CORNWALL—The Cornwall Library will host a special literary conversation Saturday, Sept. 6, between Nathan Kernan, author of “A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler,” and Columbia University professor Alice Quinn.
The program begins at 5 p.m.
Nathan Kernan’s biography is the definitive account of this great American poet (1923-1991) who, along with Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, was an original member of the so-called New York School of poetry.
Schuyler’s work embodies the quiet beauties of the natural world and the mundane stuff of everyday existence, even as his own life was often messy and troubled. Kernan explores this and other paradoxes of Schuyler’s singular life within the milieu of mid-century New York’s poets and painters.
Kernan’s biography traces the tumultuous arc of the poet’s life and work, who came to New York City in 1944 but later lived in Southampton, LI, with Fairfield Porter and his family, spending summers in Maine.
Subsequent years in New York were marked by poverty and mental illness, yet it was during this time that he wrote some of his greatest poems. After moving to the Chelsea Hotel in 1979, his circumstances began to turn around and, when he died, at age 67, his life was stable and fulfilled.
Nathan Kernan lives in New York and in Salisbury. “Poems,” his collaboration with painter Joan Mitchell, was published by Tyler Graphics in 1992. He edited “The Diary of James Schuyler,” published in 1997, and has written numerous art reviews, catalogue essays and monographs.
He will be in conversation with Alice Quinn, a professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987-2007. She was also executive director of the Poetry Society of America and is currently at work on an edition of the poet Elizabeth Bishop’s journals.
Attendance is in-person only. Registration requested.