Eileen Myles in conversation with Nathan Kernan, author of A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (FSG, 2025), on the life and language of James Schuyler, with additional discussion & reading of Schuyler’s work by Tom Carey, Jason Morris, & Hannah Zeavin.

*

Born in Chicago in 1923, James Schuyler grew up in Washington, DC, and upstate New York before moving to New York City in 1944, where he fell into the social orbit of the poet W. H. Auden. After two years in Italy, he returned to New York in 1949 and began to publish his first poems. There he met fellow poets O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Koch. For many years he lived outside the city in Southampton, Long Island, in a close relationship with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family, and spent his summers in Maine. Schuyler’s subsequent years in New York City were marked by poverty and mental illness, yet it was during this time that he wrote some of his greatest poems. After his move to the Chelsea Hotel in 1979, the poet’s circumstances began to turn around, and when he died, much too soon at sixty-seven, his life was stable and fulfilled.

In praise of Schuyler’s poetry, John Ashbery wrote: “To reread him is to live, as though life were an experience one had just forgotten and been newly awakened to.” 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. A Day Like Any Other, Kernan’s absorbing biographical study, explores this and other paradoxes of Schuyler’s singular life within the vibrant milieu of mid-century New York’s poets and painters.

*

Nathan Kernan is a writer who lives in New York. He edited The Diary of James Schuyler, which was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1997, and his biography of Schuyler, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the Fall of 2025.

Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry will be published by Fonograf in April 2026. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of ’22. Their newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, came out in ’23 from Grove Atlantic. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

Tom Carey is a writer, poet, and vicar in the Church of the Epiphany in Los Angeles, California. Carey was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California and is of English and German descent. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Spanish and studied theology at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. His father and grandfathers were western movie actors, and Carey himself studied acting with Jack Garfein and Stella Adler. In the 1970s and 80s Carey fronted for the punk rock band, The Beeks, and was a literary assistant to James Schuyler as well as John Ashbery. Carey became a Franciscan brother in 1988 and ran The Bushwick Play Project and taught poetry in New York City public schools for ten years. Carey’s poetry has been published in various anthologies, magazines and journals. His book of poems titled Desire (Painted Leaf Press, 1997) was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. A novel, Small Crimes, was published by BlazeVox in 2011.

Jason Morris was born in Vermont. He is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Attending Void (Lithic, 2025); Hologram (Two Way Mirror Books, 2025); Low Life (Bird & Beckett Books, 2021); and Levon Helm (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). In addition to poetry, he has written essays on Clark Coolidge’s Crystal Text and Bernadette Mayer’s interest in Nathaniel Hawthorne. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their child.

Hannah Zeavin is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. Zeavin is the author of the award winning books, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press, April 2025). She is at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance (US: Penguin Press; UK: Fern Press), for which she received a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and a 2024 Whiting Foundation Non-Fiction Grant. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis.