Caption for Grossman portrait: Allen Grossman, circa 1953 (NYTimes.com)
The Marrow and the Harvest: Reflections on Allen Grossman’s Bitter Logic
by Andrea Applebee
Poet and scholar Allen Grossman has done as much to further our understanding of poetry as he has to contribute to its practice. His books of poetry include The Harlot’s Hire, The Ether Dome, and Descartes’ Loneliness (to name a only a few); his critical works span concepts from love and the sacred to life’s contingency and the exercise of choice. Born in 1932 in Minneapolis, the son of a Chevrolet dealer, Grossman attended Harvard and gathered many honors including the MacArthur “genius” grant. He did not place his work in any particular poetic community, but his work brings together philosophy and narrative in ways that some identify as both modern and Romantic. Read More »
Souls on the Banks of the River Styx, by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, c. 1873
Against Our Vanishing: On the Loss of Allen Grossman
by Christopher Kondrich
“Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing,” wrote Allen Grossman to preface The Sighted Singer, a volume containing his conversations with Mark Halliday and Summa Lyrica, a treatise on poetics and personhood that, to my whole being, is a singularly beautiful, eloquent and courageous work of aesthetics and humanism. This opening sentence, which has stayed and buoyed me ever since I first encountered it, is a door he left ajar to a way of valuing humans and our “right of presence,” to envisioning aesthetic creation as a social, not solitary enterprise, and to understand poetics as the labor, the process of making humans out of bodies. It is “our” vanishing—neither solely his nor mine—and it is a power, a principle of power, that provides us with the integrity and love to keep “the image of persons as precious in the world.” Read More »