Douglas Crase, On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays

 

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”)

Moving my way through the stunning new collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase, I had foolishly presumed I hadn’t actually heard his name prior to this, only to discover I’d read his essay “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” included as part of the late Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As the press release for On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays offers: “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.” Some of the essays collected here, truly, are revelatory, and he writes repeatedly, thoroughly and thoughtfully on poets such as Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), John Ashbery (1927-2017) and James Schuyler (1923-1991), among multiple other pieces on an array of literary activity, centred around his attentions across some four decades. I’ve read numerous works by Niedecker over the years, but admittedly paid little attention to the works of Schuyler and Ashbery (preferring, myself, the work of their New York School compatriot, Frank O’Hara), although Crase’s essays almost make one feel a sense of loss for not having paid enough attention. One doesn’t need an intimate knowledge of his subjects to fall deeply into these essays, and one is even reminded of just how poorly and rarely Niedecker’s work had been read for so long, only rescued from relative obscurity in later years, thanks to critics and editors such as Jenny Penberthy and Douglas Crase (fully aware that there are plenty of examples of women poets not given their proper due until later: Mina Loy, Anne Wilkinson, Judith Copithorne, etcetera).

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.

Ongoing notes: mid-November 2021: Matthew James Weigel + Elizabeth Robinson,

Since the end of summer, I’ve felt perpetually behind, always twelve more things to accomplish for every item I actually cross off my list. Is this adulting? Am I adulting correctly?

Otherwise, we’re fine in our wee house. The young ladies continue their online e-learning sessions, and Christine and I take turns alternating our children school-lifeguarding sessions against attempts at work in our individual corners. We await the possibility of our young ladies their vaccines. We await the possibility of, once that, slowly considering a return to the world.

Other than that, apparently we had a photo session off in the woods recently, for the sake of various things, including our seasonal holiday card [photo credit: Jenna at Four Leaf Photography]. Do we not look grand?

Edmonton AB: I am very pleased to be introduced to the work of Matthew James Weigel, through his bpNichol Chapbook Award-shortlisted chapbook, It Was Treaty/It Was Me (Montreal QC: Vallum Chapbooks, 2020). And were you aware that he has a full-length debut forthcoming in the spring with Coach House Books? Subtitled “processes of: agreement, acquisition, and archive, with figures and their captions by the author,” It Was Treaty/It Was Me is a collage of excerpts and excisions. Predominantly a reclamation project, Weigel works through the archive, both his family’s personal to government and university archives, to attempt to articulate history from his own perspective, as both Dene and Métis. The basis of his thoughtful and careful assemblage of altered image and text: who gets to tell the story of one’s own family? As the back cover offers: “Drawing on government records, archival images and his own family history, Matthew James Weigel blends prose and poetry to look how John A. Macdonald and his government used to treaties to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. Weigel juxtaposes the machinations of the Canadian government with other versions of the story; official history bumps up against memories recorded in the body, exposing corruption and violence.” This is really a fascinating collection, and I can only hope that this thread he’s begun to pull might eventually become book-length. I am looking forward to his spring debut. As he writes:

I’d like you to see some of my family. This is Marie Fabien and James Balsillie with four of their youngest children.

When I showed this image to my dad, he got very quiet, tears in his eyes and with his hand held to his face.

This photograph is not in the possession of my family, but in the archives of the University of Alberta.

I’ve never seen the photo. Neither has my father or anyone else in my family. I found it online. The image has an item number and subject taxonomy links to “Family and personal life” and “Aboriginal Peoples.”

I assume it sits in a box on a shelf.

San Francisco CA: Elizabeth Robinson was good enough to send me a copy of her chapbook UNDER NECESSITY OF WIND (Milwaukee MI: tinder | tender, 2017), a grouping of eleven poems that appear to adhere to her ongoing exploration of poems writing “on,” including “On Healing,” “On The Impossible,” “On Molting” and “On Passage.” In a recent interview conducted by Valerie Coulton, and posted at Palabrosa, Robinson speaks to that particular structure:

For a long time, when my life was pretty disrupted and I felt that I wasn’t really engaged in a consistent writing practice (like ten years!)—I would just write these poems “on” anything that engaged my attention in a passing way.  They were kind of an exercise in attention and against writer’s block. Eventually, I went back and looked at them, and they are hiding out in every corner of my computer in various files.  There are at least 200.  So I guess I was writing a lot more than I realized. I’ve been mining them lately—revising, ordering them into selections and chapbooks.  It’s a little bit like looking backwards in time and making a portrait of who I was and what my concerns were. During that challenging decade, I was always trying to get away from my situation (or get out of it) and into something more productive and satisfying.  The poems in this selection may not address that in a biographical, narrative way, but the theme is clearly there!

