Anselm Hollo

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Biographical note:  Anselm Hollo is the author of more than thirty books, not including his literary translations. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into Finnish, French, German, Swedish, and Hungarian. He has received a NEA Fellowship, two grants from The Fund for Poetry, the Government of Finland’s Distinguished Foreign Translator’s Award, The San Francisco Poetry Center’s Book Award, and The Academy of American Poets’ Translation Prize. He teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844711093
ISBN-10:  1844711099
ISBN-13:  9781844711093
Author:  Anselm Hollo
Title:  Braided River
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-05
Extent:  260pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  15 mm
Weight:  390 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 19.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Braided River consists of a major selection from forty years of Anselm Hollo’s published work, as well as a selection from his most recent, uncollected work.

It describes a “braided” lifetime’s endeavours to generate text that reflects a twentieth century existence in Europe, including England, and the United States of America.

A native of Finland, Hollo has been anthologized and discussed as a “British” poet in the Sixties and early Seventies, later on, as an “American” one.

A lifelong associate of the Beat, Black Mountain, New York (One and Two), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E schools of U.S. American Poetry, Hollo hopes to convey to younger writers the amazing variety and strength of the writing (both poetry and prose) that has emerged from those quarters in the past fifty-odd years, and that has been strongly connected to the most active work created in the United Kingdom. This body of work represents the United States’ true contribution to modern and postmodern world literature, and it exists, to this day, in glorious independence from what poet/essayist Charles Bernstein has called ‘official verse culture.’ Hollo’s aim is to acquaint younger writers with this vigorous, multifarious, rhizomic tradition of U.S. American writing. He also hopes to demonstrate the multi- and cross-cultural connections that have influenced it, something he practises in his Boulder classes, examining twentieth century European poetry and French poetry in particular, and in his translation workshops.

Table of contents:
& It Is a Song (1965)
& I Heard a Man, Telling the Sky
Message from the Border
Song of the Tusk
My Ancestors
Blue Dream Movie in Eleven Takes
Faces & Forms (1965)
Late: the Aspen Hour
A New Ballade of Lost Ladies
The Mosaic Standard from Ur
The Going-On Poem (1966)
The Claim (1966)
The Man in the Treetop Hat (1968)
Requiem for a Princess
First Ode for a Very Young Lady
A Lion or a Flower (for Mayakovsky, I Thought)
And How It Goes
The Coherences (1968)
Journey
The Lights Coming Onin the RoomsStrung OutBack through the Years
The Day’s Events
Dream Rain Dance
“All the Way to Morning Town”
The One
Tumbleweed (1968)
The Monster
The Wreck
Maya (1970)
On the Occasion of Becoming an Echo
The Walking Catfish
In the Long View of Human History Man’s Reliance on Fossil Fuels Can Be but a Short Episode
The Moving Houses Are Very Movingas They Move Slowly into the Sea
Buffalo — Isle of Wight Power Cable
Sensation 27 (1972)
Moment
Spring Cleaning Greens (1973)
In Northernmost Michigan
Black Book (1974)
Knife in the Water
Seized with Unrest, Winging through the Dark
Lingering Tangos (1977)
On and Off the Road Baltimore — Ithaca
No Complaints (1983)
Fool’s Paradise
Finite Continued (1980)
The Terrorist Smiles
Hard as Nails
Object, Now
Outlying Districts (1990)
Who Wrote This
Pygmy Hut
Lighthouse
The Dada Letter
Near Miss Haiku (1990)
Monumentally Self-Deluded
An Eek
Corvus (1993)
Not a Form at All but a State of Mind
rue Wilson Monday (2000)
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Ralhar (2004)
The Long Hiss of Time
“So you start out you come across some writing …”
“listen / to the long hiss of time …”
On Reading Certain Novels
“Thirty years later …”
“wind gusts changes sky from blue to white …”
“see laughing delegates …”
From the Sayings of Chairman Ted
These Bookshelves a Forest of Poetry
Cat Pome
Ever Poem
Ralhar
Mardi
Lyckan
‘“How is it far if you can think of it?” …’
“riding the thermals all the time BORING …”
“Moving the books was like moving brain cells …”
“it is 9 p.m. and you’re not up for it …”
‘“I cannot be making a mistake” hellip;’
“walking down oldtime hotel lobby corridor …”
“was born coiffed (né coiffé) …”
“brain hovers above keyboard …”
“wave motion green as text …”
“excellent excellent …”
“The Royal Hunt of the Sun just a memory …”
“That mouse that mouse …”
“The tastemakers will go on …”
Satyricon
Going Home
“puzzled / watching people …”
A Double for Jack Collom
“a lot of commotion kerplunk and galumph …”
“after a third go-around with The Emperor …”
“They sit on some of the furniture …”
“O to be in Nueva York …”
A Bit of Hades (2004)
“faintly a brabble all cadence no words …”
“down down into the city of the dead …”
“can only love you like a sister she says …”
“reel along in the murk …”
Remembering how Paul Blackburn Made Those Old Troubadours Sound

