John Hollander

The poet John Hollander died Saturday.  He was 83 and had been long unwell.

I first met John at Indiana University in 1964.  I was an undergraduate, he was then at the School of Letters, a summer institute featuring that summer such luminaries as George Steiner, Robert Fitzgerald, and others I can't now name.  My friend Lance Bird and I were making a student film in that year, and somehow convinced these august persons to be in it, playing the syndics of the International Anarchist Conspiracy (one scene, set in front of a huge map of the world in the lobby of a modern building.)

I used to talk to him about poetry then.  A scene in my story Novelty in which an aspiring writer talks to an established poet about poems that are meant to be written and poems meant to be talked about in bars is taken from one conversation back then.

I lost touch with him then for a long time, and though I sent him a galleys or a typescript of Little, Big I heard nothing from him.  He was teaching then at Yale.  When Harold Bloom (Yale also) took up my writing and pressed LB on Hollander, he was astonished to realize he'd known me and had not recognized the name on the MS I'd sent.  He as much as Bloom was responsible for my teaching at Yale, one of the great experiences of my life.

He was the most learned man -- and the most filled with recondite knowledge of every kind in every realm -- I've ever known.  He read a galley of my book Love & Sleep and sent me a list of small errors of this and that kind I'd made -- apologizing for what he called a "crabbed response" -- later praising the cod-18th c. poem I inserted into that volume, which was high praise indeed.