Im sad to learn of the death of Allen Grossman, this past Friday, at the age of 82. He was an extraordinary mind, an odd and difficult poet, and quite simply the greatest teacher Ive ever had. As a Brandeis undergrad in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I took as many classes with Grossman as I possibly could. His lectures were passionate, serious, and abstract -- at times impenetrable. He never talked down to us but expected us to keep up with him, or try to, and the miracle is that we Grossmanians so often did. I didnt realize then how idiosyncratic, and how deep and coherent, his views on poetry and poetics were, but certain ideas and formulations affected me profoundly and have stayed with me. For Grossman, poetrys chief function is keeping -- preserving or actually instantiating the presence of the beloved, an act thats both essential and doomed because of inherent contradictions. One trades the living branch for the effigy of the branch, deathless because its not alive. Poems arise out of and fall back into silence. Silence threatens a poem from all sides, visible in the blank spaces before and after a poem on the page, and to the left and right of its lines. A poet breaks silence by finding the necessary occasion for speech. For Grossman, poetry was ultimately about love and human care. Poetry is language meant to be given away, he would always say. My friends and I invented many nicknames for the man, such as Old Furniture Breath and Agamemnon. These were names of affection rather than disrespect -- affection mingled with nervousness and not a little awe. He was a kind man and a generous professor but not so easy to approach. If his classes and poetry readings were high theater, it was never entirely clear how much his personality was a performance and how much was plain eccentricity. He was always very visible on campus and available to his students, but he kept his personal life completely separate and private. I would as likely have asked him about himself as I would ask the Oracle at Delphi what shes doing on the Friday night of a long holiday weekend. We called him Old Furniture Breath because his office, in a much-windowed corner of the Rabb Graduate Center, featured an enormous round oak table and bookshelves, floor to ceiling, lining every wall. The shelves were jammed with poetry books that overflowed into piles on the floors and most of the other horizontal spaces, making the passage from door to chair somewhat treacherous. In that office, I always got the feeling of being in the presence of the entire history of poetry. We called him Agamemnon because he cultivated a sort of Ancient of Days aura, as if Odysseus ship had just sailed up the Charles and deposited him in Waltham before heading back to Ithaca. I realize that Im older now than Grossman was when he was my teacher, but the impression remains. Grossman will always be older than all of us. Grossmans TA for many of his undergraduate classes was Mark Halliday, then a floppy-haired grad student with signature red high-top Chucks. Halliday would challenge and question Grossman in class. The two of them would wrangle and argue and attempt to find common ground, Halliday standing up for clarity and simple human fears and desires, Grossman unflappably hermetic. I remember often sitting there open-mouthed, tennis-matching my head back and forth. This was not a minor part of my education in poetry. Grossman and Halliday semi-formalized their conversations in a book of talks, which forms part of Grossmans treatise The Sighted Singer. This discourse of poetic structure remains one of the most extraordinary, and most difficult, books about poetry that I know. I had the distinct pleasure of having Grossman as my undergrad honors thesis advisor. Grossman agreed to work with me on a long essay about James Merrill, even though he detested his poems. Grossman called Merrill an infernal gamesman of words, which strikes me now as an epithet that Merrill would likely have relished. Merrill was in the throes of completing what would become The Changing Light at Sandover, and I was smitten. Still am. Grossman, on the other hand, was rather less seduced. He suggested, as a sort of antidote, Doris Lessings Canopus in Argos pentalogy and, somewhat less seriously, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Ah, Grossman, it took me many years to get that particular joke. So Professor Grossman, thank you for your window-rattling readings of your own poems, and for the way you delivered the first lines of Stevens Sunday Morning, literally shouting the downbeat of CompLAcencies, then letting your voice dwindle to a wistful croak for coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. Thank you for the three-piece corduroy suits, and for the watch fob and chain. Thank you for that time I arrived at your office for a meeting, and you introduced me to a certain Archie, who I realized only later was the unassuming and recently MacArthured A.R. Ammons. Thank you, Professor Grossman, for your intensity, and for your kindness. Thank you for showing me that a person could make a legitimate life from the study and practice of poetry. And thank you for demonstrating, so beautifully, how such a thing might be done.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 02:00:11 +0000
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