BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 01-Mar-05 | ISBN: 1844711099 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 260pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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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); 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 39; 40; 41; 42; 43; 44; 45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 50; 51; 52; 53; 54; 55; 56; 57; 58; 59; 60; 61; 62; 63; 64; 65; 66; 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

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Anselm Hollo was 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 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 taught at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He died in 2013.