PATRICK
JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews
The
Tortoise of History by Anselm Hollo
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2016)
My
earliest recollection of coming across the poetry of Anselm Hollo was a quote
in an old brochure for study of “Disembodied Poetics” at Naropa in Boulder: “Always
treat language like a dangerous toy.” This
odd sort of warning has a sharp-witted cryptic hilarity to it I’ve since come
to appreciate as typical of Hollo but which entirely escaped me at the time.
Next to these words was a superimposed headshot of the poet himself with what
looked to be an irrepressibly cagey smile, eyes merrily a-twinkle. At the time
I didn’t know how to take either the advice or the frolicsome bon vivant poet’s
mug. I was suspicious of what I took to be the overall playfulness on display.
“But poetry should be serious!” was, I imagine, along the lines of what I felt.
I was left wondering: “What’s with this ‘dangerous toy’ business? Language is
for grownups and toys are for kids what’s the idea of mixing them together?” Clearly,
I didn’t understand much about poetry, or life for that matter. Subsequent attentive
reading of Anselm Hollo’s work however continues to teach me a considerable
amount about both.
Although
Hollo’s final collection, The Tortoise of
History, arrives posthumously he did apparently assemble most of the book himself
before his passing in 2013. His widow Jane Dalrymple-Hollo describes the
contents aptly in her Foreword as “this peculiar compilation of old and new
musings, revisitations, letters to past and future, love notes to friends—and
to me”. There’s an assortment of bits
and pieces from nearly every corner of Hollo’s varied and ample poetic output
over the years. And while it’s saddening to have no further new poems to anticipate
from Hollo, he’d be the first to humorously remind us that although he may be deceased
he’s certainly not gone and perhaps ever easier to love.
“Don’t
tell me you can’t
love the
dead
sometimes
I love the dead more
than the
still living”
(“Don’t
Tell Me”)
As
British poet and Hollo pal Tom Raworth remarked at the time of Hollo’s passing
in the Independent: “There are many
who will always remember and miss his distinctive deep laugh, encouraging the
good but nervous poet while savaging the banal and pretentious.” Hollo’s laugh
was indeed a distinctive feature of his presence in a room. I well recall the
immediate pleasure I took joining in with him as he laughed away while reading
his own poems at the single reading of his I ever managed to attend. Like every
other key feature to be found in Hollo’s work, his humor has an easy air about
it, at once irrepressible and natural as anything. No matter the subject at
hand, reading Hollo’s work you get the crazy idea that poetry is meant to be
fun.
75
It ain’t
the middle of life
but I’m still
lost in the woods
Yet
Hollo was also as about erudite and cosmopolitan a poet as they come. Born in
Helsinki, he spoke German, Finnish, and Swedish at home when growing up. By the
time he made his way to Britain and was working for the BBC in the 1960s he was
speaking English and French fluently. In a sort of dream ascendance he began
publishing his poetry in English and was soon after whisked off to the United
States on what is a familiar tale for many poets of his generation of vagabond
university teaching picking up gigs wherever he could. He ranged around through
some of the major poetry scenes of the era; from Buffalo to Iowa, San Francisco
to New York and on until finally landing in Boulder. Along his way picking up
close ties to many fellow poet-comrades, such as Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, Ed
Dorn, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Andre Codrescu and Anne Waldman among dozens
and dozens of others. Hollo is a poet whose biggest fans are without doubt
other poets.
Hollo
experienced some bumpy times in his life but he eventually learned to follow
his own Muse and offers solid advice regarding how best to keep up with one’s
relationships as a poet.
“She Who
Must Be Obeyed
She Who
Laughs at Your Jokes
love them
both as one
as best
you can”
(“Wildly
Tangled”)
He
was ever humble in regard to his artistic vocation, “As a poet, I am merely one
who writes poems (=makes things in and out of language).” (Poetry Society of
America “Q & A with Anselm Hollo”) Teaching at Naropa may have come without
much national or international fanfare, but that was never the kind of thing
which interested him. And Naropa no doubt luckily, for those willing to make it
there and listen, offered him opportunity to impart some advice now and then. A
big part of which was surely not to presume whatever you’ve been told or
otherwise have handed to you as being obligatory and expected is necessarily
so: “I wish, however, that toilers in the field of poetics oppositional to those
dominant attitudes would bear in mind that they, too, often succumb to
corporate culture’s desire to have everything (not just poetry) clearly labeled and classified.” (Poetry Society
of America “Q & A with Anselm Hollo”)
A
large factor keeping Hollo’s poems active and appealing is the lively bounce
between the words on the page, surprising and delicate transitions operative at
the syntactical level. He is ever alert within the line of the poem to the
unexpected and opportunistic occasion.
“and the poem
takes you
to a love
of the kind wisdom
refuses to
abandon
the endlessly
contradictory
human heart”
(“Rides
with Bob Creeley”)
As
Joanne Kyger has described his work, “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.” Hollo’s work remains
ever conversational by nature. Sometimes quite literally so, as when addressing
a “Black Feline Angel / on opposite stool”:
“never
mind, I say, us oldies
just have
to hang on
to our
lives
and true
loves, too”
(“Late
Night, Old Surprises”)
Along
with walking the walk of professing upon poetry for a living, Hollo made much
of his income as a translator of just about every sort of text imaginable.
Also, as a multilingual speaker and reader he took great pleasure in exploring
those spaces existing between languages. Translation was thus an activity he
constantly pursued and kept a keen interest in.
