Grossman's first marriage ended in divorce; afterwards he married novelist Judith Grossman, and they stayed married until his death.[1] His children are Jonathan Grossman and Adam Grossman from the first marriage, and Bathsheba Grossman, Austin Grossman, and Lev Grossman from the second.
On November 11, 2006, on the occasion of his retirement, several friends, colleagues, and students of Grossman held a joint reading in his honor. These included Michael Fried, Susan Howe, Ha Jin, Mark Halliday, Breyten Breytenbach, Susan Stewart and Frank Bidart. The event culminated with a reading by Grossman of poetry from his latest book of poems, Descartes' Loneliness.
Grossman died of complications from Alzheimer's at a nursing home in Chelsea, Mass. on June 27, 2014.[3] He was 82.
The Song of the Lord, (Watershed, 1991). An audiotape where the author reads poems selected from The Ether Dome.
The Philosopher's Window and Other Poems (New York: New Directions, 1995).
How to Do Things with Tears, (New York: New Directions, 2001).
Sweet Youth, (New York: New Directions, 2002).
Descartes' Loneliness, (New York: New Directions, 2007)
True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Selected Prose
Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats, a study of The Wind Among the Reeds (University of Virginia Press, 1969)
The Sighted Singer Two Works on Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) Contains (Part II): "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Common Places in Speculative Poetics".
The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
"The Passion of Laocoon: Warfare of the Religious Against the Poetic Institution" in Western Humanities Review, Vol LVI Number 2 Fall 2002, pp. 30–80.
"Wordworth's 'The Solitary Reaper': Notes on Poiesis, Pastoral, and Institution", TriQuarterly 116, Summer 2003.
Ben Lerner discusses Grossman's impact on poetics at length in The Hatred of Poetry and references Grossman's death, ostensibly contemporaneously, on p. 78.[5]