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.
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