Anselm Hollo, The Tortoise of History

The Way They Pop Up Now

late in this life

the dead and the living

Technicolor

or black and white

different parts of the brain

begin talking to each other

small children reappear

and now they’re either dead

or alive as film directors

record producers high tech designers

but some ancients are still present too

even more ancients than this brain life

looks out the window

thinks squirrels are not very contemplative

but the cats watching them are

There is a sweetness to the foreword by Anselm Hollo’s widow, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, that opens the posthumous volume The Tortoise of History: poems by Anselm Hollo (Coffee House Press, 2016):

Could Anselm have possibly foretold

that The Tortoise of History, this peculiar compilation of old and new

musings, revisitations, letters to past and future, love notes

    to friends—and to me

was an inevitable foreshadowing of this day, when I, his Janey

would stop the endless fuss, unplug the phone, sit quietly

    for 20 minutes,

and then settle into his chair, in our kitchen

and read this book—aloud, in his cadence

and really take in

this “message in a bottle”?

I’ll admit, my reading of the late poet and translator Anselm Hollo’s extensive work isn’t nearly as complete as it should be. My engagements with his more than forty titles is limited to but four works: the chapbook Tumbleweed (Weed Flower Press, 1968) (generously gifted from the publisher, Nelson Ball), and larger trade collections Maya (Cape Goliard Press, 1970) (generously gifted by Nicky Drumbolis), Pick Up The House (Coffee House Press, 1986) and Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001), meaning that my take on this posthumous volume is limited (at least, based upon what it could be). How does one easily assess a potential “last volume” by a writer with such a lengthy career? In the poems collection in The Tortoise of History, Hollo swivels his short meditations on small turns in short lyrics and the occasional longer sequence, composing staccato moment after moment in a first-person cadence that runs through the length and breadth of what I do know of his work, such as the poem “Crocus,” that reads:

Hello yellow

crocus she says

snaps a picture    looks away    turns to see

the deer that later swallows the crocus

oh well    Spring

will spring

The collection wraps up with an essay on the Greek poet Hipponax, via William Carlos Williams, and Hollo’s own take on the “halting meter” he discusses, through a sequence of poems. As Hollo opens his short essay:

William Carlos Williams ends Book 1 of his Paterson (New Directions 1992, p. 40) with a quote from John Addington Symond’s two-volume Studies of the Greek Poets, prefacing it with an “N.B.:”

“In order apparently to bring the meter still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure. These deformed and mutilated verses were called choliambi, lame or limping iambics. They communicated a curious crustiness to the style. These choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is to human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting meter, 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—the vices and perversions of humanity—as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist.”

There is an echo of this quote, one that Williams found relevant to his search for a new measure, in the final lines of Book 5, the last complete installment of Paterson (p. 236):

                        We know nothing and can know nothing

                                                                             but

                        the dance, to dance to a measure

                        contrapunctally,

                                                  Satyrically, the tragic foot.

C.D. Wright, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

Spring & All

Between great hails to the imagination and salvos of opprobrium, William Carlos Williams set one sharp-edged poem after another into the composition of an unframed original. So the one who did not cast off his roots chose the eldest trope in the book, SPRING, to push and pull American poetry into the present tense. Not before he had initiated a willful number of false starts, cranking up anticipation and repeatedly sabotaging expectations. Not before the hectored reader was fetched up “by the road to the contagious hospital,” only then would the first glimpse of grass and “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf” be permitted—at the precise point at which every stick in the refuse emerged particular. Terrifying, as Robert Creeley was given to say.

Reminiscent of the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall for his own take on the essay-poem comes American poet C.D. Wright’s (1949-2016) posthumous collection of prose poem-essays, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon, 2016). Given this collection appears mere weeks after Wright’s unexpected death in January gives the book an extra edge: a twinge of grief, of wondering what might-else-have-come (one can be heartened, slightly, by a 2015 interview in which she mentions two other forthcoming works, as she offered: “A book of poetry ShallCross will be out next year and then Casting Deep Shade, also in prose (with photographer Denny Moers)”). The pieces in the expansively-titled The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All blend a boundary between and through the prose poem and short essay, weave in and out of a variety of books and authors, with repeated sketches on the work of Jean Valentine, William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All (1923), Robert Creeley, Brenda Hillman, Gale Nelson, Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting (1999), René Char and photographer and Wright-collaborator Deborah Luster, as she composes thoughtful, witty, deeply personal and utterly charming poem-essays on craft, style and subject. The ease in which Wright offers insight and commentary are intoxicating, as she seems to explain herself in the short piece “My American Scrawl,” a poem set near the beginning of the book: “Increasingly indecisive, about matters both big and little, I have found that poetry is the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine, to palter or dissemble or quaver or hastily reverse myself. This is the one scene where I advance determined, if not precisely ready, to do battle with what an overly cited Jungian described as the anesthetized heart, the heart that does not react.”

In a Word,

      a World

I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny-side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money. Of course the qualifying adjective nation does exercise an otherwise eventful noun.

