October 15: Nathan Kernan-A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler

Presented by 192 Books, Nathan Kernan discusses his book A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2025) with Matthew Bevis, followed by readings from Schuyler's work by Douglas Crase, Eileen Myles, and Charles North. 

This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Wednesday, October 15th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served.

Books will be available for sale after the conversation.

Nathan Kernan -  A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (FSG, 2025)

Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler is the definitive biography of the great American poet 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. Opening with Schuyler’s legendary first public reading in 1988, Kernan goes back to trace the tumultuous arc of the poet’s life and work.

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 the editor of The Diary of James Schuyler. He lives in New York.

Matthew Bevis is based at the English Faculty in Oxford, where he runs a series of poetry initiatives. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Raritan, and The London Review of Books. He is currently finishing a book entitled Then Again: Notes on Lyric. 

Douglas Crase has been best known for his poems in The Revisionist. Long out of print, they are available again in his collected poems, The Revisionist and The Astropastorals. Today he is recognized likewise for his essays on poets, artists, and other cultural figures, some of them his intimate friends. His essays have been newly collected in a single volume, On Autumn Lake.

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in 2022. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994), 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 I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems (2016), Evolution (2018), and a "Working Life" (2024). They live in New York & in Marfa, Texas.

Charles North has published 12 poetry collections, among them Everything and Other Poems (2020), a NY Times New and Noteworthy Book, and What It is Like (2011), which headed NPR's Best Poetry Books of the year; and 3 books of essays. Other publications include collaborations with artist Trevor Winkfield and the poet/painter anthologies Broadway 1 & 2, co-edited with James Schuyler. Among his awards: 2 NEA Fellowships, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, 4 Fund for Poetry Awards.