James Schuyler is [one] of the New York School poets, whose ideas come out of Abstract Expressionism. Schuyler, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, believe—it seems—in putting down the first (or last) thing that comes into their heads because any correction comes out of a new moment and is therefore a different poem, which they also write of course. The snag to this is that words, unlike paint, don't automatically assume a convenient abstraction—and hence a spurious form—when slapped on any old how. They just look slapped on.

This not to say that Schuyler's poems [in The Morning of the Poem] don't sometimes have a lame-duck charm. "He's extremely, almost pathologically shy," Ashbery said of him recently…. Mostly, these are poems of waiting and healing, of desperate situations barely redeemed by the jotting of words you feel with a pang are their author's only contact...