New York School poet and critic Douglas Crase was raised on a farm in Michigan and educated at Princeton University. He is the author of The Revisionist (Little Brown and Company, 1981), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; AMERIFIL.TXT: A Commonplace Book (1997), published as part of the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series; and Both: A Portrait in Two Parts (2004), the joined biographies of botanist Rupert Barneby and aesthete Dwight Ripley. Crase’s honors include an Ingram-Merrill Award, a 1985 Whiting Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Frank Polach.
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The RevisionistPoemsFrom"America Began in Houses"
Unlike the other countries, this one
Begins in houses, specific houses and the upstairs room
Where constitutions vibrate in the blockfront drawers,
A Queen Anne highboy, or maybe the widow’s walk
On a farmhouse hundreds of miles inland and believed
By the family to be a lookout for Indians though clearly
It was a pioneer’s conceit, fresh as the latest politics
From home: so much for that innocent thesis The Frontier.
The Revisionist:Poems -
The RevisionistPoemsFrom"Toronto Means the Meeting Place"
The frontier moves. We were nostalgic
Because it disappeared but the frontier moves.
It cuts inland, it darts behind a lake, it lies
In wait for us in places where we’ve been.
We will turn someday and we will deal with it.
There are frontiers everywhere. I never
Expected, for instance, to find you here.
It’s a nickel on your dollar, sir. Important,
Important to agree on the medium of exchange.
In a meeting place people decide on the exchange:
The Iroquois needed the furs to give to the Dutch
To get the guns to slaughter the Huron with,
Though this is disputed by modern historians.
The Revisionist:Poems -
The RevisionistPoemsFrom"Whiteout"
Now we account for movement when we can’t:
The plane tree peeled to white – the whiter sky –
The fuselage borne in winter, air or trial.
Is it Bulova where the departure ramp draws near?
Hands hide in their awnings, but the notes are up
And walking in the aisle. I hold you
When nobody lives in another’s world, those millions.
What references can we give, which ones request?
The baggage is trembling in the cold, long distance,
And everything comes from Texas in small amounts.
The future is hardly big enough for the past
Though we stoop into rush hour
Which will have to do. The key goes shining for the lock,
The garage door down behind in the white dark.
The Revisionist:Poems
"Crase has what it usually takes several books to achieve: an important subject; a consistent and supple attitude toward it; and a style rich enough to answer to it." —Charles Molesworth, The New York Times Book Review [on The Revisionist]
"Crase is talented, naturalistically inclined, and as lyrically grim as an abandoned strip mining field." —Webster Schott, The Cleveland Plain Dealer [on The Revisionist]
"Crase apostrophizes America—America as a lover, an antagonist and a martyr, and America as a representation of all creation. At times he achieves an almost evangelical thunder." —George H. Gurley, Jr., The Kansas City Star [on The Revisionist]
Selected Works