Robinson’s poems offer an attentive, meditative syntax of tangible objects, attentive to small gestures, language and intimacy, one that seems in tandem with the Lorine Niedecker quote included on the back cover: “simply // butterflies / are quicker / than rock [.]” Seeming very much an excerpt of a larger project or structure, Robinson’s UNDER NECESSITY OF WIND writes out the accumulative minutiae of the large canvas, including poems composed in dedication to Phillip Greenlief, Bill Bennett, Colleen Lookingbill, Beth Murray, Michael Gizzi and Selah Saterstrom (including, in some cases, poems-as-memorials). As she writes as part of the opening poem, “On Healing,” for Greenlief: “Memory is a form of syntax, a sentence pronounced on us.” Or the poem “On Faith,” that begins:

I was able to commiserate with you.

This time, I made myself a speaker. I wore my crown and

spoke as one who has a body which

can make a voice.

 

In the future we will reflect ourselves together as a further future

but my sympathy will have exhausted itself, and you

will see the crown lowered to your head.

 

Lee Ann Brown, In The Laurels, Caught

SARVIS

I’ve seen the Sarvis bloom

diaphanous white from far off

while the mountainside

is still brown

It’s almost Japanese

though I’ve yet to see

white on white

blooms over snow

 A kind of canny lullaby

A historic caution

Sarvis is the way the old folks say

Service – as in when the

circuit rider preacher

came through after ice thaw

to conduct weddings, baptisms

and funerals

that he couldn’t reach sooner

before the first breath of spring

alighted

When Uncle Dudley was a boy

brightly he brought his mother a branch

flowering white

and because she had showed him

an earlier flower which she named

The First Breath of Spring

He said, Look! Mama!
Here is

The Second breath of Spring

As the press release states for American poet and filmmaker Lee Ann Brown’s third solo trade poetry collection, In the Laurels, Caught (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2013), this collection “is a collection of lighthearted, deep rooted-poems written around the Appalachian region of North Carolina in Madison County.” Composed by an “adventurous, intellectually restless native” and “transplanted outsider,” Brown explores the details of a geography through its spoken language. Recognizing both the arbitrariness and specificness of place, Brown’s poetic study is reminiscent of the work of Arkansas poet C.D. Wright, or the Ontario Gothic of Phil Hall, exploring the dialect for the sake of exploring the stories, storytelling and myths of this fraction of the American south. Through Brown’s study, the words, phrases and references she weaves throughout her poems speak to the culture and the population of the area, from the sing-song lilt of casual speech and laid back conversation to the rougher ends of such a folk-collection of country music. The collection opens with both a travelling companion, Lorine Niedecker, and an open, uncertain eye, one attempting to gather as much and as quickly as possible before beginning to settle into the poems. It almost reads as though Brown was channeling Niedecker to help open the potential manuscript, channeling Niedecker’s scientific approach to writing her own “pastoral” in exploring natural and human histories through the poem, such as in her own poem “Lake Superior” [see my review of the recent edition of Niedecker’s Lake Superior title here].

RURAL SURREAL

lorine niedecker

wanted to get away from the anecdotal

into an arc of sound

vertical

cicada skins

we’d wear as pins

circadian skins

we’d swear as kin

The author of two previous trade works – Polyverse (Los Angeles CA: Sun and Moon, 1999) and The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), as well as numerous chapbooks – Lee Ann Browns’ In the Laurels, Caught is a polyvocal text, from the poems within the main body to the handwritten script that edges along the lower margins of each page, sometimes as appearing as a kind of Greek chorus, and other times, entirely separate from the action of the main text. Held as the final section of the collection, “River Codex,” is sketched in reverse through the whole of the collection. In the “NOTES ON THE POEMS” at the end of the collection, Brown explains: “Throughout, italicized lines are either quotes, overheard, or should be sung. RIVER CODEX is designed to be read either forwards or backwards, stanza by stanza, throughout the book.” The section helps give the collection the appearance of a living document over a fixed text, as a kind of working notebook.

IF I DON’T SHAKE YOUR HAND

OR HUG YOUR NECK

Just know I want to,

Billy in the low ground

This song has an Extry Part

that I made a little bit crooked

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone

This is a new song

that sounds like an old song.

That’s why we like it.

