On Autumn Lake
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By the same author
POETRY
The Revisionist and The Astropastorals: Collected Poems
CRITICISM
Amerifil.txt: A Commonplace Book
BIOGRAPHY
Both: A Portrait in Two Parts
ON AUTUMN LAKE
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS
DOUGLAS CRASE
NIGHTBOAT BOOKS
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2022 by Douglas Crase
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
Print ISBN 978-1-64362-143-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64362-161-6
Cover photo: Detroit Publishing Co., Lake Ontario from the boulevard, Oswego, N.Y. [between 1890 and 1901]. Library of Congress.
Design and typesetting by Crisis
Typeset in New Caledonia
“There’s a better shine,” “How bright you’ll find young people” and excerpts from “Lake Superior” by Lorine Niedecker, copyright © 1985 by the Estate of Lorine Niedecker, reprinted by permission of Bob Arnold, literary executor for the Estate of Lorine Niedecker.
“Rain Moving In” from A Wave by John Ashbery, copyright © 1984, 2008 by John Ashbery, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc.
“A Hidden History of the Avant-Garde,” copyright © 2011 by Douglas Crase, reprinted from Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painters & Poets by permission of Andrew Arnot for Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress
Nightboat Books
New York
www.nightboat.org
Preface
FOUR SAINTS
On Autumn Lake
A Voice Like the Day
Make It True
The Poet’s So-called Prose
A Schuyler Ballade
Note on Niedecker
Free and Clean
Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime
HOW EMERSON AVAILS
How Emerson Avails
A Brief History of Memes
Native Genius
Lines from London Terrace
The Leftover Landscape
An Outsider’s Introduction to Emerson
THE PROPHETIC ASHBERY
Remarks on Ashbery
The Prophetic Ashbery
Justified Times
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL REVISITED
Unlikely Angel
A Hidden History of the Avant-Garde
The Drawings of Dwight Ripley
The New York School Revisited
THE MENACE AHEAD
Poetry and the Menace Ahead
Dead Tech
The Enduring Influence of a Painter’s Garden
The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry
The Applause of Science
Deborah Rosenthal’s Art of Deep Time
The Civic Metonymy of Michael Schiavo
Apertures on a Virtual Field
Introduction to a Long Poem by Robert C. L. Crawford
Mark Milroy Paints My Portrait
In the Empire of the Air
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
If there’s anything to explain about this book it’s that I never planned to write criticism and, no matter the appearance of the pages that follow, I never did. A critic, as defined by Randall Jarrell with more than a hint of irony, is someone who protects you from the bad poems you shouldn’t let yourself read, and by extension, I suppose, from the bad art you should be careful not to see. One would have to read all the poets, see all the art, to be of any use in such a job, which means the critics must suffer the very exposure they warn the rest of us to avoid. I’d retreat from the task before it was even begun. The essays here must belong in some other category; 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.
I didn’t plan a life in literature, either. In college I toyed briefly with the prospect of switching from pre-law to the recently organized and optimistically named program in American civilization. My temptation was thanks to Wallace Stevens, whose insistent cadence I encountered in an elective during the second year. I went so far as to show poems of my own to the professor, emboldened, no doubt, because he wore boots, a leather jacket, and sometimes arrived for class on a motorcycle, all of which lent him considerable authenticity in the eyes of a college sophomore. This was the professor who tactfully advised me later that “poetry is an avocation, not a vocation.” By then I was in law school, so perhaps he thought his advice would do no harm.
Another two years were required before I abandoned law school for good, a liberation I owe to the life-altering influence of heroes, including Stevens, and friends. Heroes and friends were to be the visible saints who supplied by their example the education I missed in school.
An education by friends, in my experience, is an education by enthusiasm and reproach. Nobody in their proud twenties wants to play the sedulous ape; but to adopt the passions of a lover or a friend, to try them on like clothes even if you must painfully outgrow them, has to be one of the most glorious paths to an advanced degree. The drawback to the curriculum is that it leaves blind spots. You can emerge from your education by heroes and friends lacking a certain conventional balance, partial for the rest of your life to a set of values acquired when you were the fool of love. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Still, I was surprised to discover from a trial arrangement of these essays that their strict chronology put a piece on landscape as first in the book. I shouldn’t have been. Land use in America, urban and rural, was an early obsession. One evening at dinner in the apartment I shared with my partner, now husband, Frank Polach, our friend James Schuyler took a long look around the room where the books were stacked in piles on the floor. “Every book I see in this room has the word America or New York in its title,” he gently observed.
If this was a limitation, it didn’t bother me. I had been won over by Gertrude Stein’s remark in her lecture “What Is English Literature?” that she was content not to know everything. In fact, she was more than content. “I know that one of the most profoundly exciting moments of my life,” she said, “was when at sixteen I suddenly concluded that I would not make all knowledge my province.” In an age of information overload, her wisdom is more thrilling by the day.
