Hollander resided in Woodbridge, Connecticut, where he served as a judge for several high-school recitation contests. He said he enjoyed working with students on their poetry and teaching it. With his ex-wife, Anne Loesser (daughter of pianist Arthur Loesser;[7] married 1953–77), he was the father of writer Martha Hollander and uncle of the songwriter Sam Hollander. He married Natalie Charkow in 1981.
Hollander stressed the importance of hearing poems out loud: "A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you, informs you and entertains you".[9] The poet needs to be aware of the "sound of sense; the music of speech".[10] To Hollander, verse was a kind of music in words, and he spoke eloquently about their connection with the human voice.[4]
Hollander was also known for his translations from Yiddish.
He usually wrote his poems on a computer, but if inspiration struck him, he offered that, "I've been known to start poems on napkins and scraps of paper, too."[9]
Hollander was considered to have technical poetic powers without equal,[11] as exampled by his "Powers of Thirteen" poem, an extended sequence of 169 (13 × 13) unrhymed 13-line stanzas with 13 syllables in each line.[12] These constraints liberated rather than inhibited Hollander's imagination, giving a fusion of metaphors that enabled Hollander to conceive this work as "a perpetual calendar".[13] Hollander also composed poems as "graphematic" emblems (Type of Shapes, 1969) and epistolary poems (exampled in Reflections on Espionage, 1976),[14] and, as a critic (in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 1975), offered telling insights into the relationship between words and music and sound in poetry, and in metrical experimentation,[15] and 'the lack of a theory of graphic prosody'.[16]
Hollander influenced poets Todd LaRoche and Karl Kirchwey, who both studied under Hollander at Yale. Hollander taught Kirchwey that it was possible to build a life around the task of writing poetry.[17] Kirchwey recalled Hollander's passion:[17]
'Since he is a poet himself ... he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration.'
Hollander also served in the following positions, among others: member of the board, Wesleyan University Press (1959–62); editorial assistant for poetry, Partisan Review (1959–65); and contributing editor of Harper's Magazine (1969–71).[18] His other role was as a poetry critic.[19]
^ abcBoynton, Cynthia Wolfe, "Venerable Poet's Words To a Pop Music Beat", The New York Times, Connecticut and the Region section, February 10, 2008, p. 6.
^Essay: "The Poem in the Ear", Vision and Resonance: Two senses of Poetic Form (1975).
^Howard Richard, Alone in America: Essays on the art of poetry in U.S.since 1950, 1969.
^Breslin, Paul, Review of Powers of Thirteen, Poetry, vol. 145, no. 3, December 1984.
^Lehman, David - article in Newsweek, January 23, 1984.
^Hollander, John - interview by email with Paul Devlin March/April 2003.
^Attridge, Dennis, Review of Vision and Resonance: Two senses of Poetic Form, MLR, vol. 72, no. 3, July 1973.
^Rothman, David, "Verse, Prose speech, Counting and the Problem of Graphic Order", Versification, vol. 1, no. 1, March 21, 1997.
^ abJohn swansburg (April 29, 2001). "At Yale, Lessons in Writing and in Life". The New York Times. Retrieved October 15, 2010. Karl Kirchwey, who graduated from Yale in 1979, recently became the director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, after having run the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y for over a decade. He remembers his first two years at Yale as unfocused and unproductive.
