Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence [Paperback]

Anselm Hollo (Author), Robert Creeley (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

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 Fairground: Mona Van Duyn
A Postcard from the Volcano
Essay on Robert Frost

Part Four
Trochee, Trimeter, and the MRI: On A Shropshire Lad
Gymnastics: The Villanelle
A Way of Staying Sane
Word for Word: "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

ES: I know that there are many poets whose work you admire, but who has exerted the most influence on you?

MK: Auden, unquestionably. Almost everything I know how to do with the line, I learned from absorbing Auden.

ES: You never met him?

MK: 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.

ES: Marianne Moore?

MK: 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 thought: "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gathering work from 24 mostly small-press collections, Notes is the Finnish-American Hollo's first selected volume in nearly 25 years. Hollo speaks, writes and translates in or from at least four different languages, and has moved gradually over the years from a spare, wit-based lyrical style toward more angular, often slyly political speech and casual humor: "a copacetic evening/ watching the latest military techn?/ wipe out poverty in the world/ in its most obvious form, the poor." The plethora of poems here, arranged chronologically and containing a quietly expanding sense of uncertainty for the fate of the species, have a range that belie Hollo's relative lack of fame and his predilection for writing in modestly short or serial forms as he does brilliantly in Rue. Dedicated to "The School of Continuation" and written during a five-month stay in a small French town outside of Paris, Rue is a crackling, wickedly lyrical sonnet sequence hurtling 21st-century noun logjams across the bows of cubist poetic structures. Taking tonal cues from several oft-cited contemporaries (Ed Dorn, Ted Berrigan) while speaking directly out of the open-ended sensibilities of present-day poetic transformation, the book extends the arena of poetic eavesdropping out into the world at large: "breeze through the grand accordion of frames/ watch reflections flounce/ prattling selves, quavered ecliptics/ sink into head's reanimated folds." Hollo has been associated with just about every subdivision of and outgrowth from the New American Poetry, but has remained defiantly unclassifiable. These collections will no doubt resonate with longtime Hollo readers, but both have the observational charm and unpretentious wit to win a deservedly larger audience with Rue being the ideal book for first-timers. (June 1)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

The author of more than forty books of original work and the translator of Genet, Truffaut, and others, Anselm Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1934. An Associate Professor of Writing and Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Hollo has won an NEA Poetry Fellowship and a PEN award for translation. He has taught at the Black Mountain College Symposium, SUNY Buffalo, and the University of Iowa.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566891132
• ISBN-13: 978-1566891134
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,975,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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