POET

Allen Grossman (1932 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Allen R. Grossman's poetry has been described as being like no other postmodernist American poetry. His poetry is influenced by modernist poets as are many other postmodernist poets of Grossman's generation; however, unlike his peers, Grossman does not align himself with any one poetic community. As Gary Roberts wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, almost without exception, Grossman "does not refer to friends, peers, colleagues, or fellow living poets by name" and does not make allusions to any "social networks and personal allegiances" in his work. These, again, are ways in which Grossman's poetry sets itself off from the poetry of his contemporaries. Due to his unique style, literary critics have been unable to classify his poetry into a specific literary movement, thus isolating Grossman in a category all by himself.

Grossman's poetry comes out of the Romantic tradition of lyric poetry, and he writes in a high style, reflecting the influence of William Butler Yeats. Although Grossman has stated that any worthy poem is written in an anonymous voice, Roberts pointed out that many of Grossman's poems reflect his relationship with his parents as well as his memories of his youth. In his first published poetry collection, A Harlot's Hire, Grossman also appears to contradict his anonymity as many of the poems disclose his Jewish heritage.

In Grossman's fourth book, The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River, Roberts wrote that Grossman "announces arrival at his incontrovertibly distinct authority," and with each subsequent book thereafter, Grossman's poetic voice grows stronger. The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground: Love Poems "presents a more unified display of intention, focus, and revelation," Roberts stated. In the end, Roberts defined Grossman's poetry as "dark and uncompromising, but it is also without dismay: it is resolute."

Grossman's The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected, a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, was described by critic William Doreski for the Literary Review as representing "a long devotion to poetry not as a quasi-career but as a way of understanding the world." Doreski praised Grossman for creating his poetic art as a "salvation, consolation, and communion or contact with the world of spirit," something that most modern poets "no longer understand." Grossman knows how to use symbol and faith, Doreski continued, to represent the material world, where other poets "struggle with the material world for its own sake."

In 2001 Grossman published How to Do Things with Tears, a collection of poems that James Longenbach of the Boston Review described in this way: "Each book that Grossman has published since The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River has been more ambitious, more weighty, more cacophonous than the one before it, and How to Do Things with Tears is his wildest creation yet." The material in this book, Longenbach claimed, could have filled ten books. In this collection, there are poems for everyone, and all of them are "stuffed with characters, voices and idioms"; and yet there is a unifying voice, Longenbach wrote, that makes a singular statement: "Poetry is what we do with memories, and remembering is what we do with tears." Longenbach concluded his review by warning his readers that Grossman's book is by no means an easy read. "It exists to confound." However, despite the difficulty that readers might have in deciphering Grossman's poetry, Longenbach reminded them, "it is impossible to resist the unironic joy with which Grossman performs the work of poetry."

CAREER

Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, beginning 1967, assistant professor, professor of English, Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of Poetry and General Education, 1983-91; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities, 1991—.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Harlot's Hire, Walker-de Berry (Cambridge, MA), 1962.
The Recluse and Other Poems, Pym-Randall (Cambridge, MA), 1965.
Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats: A Study of the Winds among the Reeds (prose), University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1969.
And the Dew Lay All Night upon My Branch: Poems, Aleph (Lexington, MA), 1973.
The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River: A Book of Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1979.
Of the Great House, New Directions (New York, NY), 1981.
Against Our Vanishing: Winter Conversations with Allen Grossman on the Theory and Practice of Poetry, Rowan Tree (Boston, MA), 1982, revised and expanded as part 1 of The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (also see below), Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1992.
Of the Great House: A Book of Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1982
The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground, New Directions (New York, NY), 1986.
The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected, New Directions (New York, NY), 1991.
The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1992.
The Philosopher's Window and Other Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1995.
The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (Poets on Poetry), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1997.
How to Do Things with Tears, New Directions (New York, NY), 2001.

Works represented in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry series, 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1993. Contributor to literary periodicals, including Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, and TriQuarterly.