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"Douglas Crase's prose is rich with conviction and desire, inspiring as John Yau wrote, 'the kind of attention usually reserved for poetry.' His essays, written as rhythmically as poems, take a personal rather than abstract approach, offering committed and sometimes intimate portraits of John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, and others. With generosity of spirit, Crase shares his devotion to poetry, democracy, and landscape in this ... volume that greatly enlarges the available body of his work and will be seen as the essential complement to his collected poems"--Provided by publisher.
List of contents
I. Introduction II. Four Saints
On Autumn Lake: John Ashbery
A Voice Like the Day: James Schuyler
Make It True: James Schuyler
The Poet’s So-called Prose: Marianne Moore
A Schuyler Ballade
Note on Niedecker
Free and Clean: Lorine Niedecker
Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime
III. How Emerson Avails
How Emerson Avails
A Brief History of Memes
Native Genius: Richard Poirier
An Outsider’s Introduction to Emerson
IV. The Prophetic Ashbery
Remarks on Ashbery
The Prophetic Ashbery
Justified Times: John Ashbery
V. The New York School Revisited
Unlikely Angel: Dwight Ripley and the New York School
The Drawings of Dwight Ripley
A Hidden History of the Avant-Garde
The New York School Revisited
VI. Traditions Ahead
Poetry and the Menace Ahead
The Enduring Influence of a Painter’s Garden: Robert Dash
Statement on Form
The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry: John Koethe, Marjorie Welish
The Applause of Science: George Bradley
The Civic Metonymy of Michael Schiavo
Three Introductions: Ann Lauterbach, Gerrit Henry, Marjorie Welish
Apertures on a Virtual Field: Michelle Jaffé
Deborah Rosenthal’s Art of Deep Time
Mark Milroy Paints My Portrait
In the Empire of the Air: Donald Britton
VII. Updates
VIII. Appendix: A Conversation with Ian Pople
IX. Index
About the author
Douglas Crase is an independent poet and essayist. He was born in Michigan in 1944, raised on a farm, and educated at Princeton. A former speechwriter, he was described in the Times Literary Supplement as "the unusual case of a contemporary poet whose most public, expansive voice is his most authentic," and in Hyperallergic as "that rare figure in American letters: a subversive who challenges the received wisdom promulgated in English and American literature departments from sea to shining sea." His first book, The Revisionist, was named a Notable Book of the Year in 1981 by The New York Times and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a National Book Award in poetry. His collected poems, The Revisionist and The Astropastorals, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and named a Book of the Year for 2019 in both the Times Literary Supplementand Hyperallergic. His dual biography of influential aesthetes Rupert Barneby and Dwight Ripley, Both: A Portrait in Two Parts, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur "genius" award. He lives with his husband, Frank Polach, in New York and Carley Brook, Pennsylvania.
Summary
On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.
Douglas Crase’s prose is rich with conviction and desire, inspiring as John Yau wrote, “the kind of attention usually reserved for poetry.” His essays, written as rhythmically as poems, take a personal rather than abstract approach, offering committed and sometimes intimate portraits of John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, and others. With generosity of spirit, Crase shares his devotion to poetry, democracy, and landscape in this handsome volume that greatly enlarges the available body of his work and will be seen as the essential complement to his collected poems.
Additional text
“Gracefully wrought essays imbued with a rare intimacy.” — Kirkus (Starred Review)
“The future awaits us and Crase has set the bar high for all of us. May we live up to his example.” — g emil reutter, North of Oxford
"Four decades of critical writing from poet Crase (The Revisionist) come together in this intensive collection... Crase is skeptical about calling the pieces criticism; rather, 'they are appreciations or predilections, though to be truthful they were more like affairs of the heart, affairs of attention and intellectual desire, rather than criticism.'" — Publishers Weekly
