Impotent Poethics: James Schuyler and Reparative Climate Lyricism

James Schuyler is affiliated with American postwar avant-garde art communities and devotes a significant portion of his oeuvre to what could be called nature poetry, though he is only conditionally deemed a poet of either category. This essay argues that Schuyler’s poetry is an exemplar of the ways in which the judgment structure the environmental humanities inherited from avant-garde aesthetic discourse fails to accommodate work that does not prescribe action or ideological change. In doing so it demonstrates how Schuyler’s “Empathy and New Year” models a reparative climate lyricism that, in the face of the climate crisis, helps readers process skepticism (about, for example, the possibility of meaningful action), acknowledge the unknowable, and sustain attachments to everyday environments and literary objects. Schuyler’s poetry recognizes the difficulty and necessity of cultivating an ethics of not-knowing, an ethics of desire-for-life despite the indeterminable, opaque relation between self and other, aesthetic and effect.