before pushing the elevator button, to discover a floor labeled “Payne Whitney.” I later learned that it’s a different building than the one in which Schuyler received treatment, that building having been torn down, but the same institution. I haven’t been to that floor yet, but who knows: life is long.

Anyway, I’d been wanting to read more of Schuyler’s poetry for a number of months, and this has turned out to be the right time. He was a New York School poet. According to The Poetry Foundation, “In 1951, Schuyler was introduced to Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery at a party in New York. The three poets would go on to share an apartment on 49th Street in Manhattan and to work closely together, often collaborating on a variety of writing projects.” I find it somehow heartening to think of the three of them sharing an apartment. Even famous poets need roommates! Plus: imagine the parties! Schuyler worked as a curator for the Museum of Modern Art, too, and wrote for Art News. It sounds like a glamorous life, though his poems are not glamorous, and his life, regardless of how much glamour it did or did not contain, was clearly not always an easy one.

I admire his poems’ plainspokenness and their focus on the ordinary while, at the same time, suggesting huge wells of emotion. “Sleep,” written when he was an in-patient at the clinic, begins, “The friends who come to see you / and the friends who don’t.” There is too much to say, the period suggests, so we’re stopping here, but nonetheless, I feel it all.

Schuyler feels like the right poet for this cabin and this time in my life, and for this season, rainy March, shoulder season in the Catskills, where businesses’ hours are still curtailed, though not as curtailed as they are during the winter, when some shut down entirely. This season, in turn, feels like the right one in which to send out this first entry in “Shoulder Season.” My plan is to write about my life a little, and about books a little, and about art a little, and about place a little, and to see where that takes us.

I’ve settled on the name “Shoulder Season” because it suggests what I like most in art: complexity, subtlety, intimacy, an obliqueness and refusal of the obvious, shot through with unexpected pleasures. I also like humor, and to me, the phrase contains the possibility, at least, of wryness. I wrote a story called “Shoulder Season,” which, when I do a good job reading it and the audience is on my wavelength, meaning I haven’t scared them too much with the seriousness of the opening, makes people laugh. The name suggests to me the role of these dispatches, too: adjacent to a piece of writing shaped for and selected by someone else for publication, a story or essay or book, say, but, to me, all the more appealing for that: for its immediacy, for the ways in which it resembles a sketch (which I love, as a form) or a letter.

Thanks for being here. Let’s end with some Schuyler, patron saint of this little dispatch: “Give my love to, oh, anybody.”