You’re every song I ever heard

Sing for me my mockingbird

Usually we start slow and taper off.

Thank you to the folk up in Madison County

for welcoming us in

Two big reasons I can’t be Dolly Parton

I’m busted

So Bless your hearts and other vital organs

What do we know of Madison County? Predominantly, what Brown tells us. Any geography can’t help but be thick with its own language, dialect and references, and Brown’s project, in many ways, is no different than Lisa Robertson writing out meteorological language in The Weather (New Star Books, 2001) or Michael Holmes exploring the patter of professional wrestling in Parts Unknown (Insomniac Press, 2004). Brown’s is nearly a scrapbook of poems as signage, conversation, journal entry, letters to friends, reminiscence, historical fact, observational note and the occasional ballad, all wrapped up in an engaged, sustained and ongoing love for the people and the place. As she writes to open “A LETTER OUT”:

So it’s one of my first days writing here. I take off to the old turnpike and stop in at the Ramsey cemetery. It reminds me of the one Linda took me to with a view of the Flatirons where we searched for the unmarked grave of Edward Steele and instead found a heart-shaped rock. A blue and grey vista of ridges fold around my home. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies: 5 million years old, Appalachians: 500 million.

The poem ends:

I want to meet you people but I am only on the first level time-wise. Even though it’s my home state, I’m way out in the country now. There’s something in this impulse that wants me to write it with light.

Juliet Patterson, The Truant Lover

NOTE

In the original, the sex of the person

at the next table is ambiguous.

The anonymous

speaker is not an imaginary

character.

The first version

was written

with the title,

“Love It More.”

Loosely rhymed.

The speaker encumbered

by love. Threes, threes

& threes. Three roses

& three stems.

Red where in the whorls

petal lying in its glow,

her immaculate white bed

mounts a lonely street.

I’m just now going through Juliet Patterson’s first trade collection, The Truant Lover (Beacon NY: Nightboat Books, 2006), thanks to the author’s generous gift through the mail, after I recently reviewed her Albion Books chapbook [see my review of such here]. The Truant Lover is an absolutely magnificent and startling collection of poems. What appeals immediately is the silence and slowness that radiate from her lines, and her fragments each force a pause that strikes, deep into the heart. Patterson manages to compose poems that contain just about everything—from Lorine Niedecker, Francesca Woodman, origami, small splashes of blue—and the density of her language sends breathless chills down the spine. With her repeated poems referencing and working variations on portraiture—“Who is her Other a Figure in the Picture Attending,” “Self-Portraits (after Francesca Woodman),” and the two poems titled “Study for Self-Portraiture”—she highlights her use of the poem as explorations of the portrait, composing studies that explore a series of designations, and a series of studies on what portraiture allows. We might not know what a particular subject (whether the self or other) might look like, but we understand full well what the subject contains.

STUDY FOR SELF-PORTRAITURE

If it had no pencil, would it try mine—now dull & tender

& sweet. If it had no word, would it make the daisy

most as big as I was when it plucked me.

Would those eyes see even less than the tiny nostrils

Breathe. Would the penis be slighted, its tip flush

with the contour of thigh if the forearm left

the torso to swing into space, narrow in the grass.

If it came to rest just where you might expect

a signature, would steep rows of white seats swell

for a pencil, a drawing hand. Would the grass divide

as with a comb. Would the penis suggest the conceit of another

pun, for example, genitals = genius, penis = pen

or I’m nobody! Who are you? Would everything work

by repetition, telling each to each: you, you & you.

Would the eye then demand horizon, or more precisely,

would the eye knot & bite its thread. Would it lay an emphatic

thumb with the flutter of something really happening.

Would it be the funeral loose in my body so long it seemed

yesterday across the threshold on the next page.

How does such an open, fragmented poetic manage to be so damned precise? These poems, on the complexity of living and being, accomplish a remarkable precision, even as they display considerable emotional risk. Everyone should be reading this remarkable book: can I make that any clearer?

AMERICAN REVERIE

We are thinking of the tender mouth of the rabbit pulling

at blades of grass. A flower,

if you blink, from bowel to breast.

We want to be so beautiful.

If we wanted, we could remember

anything. The eyes of the rabbit

might be open or closed. There is Friday

& then Saturday. A season changes, years

Pass. The long grass lays itself down.

What may be better & what may be

worse & what may be lover

nobody knows. Yes, there is a rabbit on the lawn & the wish

comes true before you make it.

Do you know what you’ve seen?

Do you know what to do?

