For Allen Grossman

Sad news today from Norman Finkelstein: Allen Grossman (1932-2014) has died.

I don't remember how I first came across "The Ether Dome." But its extraordinary mixture of melancholy and the prophetic voice mesmerized me. Here was a poet who defied the trends of the post avant-garde by unapologetically owning the obligations of High Modernism, yet who also seemed unclassifiable, embracing the vatic visionary mode in an era drunk on shallow irony. His work was both sublime, heated by the hellish furnace of history, and at the same time risked a raw sentimentality that somehow always felt earned.

My professor at Colorado, Jeffrey Robinson, first introduced me to Grossman's magnificent and bewildering manifesto, "The Sighted Singer" (he'd studied with Grossman at Brandeis). Grossman's sheer generosity to the idea of poetic voice, articulated so precisely and humanely, astonished me. Though I recall being deeply annoyed by his praise for Elizabeth Bishop and his complete ignorance of Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedekcer. Well, "nobody's perfect."

Grossman was unabashedly hieratic. His great gift -- maybe his greatest? - was the way in which he acknowledged and honored our mortality. He was a poet of tremendous humility. A poem was a field charged with eros and with the sadness of its own fragility. Out of this came work of the highest lyricism:

"Stars are tears falling with the light inside.
In the moon, they say, is a sea of tears.
It is well known that the wind weeps.
The lapse of all streams is a form of weeping,
And the heaving swell of the sea."

from "The Woman on The Bridge Over the Chicago River"

And here is the galvanizing first sentence of "The Sighted Singer," brimming with the challenge of futility and transcendence.

"Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing."

What else can one add?

Here's my hasty, off-the-cuff elegy. Logos is cultural, and therefore, transient. But poetry, poetry, one hopes, goes on to infinity...

The Broken Tower
i.m. Allen Grossman

Remember?

How we lived
how we bathed
how we wept

outside the homes
for our own
lost names?

A name is a cloud.
It burns
its own grave.

Someone said
“rain.” Someone
said this rhyme

means pain
except that in song
it lifts us

& we stand
outside time
laved by the light

the impossible
makes
requisite.

There is no
outside nor any
inside either.

Only the stellar
dust that makes
of the Void

a body and from
a body's garments
love.

What song is this?
If I forget thee, O
my vanishing

then what song is this?
To become the green
doom of pastoral

on the bridge of the Messiah?
To insist that
the poem breathe?

There is no word
for death because every
word kneels before

its open grave.
Pray to the amen
that no one says.

Outis, Shalom.
The word for hope
is bridge or nothing.

Passage to a book
made by dust
to be read by dust.

Remember this.
How words are dust
without any end.

There is no end
but what dust will whisper.
Begotten and forgotten.

Murmured without
end. Murmured without
end.