Within the province of my interests I seemed to narrow the focus even further. Whether this was by default or design is no longer important, but it did register as a conscious decision at the time. I wanted a life to be partial to; wanted to know things like the hedgehog instead of the fox, or, to pick a more vividly North American metaphor, I wanted to travel a good deal in Concord. I wanted this because I’d developed the idea from subjects in history and political science that knowing one thing in depth would make an emblem for knowledge elsewhere, that knowledge in all its diversity was nonetheless, in its internal density, complexity, and structure, isotropic in all directi
ons like the universe.
Say you’ve decided to read all of a single author, as I did Emerson, or as Susan Howe must have done with Dickinson; read them as if no one had read them before, and only afterward consult the established critical writings on that author. You soon note that the writings generalize where they might be particular. They elaborate on their learning, impressions, and at times their prejudice, until it appears eventually they have substituted the elaborations for what the author actually wrote. Jarrell cautioned his readers to remember that the criticism of any age, even the best of it, becomes inherently absurd. Sometimes it’s risible. And the conclusion is: if they got Emerson wrong, or Dickinson, how can I believe what they are telling me about Ashbery, or Niedecker, or the origins of the New York School?
On the other hand, if you travel much in Concord it tends to define you as a conversationalist. People get tired of hearing for the nth time about the depth of ice on your neighbor’s pond while they are recalling to each other their favorite restaurants in Paris or paintings in Proust. No passion comes free of embarrassment. The advantage is, it directs your attention. The first articles I published were not about art and literature at all, but about the possibility of a new politics in the short, incandescent era between the Vietnam Summer of 1967 and the massacre of students at Kent State in 1970. My friends and I felt that possibility intensely; I imagined my heroes did, as well. Those articles, which appeared in the Nation, are too naive and dated for this book; but they remind me that essays as much as poems must believe themselves at the risk of embarrassment into being.
The result of running that risk was more essays than I expected to write. It would be satisfying to claim I had principles that informed the writing, but each occasion seemed to me an emergency of pure empiricism. Whatever habits of thought could be discerned were deduced only afterward. Foremost, in retrospect, was the need to reveal in public my affair with a writer, or an artist, who deserved new notice or a fresh appraisal. This would be less a principle than a sense of urgency, the objective being in each case to replenish in the present the community of heroes and friends, who, as I knew from experience, can alter careers and lives. Probably that’s a truism, and I’m not the first to favor it. Robert Duncan closed his essay “Towards an Open Universe” by quoting to like effect the words of Alfred North Whitehead. “The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage,” wrote Whitehead, “but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is, the present; and the mere lapse of time through which any particular group of saints must travel to reach that meeting-place, makes very little difference.”
It is said that poets in their spare time should write criticism, though there exists also the romantic notion that a driven genius has no time to spare and would never bother to write about someone else. Of course that is an aristocratic ideal, which degenerates in modern society to a dandy ideal and not a democratic one. Poets serve together in this project of cultural evolution, regardless of the resistance from those who are fearful of culture and evolution both. Literature is for the descendants of the fearful, too. It must be sent ahead to meet them, when they break free as I did and burn to catch up.
— D. C.
FOUR SAINTS
ON AUTUMN LAKE
It was convenient for John Ashbery, and dumb luck for me, that I was living in Rochester and could pick him up at the airport whenever he arrived from New York to visit his mother. Sometimes, because he did-n’t like to fly, he’d arrive at the bus station instead; but I could meet him there too. It was an arrangement from which we both might profit, he explained, not profit in the American sense but in a way best expressed if you said it in French, profiter de. And thus we began my unexpected education, a kind of improvised fellowship with visiting tutor and bonus bits of wisdom delivered in French.
John, as most anyone who follows poetry will know by now, was born in Rochester and raised on his father’s fruit farm in the next county to the east; though he spent a lot of time in town, as much as he could, at the home of his maternal grandparents at 69 Dartmouth Street. His grandfather was no farmer but a cultivated professor of physics, and the young John had let his preference show. Perhaps it was auspicious that we were only four blocks from that Dartmouth Street house the night we met. The director of the Rochester Oratorio Society was hosting a dinner party, which included among its guests a handsome assistant to Aaron Copland who drove up from New York. John had hitched a ride, crashed the party, and was slouched in the doorway of the dining room when he caught my eye.
He was, to get this on record, sexy. He seemed intent on it. He was forty-five that autumn night (I was twenty-eight) and he looked as he does in the now-famous photograph taken a year earlier by Gerard Malanga on Eighth Street—full mustache, unruly hair, and a practiced slouch that was part boredom and part come-hither-if-you-dare. Of course I hadn’t seen the photograph, didn’t recognize him, and would hardly have known a reason why I should. A friend identified him as a poet and supplied his name. With the instinctive opportunism you have when you’re young—apparently I had it, anyway—I detached myself from the friend, approached the mustache, and inquired if he was the John Ashbery.
