The Raven at the End of the World:
Anselm Hollo’s Dangerous Language
A Review of
Corvus by Patrick Pritchett
N.B.: an earlier version of this review appeared in The Boulder
Daily Camera and LA View.
For over
thirty years, Anselm Hollo has been brilliantly weaving together the pioneering
sensibilities of a high-modernist European with a postmodern American
vernacular to produce a poetry of extraordinary grace, wit, and power. In his latest work, Corvus, he
surpasses himself — it’s more beautiful and assured than anything he’s yet
written. These new poems ripple with an
elegant clarity while offering a delightfully subversive edge. Hollo’s poetry
performs the seemingly impossible, delivering the ancient satisfactions of
sheer pleasure within a radical form that challenges the reader to think
differently about what “literature” might be.
A master at leaping effortlessly between the high note and the low,
between sonorous, elegiac rhythms and the slyly comic mordant aside, he can
swerve from these lines, in “West is Left on the Map”:
a puff of dust where the
lampshade bloom’d
Marlene forever young
like
Marx or Helen’s ankles
at
the gates of dusk
to the
deadpan observation of:
many
thoughts return marked insufficient
postage
For sheer
dexterity, he has few equals. There’s a protean suppleness at work throughout
this book, which by turns is bracingly skeptical, ruefully laconic, and flat
out wondrously enheartening.
In Hollo’s poems, the sublime and
ridiculous are more than just strange bedfellows, but markers for the
circulating energies of an endless play of perpetually reconstituted meanings.
The deeper we read Corvus the more we come to see that these polar nodes
are tropes for generating a mysteriously liberating force, and that if we are
quick enough to glimpse it, we might be endowed with a saving sense of
beautiful absurdity.
hand me my spear my little secret book
desperately singing in harm’s way
yes yes that does describe your
arbitrary foci
dream of big live teddy bear that
“wants” “you”
Like
another great original, the French Surrealist Robert Desnos, Hollo sees his
poems forming “one continuous poem.”
Viewed in this light, it might be tempting to cast Hollo’s corpus as an
epic, say, along the lines of Pound’s Cantos or Olson’s Maximus Poems. Nothing could be more misleading. Hollo
eschews the grandiose and the macroscopic in favor of the intimate and the
local. For the special genius of his work is the way it articulates a kind of
anti-epic, a discrete series of poems — linked by the tonal and thematic
concerns of a wry, deft sensibility — that focus on the marvels and inanities
of the quotidian, on friends, the literary world, the procedures of art and
science (to name but a few of the amazingly diverse range of topics he
addresses), and the exasperating and often hilarious ironies attendant on all
of these. The possibility for “epic”
contained in the notion of “one
continuous poem” is realized, if one may call it that, in the puncturing of the
ambitions and pretensions of the epic. Instead, we are given the most rewarding
and humane alternative — a conversation.
Much of the
tone in Corvus is retrospective.
It is a book of looking back, taking stock, summing up. In many ways, it is book of elegies, and
among those recalled are the poet’s sister, Irina, whom he memorializes in the
austere and haunting “1991,” as well as the cosmopolitan poet Piero Heliczer,
and American poets Joe Cardarelli and Ted Berrigan. The exuberant Berrigan figures prominently in
Corvus. The section entitled
“Lines From Ted: An Ars Poetica” is a transcription, Hollo writes in his
fascinating Notes (an appended sub-book that is as rich in detail as the main
text), of talks given by Berrigan at Naropa in 1982. The result is a remarkable posthumous
“collaboration” that outlines what might be called “the way of the poem.”
You
have to make your work at your own pace
It
is made of words
One
word after another
Some
people do it in phrases
Others
are beautiful writers of sentences
&
some are beautiful writers
of
one word at a time
+ +
+ +
But
what I think happens when a poem works is
That
it rises into the air of its own powers
And
in doing so it has formed a circle
And
it becomes something like the sun or a star
Or
a planet
Or
whatever
I like the
idea of it being up in the air
To have no idea is a good idea
If it helps you to make a poem
I
have to go now
I
have to go and think about this for a thousand years
And a
thousand years would only be a start. “Lines
From Ted” magnificently performs not just what poetry can bring us — its
enigmatic news from beyond, its invigorating power of play — but what poetry is. As warm and fresh as a talk with a dear, old
friend, it also shrewdly meditates on the materialist character of the poem, a
thing made out of that most recalcitrant and unyielding of substances, words,
that nevertheless transcends its origin to achieve a wild, emotive life all its
own.
Hollo is undoubtedly one of our most
erudite poets, but while Corvus bristles with a wealth of allusions,
it never feels top-heavy, nor is the
music ever impeded by the learning.