As her title, a collage of multiple references, hints, Wright’s The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All is a bricolage from a lively, engaged reader pulling at strands from a variety of corners of American poetry and stitching them together into a comprehensive through-line, one that only she could have constructed. The repetitions of title, subject and author throughout allow for some intriguing movements, such as the half-dozen poems referencing Jean Valentine, for example, that, instead of attempting to contain the complexity of an author’s work in a single piece, expand into a series of facets, each exploring another element or idea in Valentine’s writing. The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All showcases the depth of what we have lost through the author’s sudden death: a restless curiosity, a thoroughly engaged mind, and heart as large as the continent. As Wright writes to open one of the “Jean Valentine, Abridged” poems: “The poems stay resolutely strange. When I say the writing is strange, I mean the writing resides on the positive side of the strangeness axis.” An earlier piece with the same title opens: “When I read Jean Valentine’s poems I fill up with questions, flow over with emotion. I cease, in some ways, to think.” She continues:

It is not that the writing is hermetic; in fact, I believe its entire pitch and purpose is openness. I grasp that the whole life—of loving and losing, erring and righting, reading and thinking, saying and seeing—is faithfully recorded, word for word, and submerged under each elliptic dot. She is “shy of words but desperately true to them,” wrote Seamus Heaney. “Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake,” wrote Adrienne Rich. I think I see what Valentine sees: her own outline and what has settled below. But I am wary of describing it.

Joseph Massey, Illocality

POLAR LOW

Half-sheathed in ice

a yellow double-wide trailer

mirrors the inarticulate morning.

The amnesiac sun.

And nothing else

to contrast these variations of white

and thicket

choked by thicket

in thin piles that dim the perimeter.

Every other noun

freezes over.

On the heels of his California trilogy comes American poet Joseph Massey’s fourth poetry title, Illocality (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2015). His previous collection, To Keep Time (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here], was the “third and final book grounded in the landscape and weather of coastal Humboldt County, California, and contains the last poems I wrote there before moving to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in the winter of 2013.” As the press release for this new title informs: “Joseph Massey composed Illocality in his first year in Western Massachusetts. Massey’s austere landscapes channel the quiet shock, euphoria, and introspection that come with reorientation to place.” Illocality is a sequence of exploratory moments composed in short bursts, as Massey attempts to locate himself in the physical and philosophical spaces that make up his new geography, although one that seems devoid of human interaction.

The world is real

in its absence of a world. (“TAKE PLACE”)

His short, precise lines echo William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, but place themselves in entirely different ways: the physical shapes of his immediate physical environment. And Pioneer Valley (especially during the winter) is very different than Humboldt County, California. As he writes in the poem “PARSE”: “This rift valley // A volley of / seasonal beacons // Window / where mind // finds orbit [.]” Where Williams and Creeley included the domestic and other other human interactions in their precise explorations (that included geography and the physical landscape), Massey’s poems allow for the suggestion of human presence without any kind of direct interaction. Where are all the people in Pioneer Valley?

ROUTE 31

Yellow centerline

split with roadkill.

First day of summer—I’ve got my omen—

the clouds are hollow, roving

above a parking lot.

Each strip-mall pennant blurred.

So much metal

shoving sun

the sun shoves back.

Massey’s invocations of the natural world are often in parallel, or even in conflict, with the human world: “the sun shoves back.” His is an uneasy balance between the two. Logics of the natural and human elements of the geography collide, and become illogical, creating their own set of standards, logics and rules, all of which he attempts to track, question and even disentangle. As he writes in the extended sequence “TAKE PLACE”:

As if a field guide

could prevent

the present

from disintegrating

around us.

Raymond Souster (January 15, 1921 – October 19, 2012)

As Bruce Meyer posted yesterday afternoon on Facebook:

Yesterday Canadian poetry lost one of its giants with the passing of Raymond Souster. He was the first in Canada to take up the poetics of William Carlos Williams. His career spanned generations. I saw him about a year ago and his brilliant mind was still sharp though he was physically infirm. We talked for about six hours, until I was exhausted. He didn't want me to leave. His life was Canadian poetry. Rest in peace, Ray. See you at the World Series.

The author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, he live the entirety of his life in Toronto, and was once called the city’s “most loved poet.” If you can find Stephen Cain’s essay, “Souster’s Toronto,” I would highly recommend it.

With the email he originally sent out, James Deahl included this short bio for Souster that he wrote for a publication called The Ambassador:

Raymond Souster was born in Toronto during 1921 and has been a leading member of the Great Generation for the past 70 years. Souster won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1964 (for The Colour of the Times), was presented with Canada's Centennial Medal in 1967, won the City of Toronto Book award in 1979 (for Hanging In), and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1995. He was a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets and served as LCP President from 1967 to 1971. He is the author of well over 70 books, largely of poetry, most recently Easy Does It and Never Counting the Cost. 

Souster served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. In the 1950s, he edited first Contact and later Combustion, the foremost Canadian poetry magazines of their day. He also ran Contact Press for 15 years (1952 - 1967), which published many of Canada's most important contemporary poets. Souster lives in Toronto with his wife Rosalia. 

Nelson Ball adds a short post-script: Ray Souster, the poet of Toronto, went into hospital September 30th and died October 19, 2012. He had two books published in 2012: Easy Does It: New Poems and, co-authored with Les Green, Never Counting the Cost. Both were published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in Eugenia, Ontario. He worked to near the end.