What do you think?
Rate this book
Guests of Space by Anselm Hollo
Anselm Hollo hangs his poetic hat upon the sonnet, graciously inviting us into his conversation with poets and thinkers, both here and gone, on subjects that range from environmentalism to the WTO protests, from wars waged in Kosovo and Iraq to questions of creativity and mortality.With trademark wit, acumen, and charm, Hollo's contribution to this multigenerational, international choir is one of the most important and enjoyable in contemporary letters.Andrei Codrescu has said he awaits Hollo's new poems "with more eagerness than those of any other living poet," and Library Journal urges us not to "miss anything at all by this strong poet."
Paperback
First published February 1, 2007
30 people want to read
About the author
Anselm Hollo
128 books24 followersAnselm 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 4, 2014
I once saw Anselm Hollo at a bookstore in Denver that I haunted for two years. I saw him, not at a reading, but browsing the vast selection of sale books on the lower level. Being very shy by nature, I didn’t approach him, but rather haunted him for fifteen minutes; a haunting within my haunting. My eyes lingered over him as his eyes lingered over first this book then that book then another, and there was such patient awareness in his gaze, such total yet unstrained attention, such presence, that seeing him leaf through discounted dinosaur books has inspired me ever since.
And when I read him I read him with the same qualities of attention I witnessed in him that day.
Hollo’s not a particularly well known poet, at least not well known to people who aren’t “in the know”. He’s actually probably better known as a translator, or at least his work as a translator is better known – he translated Genet’s Querelle, for example. His own poetry fits snugly into the avant-garde, but an avant-garde that is congenial, human, wise, and funny; but no less “difficult” for that. Again, difficult for those not in the know. Poetry’s a strange game, in that more often than not you need to be into it to get into it, and Hollo’s no exception, at least for the bulk of this slim book.
This is a collection of five groupings of sonnets; sonnets in the loose modern definition of that form wherein any poem of 14 lines qualifies. Throughout most of these sonnets are quotes (either direct or modified) from world literature of all eras; many of which are attributed while others aren’t. Throughout there is also a pervading atmosphere of homage to Ted Berrigan’s great book of sonnets. So that’s partly what I mean by “being in the know”: if you aren’t intimate with Berrigan and his sonnets, and other works in that “family”, then much of this book will fly by you. But that is not to say that Hollo’s wit will. Anyone with a sensitive ear for language, sufficiently educated mind, and a sufficiently trained perceptual apparatus can appreciate his work if sufficient attention is applied.
Example:
Which can be enjoyed on its own, in the sound and sense world of its own hermetic-seeming self, or enjoyed as an echo chamber of poetry and poets.
But Hollo can also be baldly vicious when it comes to the power-mongers of this world and the idiocies of “civilization”, and when this quality comes to the fore his poetry strips off its many robes of reference, whittles its song down to a few bare knuckles, and fights with grace:
Fight on, Mr. Hollo! And sing on! You’re a treasure and an example for us all. Cynical when necessary and required, but at heart an expansive humanist and lover of the true truly civilized civilization that by necessity must remain underground (as barbarians rule aboveground), accessible only to those in the know.
And when I read him I read him with the same qualities of attention I witnessed in him that day.
Hollo’s not a particularly well known poet, at least not well known to people who aren’t “in the know”. He’s actually probably better known as a translator, or at least his work as a translator is better known – he translated Genet’s Querelle, for example. His own poetry fits snugly into the avant-garde, but an avant-garde that is congenial, human, wise, and funny; but no less “difficult” for that. Again, difficult for those not in the know. Poetry’s a strange game, in that more often than not you need to be into it to get into it, and Hollo’s no exception, at least for the bulk of this slim book.
This is a collection of five groupings of sonnets; sonnets in the loose modern definition of that form wherein any poem of 14 lines qualifies. Throughout most of these sonnets are quotes (either direct or modified) from world literature of all eras; many of which are attributed while others aren’t. Throughout there is also a pervading atmosphere of homage to Ted Berrigan’s great book of sonnets. So that’s partly what I mean by “being in the know”: if you aren’t intimate with Berrigan and his sonnets, and other works in that “family”, then much of this book will fly by you. But that is not to say that Hollo’s wit will. Anyone with a sensitive ear for language, sufficiently educated mind, and a sufficiently trained perceptual apparatus can appreciate his work if sufficient attention is applied.
Example:
What’s current? I mean misheard?
Currently misheard? Shelf dancing? Alpine badminton?
Now write a sampling on one leg
Of composed being with shaky eyelids
Who tells you “I am in the art, but molecular
Only by dint of a visiting pillow;
I am the author of Author.
Now shall we agree, say I, before the bar is toothpicks
That poetry is a chicken in good mud-tennis weather?
Such tube-lit discourse. Ten dollars a waltz.
No tidy archery. So sell me that bumper, no, I meant
The mouse calliope, yes, that’s it! The ego
Seriously in tears at the holy beneath
Dangerous furry feelings – beware the hole punch
Of darkness, shrunk from the world.
So. One mouse calliope, please.
Which can be enjoyed on its own, in the sound and sense world of its own hermetic-seeming self, or enjoyed as an echo chamber of poetry and poets.
But Hollo can also be baldly vicious when it comes to the power-mongers of this world and the idiocies of “civilization”, and when this quality comes to the fore his poetry strips off its many robes of reference, whittles its song down to a few bare knuckles, and fights with grace:
Ah, to be a “National Poet”
wouldn’t that be fun?
No I don’t think so
They shot the last one
In the nineteenth century
& even less so
In the twenty-first
Where “spectacle overcomes thought”
& Xtianity so-called
‘s a perversion
Of the renegade rebbe’s teachings
Shock & awe Shlock & dread
Into the valleys of idiocy
They ride, our lords
Fight on, Mr. Hollo! And sing on! You’re a treasure and an example for us all. Cynical when necessary and required, but at heart an expansive humanist and lover of the true truly civilized civilization that by necessity must remain underground (as barbarians rule aboveground), accessible only to those in the know.
Displaying 1 of 1 review