The
second part of The Tortoise of History
fittingly presents what is presumably his last complete exercise in
translation, “Hipponax, His Poems”. It serves as a kind of mini-grand Summa
Poetica, paying homage to poets within the lineage with which he felt himself taking
part: from William Carlos Williams and the Blues tradition to his late great
pals Ted Berrigan and Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski. Hollo’s interest in the
ancient Greek poet Hipponax’s “deformed and mutilated verses [that] were called
choliambi, lame or limping verses”
runs from Saarikoski’s Finnish versions published in 1959 back to mention of
Hipponax in Williams’ Paterson Book
One along with Book Five’s “the dance, to dance to a measure / contrapuntally,
/ Satyrically, the tragic foot”, forward to Ted Berrigan’s uncanny ear for the
abruptly cut-off fragment of speech that’s yet a worthwhile bit of poetic
address.
While
“no ‘complete’ poem by Hipponax survives” and Hollo admits several of the
fragments which are left “may not seem all that evocative, or merely evocative,
hovering just below the threshold of ‘interesting’”, he nevertheless presents
an intriguing entrance into the work. He arranges his own versions under four
headings:
“Careless
Love” (check out Dr. John’s recorded version of that American classic)
“What a
Mob” (consisting of angry, vicious, and slanderous material)
“Screech
Screech Here Come the Ghosts” (Or, “People Who Died”) (see Ted Berrigan’s poem,
Jim Carroll’s song)
“Still
Waiting for My Winter Coat” (lines dealing with the ever-present needs and
wishes of the unhoused and impecunious)
Turns
out, as may be learned from reading Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, that Hipponax apparently had a feud over a woman,
Arété, with the sculptor Bupalos. As a result, there’s numerous reference to
this situation in lines of the poetry.
“here hang
on to my shirt
while I
bop Bupalos right
in the eye
for I am ambi-
dexterous
and my aim is
perfect”
Along
with aside-like comments, “was that a fart or a croak?” locality proximities, “he
lived in Smyrna / the wrong side of town // halfway to Hades” and astute
observations, “unfunny he who drinks his lunch”. Hollo delivers a brilliantly
subdued take on a poet whose work shows how “the Greeks displayed their acute
aesthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between
crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt” mixing in by way
of exampled demonstration his extending of Williams’ poetic composition in the
American Idiom.
In
closing, I’ll risk gross self-aggrandizement by sharing a poem of my own written
several years ago while aboard a plane back to San Francisco returning from my first
and only trip to Boulder. It clearly seeks echo Hollo’s easy-going style, which
is to say it attempts be successfully pedantic only in so far as to mock its
own earnestness and laidback documentation of a few “facts”. I believe I had Hollo’s
glorious Braided River: new and selected
poems 1965-2005 (Salt Publishing) on the empty seat next to me, although it
may have been the equally glorious Notes
on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: selected poems, 1965-2000
(Coffee House Press)—despite the similar coverage of years, there’s notably few
if any poems overlapping between these collections—along with Hesse’s Siddhartha, a goodbye gift laid on me by
my host, used books and nearly anything else acquirer extraordinaire the poet
Michael Price, to whom the poem is dedicated. It had been a poet-trip organized
by Price which brought me to Boulder. A group of us read at the Boulder Museum
of Contemporary Art, drove up into the Rockies on a day excursion, lounged in
his backyard by his airstream trailer, and paid our respects at the grave of Ed
Dorn. A meeting with Hollo had been floated as a possibility yet sadly wasn’t
manageable due to his poor health at the time.
ESPLANADE
MIGUEL
Buddhists walk among us. Walk among us,
Buddhists walk among us. Walk among us,
without hidden intent...
Nothing a Buddhist may do
may be or not. Stay or
go,
hidden or no. Although
Buddhists do go:
walking amongst us. The
sun goes away,
some clouds arrive &
go. Maybe it rains.
Who knows? it's all
without warning
& there's a lesson
(there's always a lesson).
Happiness, come & go, don't ever stay.
Happiness, come & go, don't ever stay.
Up in mid-Plains air,
where Buddhists love cats,
poetry, occasional
pottery, teach irrational passion rationally,
chanting and walking semi-city pavement under permanent
chanting and walking semi-city pavement under permanent
bejeweled starry sky,
would it were so forever.
A breakfast of 'almost', then airport drinks
& empty plane Hesse & Hollo equally share.
A breakfast of 'almost', then airport drinks
& empty plane Hesse & Hollo equally share.
for Price
*****
Patrick
James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library for the
University of San Francisco. He is a graduate of the Poetics Program from the
now-defunct New College of California, where he studied under Tom Clark, Adam
Cornford, Gloria Frym, Joanne Kyger, George Mattingly, and David Meltzer.
Alongside poets Marina Lazzara and Nicholas Whittington, he’s currently at work
editing together an anthology of critical writings by Poetics Program alumni
and faculty. His books include: GUSTONBOOK
(Post Apollo, 2011), Das Gedichtete
(Ugly Duckling, 2013), from Book of Kings
(Bird and Beckett Books, 2015), Drops of
Rain / Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and THE DUNCAN ERA: One Reader's Cosmology (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). He
edited and wrote the introduction for Owen Hill’s A Walk Among the Bogus (Lavender Ink, 2014).
Another view is offered by John Bloomberg-Rissman in this issue of GR #27:
ReplyDeletehttp://galatearesurrection27.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-tortoise-of-history-by-anselm-hollo_10.html