Author Talk: Nathan Kernan, Author of “A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler”

*NOTE: This event will take place at the Cornwall Town Hall, 24 Pine Street, located next door to the library.

A Special Evening with Nathan Kernan, author of A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, in conversation with Alice Quinn

Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker hails Nathan Kernan’s “intrepid” biography, “this filigreed and astute presentation” of a poet “whose reminiscences form the core of several poems that rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature.”

Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler is the long-awaited definitive biography 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.

Kernan’s enthralling biography traces the tumultuous arc of the poet’s life and work. He came to New York City in 1944 but later spent time in Southampton, Long Island, living with Fairfield Porter and his family, and 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 sixty-seven, his life was stable and fulfilled.

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 vibrant milieu of mid-century New York’s poets and painters.

Nathan Kernan lives in New York and Salisbury, CT.  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. Kernan is also a co-founder and board president of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, an exhibition space for painting in lower Manhattan.

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.

Books will be available for purchase. Attend in-person only.