It was a cheap gambit, no sooner spoken than I realized from his expression of disarmed surprise how cruel the young opportunist can be. “Have you read my work?” he asked, while the light in his eyes darkened from split-second joy to caution. “No,” I said, trying weakly to undo the damage. “But I will now.”
Lucky for me that John, as many a young poet can since attest, was by nature generous. He smiled, if just enough to signal his satisfaction, and forgave me the slight. There would be further generosities ahead, although in this first instance I suspect he was already calculating, in the sense of profiter de, the ride he would request from the dinner party to his mother’s house in Pultneyville, twenty-eight miles east of Rochester on the shore of Lake Ontario. It was late as we left the party, had been dark for hours, and I couldn’t see much of the narrow Federal-style house (it’s at 4188 Lake Road, known locally as Washington Street) where I dropped him off. He was swallowed by the night and I never expected to hear from him again. He called the next day.
A week later, after John had returned to the city, a copy of Three Poems arrived in the mail. Reading it, I must have held my breath from the first sentence to the last. If poetry should be as well written as prose then here was proof that the secret was to write it as if it were prose. Here was language in the shape of a quest, language that had detached utility from the great quests of the Sixties and employed it as a means to continue in the wake of their defeat. It was a way to go on without hope, but without losing the feeling of hope. In 1972, with the war still unended and Nixon’s re-election all but assured, the ambiguous resolve of Three Poems was the exact resolution a stalled intellect needed to hear.
I wish I’d told him that. Instead, when he asked how I liked the book I answered—and what imp of aesthetic cowardice prompted me?—that perhaps his previous book, written in lines that actually looked like poetry, was even better.
My luck held, not least because I had the car; and John, who in those days didn’t drive, did like to go for rides in the country. In this he claimed to resemble his mother and quoted fondly her declaration, heard frequently when he was a child, that she was “a great go-er.” We became go-ers, too. We must have driven all over western New York State, stopping at antique shops, used book stores, fruit stands and general stores (where John insisted, to the consternation of the owners, on washing the apples he bought), parks, historical sites. Waterfalls. If these were pleasure trips for him they counted as field trips for me, made instructive by the exemplary way he indulged his interests and wasn’t ashamed of them. He could spend hours looking through old postcards at the used book store in Springwater, a favorite; or, if not hours exactly, then certainly time enough to make us late in getting him back to Pultneyville.
Our rides were exhilarating, not only for the miles we covered but bec
ause his conversation, so habitually casual and good natured, was also fearless. Each ride was a rolling preceptorial. We were headed west down a long hill in remote Wyoming County the first time he quizzed me on what I’d been reading lately. I was deep into local history before we met, had spent days in the Rundel Memorial Library absorbing histories of the New York frontier, its penetration, the displacement of the Iroquois. I was anxious to know how you transform the local into something mythic. No surprise, then, that what I’d been reading was Charles Olson. To test my memory, or because he didn’t remember any lines by Olson himself, John demanded an example. With my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road ahead, I retrieved a memory of “The Kingfishers” and began to recite. “When the attentions change / the jungle / leaps in // even the stones are split.”
Immediately from the passenger side of the car came an explosion of triumphant scorn. “I always thought he had a tin ear!” exclaimed John.
Olson’s was not the last of the established reputations to be trimmed for my benefit. Now that he’d liberated my interests, I could confess to John that I once attended a poetry reading at the University of Rochester. Friends in the English Department had said it would be a big event. So who was the reader? he asked impatiently. When I told him it was James Merrill he responded with a delighted sneer. “Oh, you mean the Fabergé of modern American poetry?”
John never insisted on being the sole poet you were allowed to admire. Not long after he sent Three Poems he embarked on a mission clearly designed to improve my library. Freely Espousing arrived, by James Schuyler, followed by the recently published Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. To these he soon added Hebdomeros, Hesiod, and Raymond Queneau. If you hadn’t majored in literature, as I hadn’t, John’s erudition was thrilling and his eagerness to share it, a revelation.
Gradually I discovered he did not know everything. He was rather a snob about classic American literature—he once admitted this— which must qualify as a blind spot when you think of it, since the man who could write “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” was enthralled by American comics, old movies, and popular culture. But when I ventured to say how cool it was that he actually grew up by blue Ontario’s shore he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I had to explain that this was the title of the grand poem in which Whitman summons the poets of the American future; so his being born and raised on that very shore made it seem Whitman had John in mind. At this he didn’t sneer, but said nothing. Years later he took to reading Whitman and claimed that perhaps he’d been influenced after all.