Caws & Causeries
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Poet Anselm Hollo has collected a number of his prose writings, including an autobiographical essay describing a remarkable odyssey from his native Finland via the U.S. to post-WW II Germany, Austria, and Swinging Sixties London, then back to the U.S. in 1967 to lead the life of an itinerant scholar for two decades in California, New York, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Utah, and Virginia, until he found his Ithaca in Boulder, Colorado, teaching at The Naropa Institutes Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Other pieces in the collection, ranging from brief pieces (caws) to more extended causeries (informal essays), which include Some Aereated Prose for a Panel on experimental writing; Gregorio the Herald (a tribute to Gregory Corso); discussions of Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski, British poets Tom Raworth, Christopher Middleton, and Douglas Oliver, French poet Francis Ponge; an extended section From the Notebooks; What Was It Like: a Remembrance of Allen Ginsbergs Howl; and a sampling of a lifetimes observations on the world of poetry and poets. What emerges is a lively, unabashedly opinionated, always personal poetics forged in association and friendship with numerous representatives of The New American Poetry, i.e. the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the New York School, the Language School, and the perennially unclassifiable and enigmatic.
Andrei Codrescu Anselm Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1934 and was educated there and in the United States. In his early twenties, he left Finland to live and work as a writer and translator, first in Germany and Austria, then in London. For the last thirty years, Hollo has lived in the United States, teaching creative writing and literary translation at numerous universities including SUNY Buffalo, University of Iowa, and the University of Colorado. He is now Associate Professor in the Graduate Writing and Poetics Department at The Naropa Institute in Boulder. Author of more than thirty books, Hollos poetry has been widely anthologized, and it has been translated into Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, and Swedish.
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