Allen Grossman died in June this year and it returned me to his poetry. He is the kind of poet our time needs but rarely acknowledges. Grossman received a 2009 Bollingen Prize, one of those high honors that only other poets know about. He didn’t receive the more obvious Pulitzer or National Book Award. But, then again, prophets and prophet-poets don’t open their mouths to receive accolades.
When I first read “The Ether Dome and Other Poems” I found that I couldn’t read him silently and truly hear his voice. I had to read him out loud to taste the textures of his words on my tongue. Because I do much of my reading in public while in transit, I often looked like a madman walking down the street, talking, gesturing and laughing to myself. But allowing myself the freedom to do this in spite of the public display, helped me to see what a remarkable poet he is, one with a voice that needs to be heard in more ways than one. He is a late 20th century child of both Blake and Stevens, but not a child in the sense of merely inheriting traits or styles, but an active creator or, in his own words, “the self-determined maker.” With epigrammatic lines like “Eternity and Time/Grieve incessantly in one another’s arms” he echoes but comments on Blake’s “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Or his recurring use of the realm of the unborn recalls Blake’s vale of Har from the Book of Thel but goes on to make further comments for our own time. He engages those paradoxes that strike at unapparent truth as when he says, “Distance and intimacy grow together” or “In the/ Book at hand is a book beyond all hands.” Then he will also comment on and extend Stevens as when he says, “sex and imagination are one” or when he says, “the whole/Body is an Orphic explanation by a most eloquent spirit/Failing to be clear.” To be sure, there is also humor in this, a playfulness that is the mark of a truly great mind. For only the truly great mind is great enough to remain playful even when serious.
Unlike Steven and more like Blake, one sees in Grossman a man of vision: a prophet. Stevens was a deep man of intellect and imagination, but not a man of spirit—or should I say, of faith? For Stevens to say, “God and the imagination are one” was to echo Protagoras in saying, “man is the measure of all things.” While for Blake to say, “imagination is Holy Spirit,” was actually to assert the indwelling reality of the divine. Stevens is at the end of the long line of Romantic thinking, but in him there is no faith as there is in Blake. What we have in Grossman is a poet who embraces the polarities of that arc from Blake to Stevens, uniting them in a poetic dialogue that reasserts the status of the poet as prophet.
Subsuming the disillusionments in Stevens into a larger spiritual commentary on our time, Grossman reconnects with the dialectic vision we find in Blake. At the same time, he confronts the darker realities of the modern world, assuming the infinite cycles and entropies we take for granted, as in his poem “The Guardian,” where he says,
. . . after a long time, all this will stop, flow
Back into the universe, cease form, cease
To be metal, become another thing,
Become nothing.
It is the colder reality of the flux of a universe too large for us to know. We will be absorbed back into it and this is part of the whole. There is something of the idea of Indra in this, the small god who oversees the current universe, but who himself is merely one in a number of Indras from countless universes as each world is born and dies in the sleep of Vishnu. Grossman’s poems are always peeling back more and more layers of appearance to disclose deeper or more distant realities. Some of those realities are so distant and so deep they no longer include the human. Yet, it is always in the context that we are a part of this, this is the whole spiritual context of our singular existence at this moment. Because of that, it is surprisingly comforting. A rare quality to find in a modern poet and one profoundly needed.
