The Revisionist and The Astropastorals

by Douglas Crase, Mark Ford (Introduction)

This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition.

Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eight years later, the book appears together with the chapbook entitled The Astropastorals (2017), which together constitute the core of Crase's poetic work.

He is among the crucial poets of his generation, but until now his work has not been widely available. An heir to Whitman, to Crane, to Ashbery, Crase deploys what he calls an American 'civil meter', throwing down a wry distinctively American prosodic gauntlet to readers and writers that is likely to be as discussed as Williams's 'variable foot'.

With an introduction by Mark Ford.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 15, 2019

About the author

Douglas Crase is known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist.

Born in 1944, Crase grew up on a farm in Michigan, went to Princeton, and planned a career in law. In response to the political turmoil of 1968 he abandoned law school to write the report of the Political Reform Commission of the Michigan Democratic Party. He subsequently served as speechwriter to the Democratic candidate for governor of the state.

As noted in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, he is the Doug in James Schuyler's poem Dining Out with Doug and Frank. For many years he earned a living as a free-lance speechwriter for Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and other corporations. The poems he wrote at the time are informed, according to the Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets, by an "interest in rhetoric" not traditionally associated with poets of that school. When The Revisionist appeared in 1981 its unusual rhetorical address was widely recognized.

Crase followed The Revisionist with essays on favorite writers, including Emerson, Ashbery, and Niedecker. His commonplace book, Amerifil.txt, was published in 1996 and became an example of possibilities in the form. Likewise unusual was Both, his dual biography of artist Dwight Ripley and botanist Rupert Barneby, lifelong partners whose rediscovered story sheds new light on the mid-century art scene in New York.

On his departure from law school Crase was called to the dean's office for an explanation. When he remarked that his classes were boring the dean countered, "My son, ninety per cent of life is boring." Since that interview, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship for his work. Committed to the city - he was for three years a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities – he also makes time for a mountain stream in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Lars Meijer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Douglas Crase, de vrijwel vergeten dichter uit de naoorlogse New York School-beweging, is een tough nut to crack. Deze bundel verzamelt de enige twee bundels die hij tijdens zijn leven heeft uitgebracht. Ik kon me soms moeilijk overgeven aan de combinatie van wetenschappelijke kennis en natuurlyriek, maar soms kwam het opeens helemaal binnen:

‘Though we never reached it together, this world / we planned is the only one in which I can imagine you. / As a result, and despite our separation, I have never / relented my right to plot the coordinates which might / have got us there, so that even my memories of you as is / take shape in the width of once possible days.’

*2,5

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa. THE REVISIONIST lives up to the hype on the jacket copy about Crase being a crucially important poet who needs to be reintroduced to the reading public. "The Revisionist" in particular is absolutely fantastic; "The Astropastorals" (uncollected poems post-Revisionist) is great but take a pause between reading the two -- because everything pales in comparison to that first long poem.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has a brilliant start, with an elevated discursive style, reminiscent of both Rilke of the Duino elegies and mid-period Ashbery (roughly from Rivers and Mountains to Houseboat Days). The subject is often landscape, informed by a more than a superficial command of history. In other cases, the poems are bricollaged from the language or gray discourse of commerce and institutions. Sometimes the poems falter and lack concretion, and the references can be so private the dramatic platform gets shaky. But there's enough here that I would return to it. The later chapbook, The Astropastorals, seems too fragmented and to lack fire.