Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence

by Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley (Introduction)

Table of Contents Part One
Excerpts from a June Journal
Beans
June 1, 1991: Sleeping Late
June 16, 1991: Final Foal
Journal Entry, PoBiz, Texas
Notes from My Journal, Kyoto, December 1984 Part Two
Interstices
Swimming and Writing
Motherhood and Poetics
October 4, 1995
For Anne at Passover
Recitations
First Loves Part Three
An Appreciation of Marianne Moore's Selected Letters
This Curious Silent Unrepresented Life
Josephine Jacobsen
Back to the Mona Van Duyn
A Postcard from the Volcano
Essay on Robert Frost Part Four
Trochee, Trimeter, and the On A Shropshire Lad
The Villanelle
A Way of Staying Sane
Word for "Poem for My Son"
Scrubbed Up and Sent to School Part Five
Keynote Address, PEN-New England, April 11, 1999
Premonitory Shiver
Two Junes Part Six
Interview from an interview with Enid Shomer I know that there are many poets whose work you admire, but who has exerted the most influence on you? Auden, unquestionably. Almost everything I know how to do with the line, I learned from absorbing Auden. You never met him? No. I probably attended a dozen readings he gave, in and around Boston, in his carpet slippers. I worshipped him from afar. Today, it must seem a strange influence, and Anglo-American male. You'd expect I would say--I don't know--but some woman role model. There really was no one at the time. Marianne Moore? Hardly. She was inimitable, in the firest sense of that word. And Elizabeth Bishop was just too distant and too classical. But when I was sixteen, I adored Edna St. Vincent Millay; I could say lots of her sonnets by heart, and that was all to the good. Auden exerted an intellectual and visceral influence on me, though, metrically, in terms of rhyme and scansion, and his ability to compress those gifts into images, to make a metaphor of a "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."

Genres: Poetry

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2001

About the author

Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo was a Finnish poet and translator. He lived in the United States from 1967 until his death in January of 2013.

Paavo Anselm Aleksis Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland. His father, Juho Aukusti Hollo (1885–1967) — who liked to be known as "J. A." Hollo — was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, an essayist, and a major translator of literature into Finnish. His mother was Iris Antonina Anna Walden, a music teacher and daughter of organic chemist Paul Walden. He lived for eight years in the United Kingdom producing three children: Hannes, Kaarina, and Tamsin, with his first wife, poet Josephine Clare. He was a permanent resident in the United States from the late 1960s until his death. At the time of his death and he resided in Boulder, Colorado with his second wife, artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo.

Hollo published more than forty titles of poetry in the UK and in the US, in a style strongly influenced by the American beat poets.

In 1965, Hollo performed at the "underground" International Poetry Incarnation, London. In 2001, poets and critics associated with the SUNY Buffalo POETICS list elected Hollo to the honorary position of "anti-laureate", in protest at the appointment of Billy Collins to the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Hollo translated poetry and belles-lettres from Finnish, German, Swedish and French into English. He was one of the early translators of Allen Ginsberg into German and Finnish.

Hollo taught creative writing in eighteen different institutions of higher learning, including SUNY Buffalo, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since 1985, he has taught in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where he held holds the rank of Full Professor.[2]

Hollo became ill, and during the summer of 2012, had brain surgery.

Several of his poems have been set into music by pianist and composer Frank Carlberg.

Poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley named their son Anselm Berrigan after Hollo.

Hollo died from post operative pneumonia on January 29, 2013 at the age of 78.

Reviews

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I more than half-read this. I two-thirds read it.

At some points it was perfect. At some points it was like hearing a stoned guy read his poem-notes to himself. A very talented stoned guy...

I will be checking out more standalone Hollo books for sure.