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Excerpt from book:  

A Lion or a Flower (for Mayakovsky, I Thought)

To all appearances a flower
on a stem
from the floor, behind that
to all appearances hotel or
boardinghouse window
rising, lonely
with his eyes in its petalled
head, dark, thickly
burning against the orange
at this late hour, and yet
the people, in passing, had to
smile. But we knew, about
windows at night in passing, so many
we had called out to only
to find it wasn’t there anymore
only acid dust bottles and where
was the room the staircase?
In passing while looking for,
but it had gone back to the old house
or looking for what, for more
for a flower, a lion maybe
to make them smile in this city
at this late hour
at the cement mixers, at the dead
workingmen fast asleep in his eyes.

Unpublished endorsement :  This is a man who sees through to the other side of empire’s lies, but who is also capable of remaining perfectly still, a rare thing, as Pascal knew. He doesn’t bother with spending the entire day in search of the mot juste, as Ford said of Conrad. He's got a million of them up his sleeve. You want mot juste? “Lookee here,” as Buddy Guy says before he rips into one of his solos: “In the land of invisible warfare, many thoughts return marked insufficient postage.”

Patrick Pritchett

Review quote:  Anselm Hollo wrote The Empress Hotel Poems (there were six of them), which appeared in Jon Silkin’s magazine, Stand, in England, in 1966. I was astounded by them then, for they proposed, for the first time in my experience, that it was possible for an American poetic idiom to be adopted by a European (writing in English). It is impossible for someone under 40 (say) writing poetry in America today to imagine the narrowness of possibility allowed by the literary climate in England at that time. There were some British poets (Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood being the outstanding examples) who had the nous to overcome those severe limits, but for me, and I’m sure for many others, it was Anselm Hollo’s work that represented a crucial breakthrough, especially because Stand was a magazine with a relatively large distribution, while Raworth and Harwood were still “underground” poets at that time. What The Empress Hotel Poems illuminated was the simple fact that Kerouac, Ginsberg, O’Hara and company, were not simply icons of a seemingly fabulous culture beyond our reach, but were potential models for the future of a new poetics.

Doug Lang
Washington Review

Review quote:  On Corvus: The bedrock solidness of Anselm Hollo’s poems makes as ever a place of refuge and delight in these meager times. Thank God for his humor, else we’d all be dead.

Robert Creeley

Review quote:  On Corvus: For three decades Anselm Hollo has been an important figure on the intercultural poetry scene. In Outlying Districts, we see how his original work has been enriched, both technically and in content, by the contact he has had with European poets through his impressive translations.

James Laughlin

Review quote:  And the language – hip and jazzy, humorous, erudite and seemingly casual, overlays the serious rumblings of a non–complacent mind, always ‘very there’, wary and alert. Resonating from the onset of the moment, his poems are sharp, concise, politically prescient, and a bit world weary – as should be expected – with his awareness of and translations from an international and intercultural world of writing. Although he has made the United States his home since 1966, he still retains the valuable ability to see ‘America’ from the outside. Yet he knows that “beauty knows no ideologically correct routines.”

Joanne Kyger
San Francisco Poetry Center Prize