Lines from London Terrace

I never met Ginsberg, Ashbery was a face on West Twenty-Second Street, and Merrill was the elfin and impossibly erudite reader of poems at the 92nd Street Y. James Schuyler might as well have lived in Marrakech rather than in the Chelsea Hotel that I glimpsed from my bedroom window. With the exception of straight male teachers like Stanley Plumly, Stephen Berg, and Larry Levis, I was finding most of my exemplars gay and straight on the page––Auden, Wallace Stevens, Louis Simpson, Elizabeth Bishop, and maybe a little chatty Frank O’Hara. An exception came from my single meeting with glamorous, gay New York poet Douglas Crase––the love child of Ashbery and Merrill and literary godson of Richard Howard––whose expansive, urbane, essayistic poems in his book The Revisionist opened me up to the possibilities of rhetoric, history, and place.