Lorine Niedecker, Lake Superior

The journey of the rock is never ended. In every tiny part of any living thing are materials that once were rock that turned to soil. These minerals are drawn out of the soil by plant roots and the plant used them to build leaves, stems, flowers and fruits. Plants are eaten by animals. In our blood is iron from plants that draw it out of the soil. Your teeth and bones were once coral. The water you drink has been in clouds over the mountains of Asia and in waterfalls of Africa. The air you breathe has swirled thru places of the earth that no one has ever seen. Every bit of you is a bit of the earth and has been on many strange and wonderful journeys over countless millions of years. (Lorine Niedecker, “Lake Superior Country, Vacation Trip ‘66”)

I’m absolutely fascinated by the new collection-study Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013), wrapped around the six-page poem of the same name by the late American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). Perfectly built for study (Hoa Nguyen recently organized a course around the book) Lake Superior includes Niedecker’s poem, as well as her “Lake Superior Country, a journal,” a piece that was written during the same period, even to the point that trace echoes, as well as more obvious connections, can be found between the two works.

In every part of every living thing

is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals

of the rock

With the addition of an essay by Douglas Crase, “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” the remainder of the collection exists nearly as an exploration of the time, influences and considerations of the composition of the poem, whether directly or possibly indirectly, including “Three Letters from Lorine Niedecker to CidCorman,” “Excerpts from Back Roads to Far Towns” by Bashō, “’Tour 14A’ from Wisconsin, A Guide to the Badger State” (the note at the end of the piece: “Niedecker worked on this guide for the WPA”), “On a Monument to the Pigeon” by AldoLeopold, “Excerpt from the writings of Pierre Esprit Radisson” and “Excerpt from the writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.” There are some elements of Crase’s piece that are quite stunning, but also just a tad precious in tone, as he opens his “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime” with:

Poetry is words. Yet when I think of the Whitman who found he incorporates gneiss, the Stein who says anybody is as their land and air is, the Stevens who locates mythology in stone out of our fields or from under our mountains, then I have to admit that the sublimest American poetry has always read to me as if it would rather restore, or even realize its desire for a wealth outside words, a wealth that is wild outside the human voice. That is what I always liked about it. It is what I liked at once about Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” that spare ferropastoral of a poem in honor of the rock and mineral wealth

                                    Iron the common element of earth

for which the human species is just another mode of transport.

Over some ninety pages of material surrounding a six page poem, this is an exceptional study of an important poem by an important American poet. Why can’t more studies such as these exist? The only frustration comes from the fact that Vancouver critic Jenny Penberthy’s (a noted Niedecker scholar) essay on the poem, “Writing Lake Superior,” isn’t included in the selection, a piece that actually introduced me to the short piece by Niedecker, although the acknowledgments do include this: “We would like to thank Jenny Penberthy for all of her work, and for Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, which was an inspiration for this book.” To read through Penberthy’s original essay (which, fortunately, is available online), many of the components of the book are referenced. As Penberthy’s piece opens:

Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior”—the first long poem she would see into print—occupies five pages with a total of 395 words. Her research and preparation for the poem, the punning and aptly named “millenium1 of notes for my magma opus” (Niedecker to Corman, August 20, 1966), numbers 260 mostly typed, single—spaced pages. Tens of thousands of words.

In late July 1966 Lorine Niedecker and Al Millen set off in their Buick on a week-long journey around Lake Superior, “by way of L. Michigan shore to Mackinaw Country and Sault Ste. Marie…along the Ontario shore and down the Minn. side” (Niedecker to Corman, July 12, 1966). The impulse to research the “magma opus,” her epic of rocks and minerals (Davie 73), can be traced most directly to the previous summer’s road trip through the Black Hills of South Dakota. Niedecker remarked to Corman on the “[r]eddish gravel beside the paved roads and in a couple of places a pale gold driveway—covering with gold bits or yellow diamond sparkles all thru it!” and “[t]he big rock structures in the hills…merely greyish or pinkish or yellowish depending on the time of day” (July 28, 1965).

Still, the one thing I wondered: why is an editor not credited for such a collection? Lake Superior provides a rare glimpse on how a poem might have been made, and the works surrounding such a piece. Niedecker clearly had clear knowledge of geology, ecology and other natural studies, something she researched vigorously, a research that appears far deeper, ongoing and direct than, say, Don McKay’s poetic studies over the past decade in stone and geologic time. What this collection provides through the collage of pieces is the “story” of the short poem. We get to see the influences, the conversations, notes and journals, tracking what might otherwise be too ephemeral to follow.