Indeed, one of this poet’s greatest accomplishments is the way he weds
acute intelligence to the rhythmic demands of song. His praxis is deceptively simple, as he notes
in “The Word Thing”:
method
is effortless:
translation
of autonomous objects
from
adept to zygote
in
rhapsodic rises & falls
Particularly
striking is the sonnet sequence “Not a Form at All But a State of Mind” (the
title comes from William Carlos Williams), which offers a sharp rebuttal to
criticism that experimental work can’t also be formally rigorous. Hollo’s
startling verbal agility and quicksilver emotional registers transform the
sonnet from a threadbare object of nostalgia and poetic propriety into a
dazzling display of intellection and pathos.
underground
trees slow darkness
and
fear has lien upon the heart of me
magpie
steals silver spoon it is gone
forever
like
the eyeglasses of the less fortunate
in a
terrifying gray light from the future
the
carnival continues a place where a sad horde
of such
as love and whom love tortures
point
to the moon and break it
Using an
Oulipian word algorithm, Hollo repeats — or better still, replays — certain key
phrases at differing junctures throughout the twelve sonnet sequence so that
the overall effect of reading them straight through is like hearing an extended
sonata, with motifs like “landing a B-52 in a desk drawer,” or “I have woven my
heart into this net of branches” reappearing with an unexpected sharpness and
power.
But the
chief pleasure of Corvus is its deeply human music. From the recondite “The Word Thing,” to the
playful farce of “Why There Is A Cat Curfew In Our House,” to his earthy
translations from the Greek Anthology, or the intimate, lyrical benediction of
“And,” a poem that, among others things, praises the work of his wife, the
artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, he strikes an expansive and ennobling panoply of
notes.
friends die
before their time
& that
is a matter of grief
but she
dreams she is swimming
in her
studio
her
paintings on its walls
make his
head swim
into spaces
as free of words
as die
Musik when it pulls away
into
angelic telepathy
shuts up
the ape ever scheming
heavy with
greed & war
lights him
up
so light he
becomes
invisible
to himself
in a vortex
of notes
audible
only to the soul
Whatever we
ask of poetry — and what more could we ask of it than this? — is to be found
here: that it lift us like this, requiring nothing more (which is everything)
but that we sit still, and listen.
Each poem
in Corvus is never less than itself, integral and complete. There are no
poses here, no sleights-of-hand, except for the verbal kind that continually
surprises, or else those the poet delights in exposing with a wink, a nudge,
and an exquisitely formed bon mot.
Over the entire book is stamped the Chinese ideogram for sincerity,
which Ezra Pound translates as “the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise
spot verbally.” Sinceritas, Hollo
amply shows, is not a quality to be associated with some sort of simple-minded
naiveté, but rather is the product of the fully engaged moral imagination of
the poet as he casts an alternately ironic and tender eye on the folly and
clumsiness of mortal doings. For beneath all the bright, bristling
wit, the marvelous, impish wordplay, the impeccable sense of rhythm, the sharp
pitch and stress of diction, another note can be sometimes heard: the sound of
twilight drawing its raven wing over the edge of the sky.
think about each word and why it
is where it is
moon splashes borrowed light on
the wall
across the street of distant
galaxies
slowly turning their tails to
point to the first letter
Which is also always the
beginning again of language. The unceasingness
of poetry, as Keats notes, will continue beyond us. That seems straightforward enough. But Hollo
sees the underside as well, the way in which language is twisted by the
professional class of liars, the politicians and those others who use it as a
tool for power over others, rather than as an instrument of liberation. Hence
the sublime directness of the modest
poem, “Proposal,” as barbed as anything in Swift or Juvenal:
For war memorial
to end all war memorials:
plain granite slab
David Jones style
lettering
text by Ted Berrigan:
THE WAR GOES
ON
AND WAR IS
SHIT
Hollo enjoins us to “always treat
language like a dangerous toy.” In his
poems, as perhaps nowhere else, what delights can endanger — and what endangers
can delight. And beyond the much needed
political critiques, beauty itself, Hollo recognizes, may be the most potent
form of subversion available to us, since it is generated by and occupies an
interior space outside the reach of the State, the Church, and all other
enslaving institutions. All of which is only to say — caution: these poems may
produce thoughts not sanctioned by the Authorities!
In his
introductory note, Hollo tells us that corvus
is Latin for raven, which is what his own surname signifies in Finnish. This is appropriate, since one of the mythic
roles played by the raven was that of psychopomp, or guide of souls to the
Underworld, a function which poets, as purveyors of news from afar, have been
playing for the species since Orpheus made his descent to Hades. The title seems triply appropriate, then — or
is that quadruply? — for the way in which Hollo pays homage to his dead, not by
stiffly memorializing them, but by continuing the conversation. This bit of
association also brings to mind Hollo’s own translation of the great Finnish
poet Paavo Haavikko:
And
I asked him,
The
bird
Who
is identical with myself,
I
asked him for the road, and he said:
It
is best to leave early.
Anselm
Hollo has always been leaving early, “ahead of all departure,” as Rilke puts
it, checking out the bends in the meandering psychic road ahead of us and
relaying back the information with subtle precision and enormous panache. In a time when so many poets tread timidly
about the poem, afraid of disturbing its marmoreal slumber, or else exhaust
their energies in endless debates about theory, the unflaggingly abundant
inventiveness of his poetry seems all the rarer, all the greater a gift for
those of us fortunate enough to be alive to read it.
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