As another appraisal of
the commonwealth, “Lake Superior” extends a tradition that seems particular
American: it’s a tradition we honor only partway. For the truth is, when our
poets start telling us about gneiss, or land and air, when they locate their
story in stone or, as Niedecker does, in rock, I think we are likely to allow
them the trope but not likely to believe they are saying what in fact they just
said. They and their poems are made of land and air and rock. People who read
poetry have always been alert enough to entertain the trope while avoiding the
notion itself as sentimental, romantic, or worse, perniciously near to
nationalism.
Get them away from poetry, however, and today’s readers
are also alert enough ecologically to know that their own identification with
the environment isn’t ipso facto proof of direct-mail mysticism or gang
nationalism. (“Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime”)
Crase’s essays are deeply knowledgeable and intimate, managing to write critically about poets, as in the case of Ashbery and Schuyler, that he was personally close to for decades, allowing his friendships to open up, and not hinder, the possibility for clear critical examination. There is also something quite charming, and even unique, about Crase’s approach, as he offers in his preface to the collection: “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 in love. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I find that kind of self-assessment quite wonderful, “a fool in love,” as Douglas Crase the critic/reader allows his thinking heart to fuel his examinations into the thinking and structure of any particular author beyond what might otherwise be possible. He continues, further on:
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 learnings, 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?
There
is such a delight in his examinations, offering a joyous and rapt attention and
passionate engagement on very specific poets, poems and moments, while
simultaneously able to see how the threads of his particular subject’s work
fits into the larger fabric of literary production, culture and politics. As he
writes as part of the essay “THE LEFTOVER LANDSCAPE,” “Much of art is the
struggle to make emotion less embarrassing.” There is something quite staggering
in that simple, short sentence that Crase manages to get, and get to. Honestly,
go to page 135 and read the whole paragraph that sits at the bottom of the
page. It’s breathtaking. And read the whole essay. And then read the whole collection.
This is easily the finest collection of prose I’ve read in years.
