Braided River

Anselm Hollo wrote The Empress Hotel Poems (there were six of them), which appeared in Jon Silkin's magazine, Stand, in England, in 1966. I was astounded by them then, for they proposed, for the first time in my experience, that it was possible for an American poetic idiom to be adopted by a European (writing in English). It is impossible for someone under 40 (say) writing poetry in America today to imagine the narrowness of possibility allowed by the literary climate in England at that time. There were some British poets (Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood being the outstanding examples) who had the nous to overcome those severe limits, but for me, and I'm sure for many others, it was Anselm Hollo's work that represented a crucial breakthrough, especially because Stand was a magazine with a relatively large distribution, while Raworth and Harwood were still "underground" poets at that time. What The Empress Hotel Poems illuminated was the simple fact that Kerouac, Ginsberg, O'Hara and company, were not simply icons of a seemingly fabulous culture beyond our reach, but were potential models for the future of a new poetics.

On Corvus: The bedrock solidness of Anselm Hollo's poems makes as ever a place of refuge and delight in these meager times. Thank God for his humor, else we'd all be dead.

On Corvus: For three decades Anselm Hollo has been an important figure on the intercultural poetry scene. In Outlying Districts, we see how his original work has been enriched, both technically and in content, by the contact he has had with European poets through his impressive translations.

And the language - hip and jazzy, humorous, erudite and seemingly casual, overlays the serious rumblings of a non-complacent mind, always 'very there', wary and alert. Resonating from the onset of the moment, his poems are sharp, concise, politically prescient, and a bit world weary - as should be expected - with his awareness of and translations from an international and intercultural world of writing. Although he has made the United States his home since 1966, he still retains the valuable ability to see 'America' from the outside. Yet he knows that "beauty knows no ideologically correct routines."