Thursday, January 31, 2013

Anselm Hollo - as remembered by Tom Raworth





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Hollo: he was talented, intelligent and wild; there was alcohol, riotous times, crazy drives
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In a famous 1965 photograph he sits on the steps of the Albert Memorial behind Trocchi and Ginsberg. His hair is dark; his eyes slant. His clothes, as always, are black.
 

Anselm Hollo was a major poet, a prolific and fine translator and an inspiring teacher. His death is a loss to the world of letters and intelligence. He was born in Helsinki five years before the Winter War into a cosmopolitan and intellectual family. His professor father translated Cervantes, Dostoevsky and Henry James into Finnish, his mother taught music, his grandfather Paul, a chemist, invented the Walden Inversion. A visit to him in Germany as a small child left Anselm the memory of walking past Hitler's Reich-Chancellery. The home language was German. His sister taught him Swedish, his father Finnish, and by his early teens he was fluent in English and French.

In 1951 an American Field Service International Scholarship took him to Camp Rising Sun in upstate New York (where he met David Ball, a lifelong friend now also a poet, translator and teacher) and then to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. High school and polite Midwestern suburbia. His hosts thought Somerset Maugham "unsuitable reading". The books of Fennimore Cooper had given him a particular dream of America. This was not it.

Back in Finland, after interpreting at the 1952 Olympic Games, Hollo developed tuberculosis. From the sanatorium he went to convalesce in Germany with his grandfather. He stayed until 1957, when he met the actress Josephine Wirkus, and they married in Vienna. A handwritten application sent casually to the BBC led to a meeting with Martin Esslin and a job with the Finnish Section. The Hollos moved to London, where they lived for a decade and where their three children were born.

Article by Tom Raworth continues HERE The Independent

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) RIP

Charles Bernstein writes in Jacket 2

Hollo and Bernstein in 2007


includes a section of The Empress Hotel Poems (1:30): MP3

Go through my things
god knows what you'll find. When I'm not here.
I'm not here, in this poem
I'm in another room, writing praises
of their loveliness and terror
the ones that dance through my mind
not endlessly, but to be one at one
with them
I want to be.
I want to be one,
I want her to be one
when the voice begins
she is, and she dances.
I am the voice. I praise
There is
no mind.



from Guests of Space

When you're feeling
about as
bad as your
average|

English translation
of Goethe you must
go see the
Parrot of Penance

and he will
say unto you
"Way around it?"
Way around it?

There's never been
any way around it."
 

 
from Braided River: New & Selected Poems 1965 -2003 Salt Publishing,
 
 
NOTE: Have a look here for more - and more links, too - http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/anselm-hollo.html



Regime #2 Launch at Perth Writers Festival

Regime Books

Regime 02 to Launch
@ Perth Writers Festival

Regime Books, an independent fiction and poetry
publisher based in Perth’s William Street arts
district, is proud to announce that the second
edition of Regime Magazine will be launched on
23 February 2013 at the Perth Writer's Festival.

Regime 02 will be launched by the editors and contributors,
with readings by poets
and writer Michelle Faye


   The Second Edition of Regime Magazine is
an impressive collection of poetry, fiction
and performance writing that is Australian
in essence, but international in outlook.

   Not only are we proud to publish new work
by Australian writers such as Geoff Page,
Ryan O'Neill, Shane McCauley, Kate Middleton,
Andrew Burke, Graham Nunn and Roland Leach
(and so many others), we include international
voices such as Frederick Pollack, Karla Linn
Merrifield, Paul Fauteux and Jonathan Greenhause.
Cover artwork is by acclaimed Sydney artist,
Joanna Wolthuizen.

   More information can be found by visiting
our online launch invitation:
http://paperless.ly/YrvwJ1. Please
feel free to circulate this link to anyone who
may be interested.

Copies of Regime 02 can be purchased from
our website: regimebooks.com.au.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

from The House of Bricks ... Spoken Word














We are holding our very first spoken word event of the year at the House of Bricks gallery on Thursday the 31st of January (the last day of the month) from 7pm.

The last event was spectacular, and we would love to share this with all of you, the people out there.

So please, RSVP by hitting that little button, and come along and enjoy some of the most diverse, and wonderful spoken word artists (both established and grass roots) around.

There will be cheap drinks (gold coin mostly), some cushions for sore bums, and lots of friendly faces.


Just some of the spoken word artists confirmed for this Thursday...

 Elizabeth 'Lish' Skec
Amanda Anastasi
Jessica Alice
Oliver Mol
Josephine Rowe.


 See you all there from 7pm.


The gallery is located at 40 Budd street (on the corner of Budd and Keele streets):

There are 4 confirmed spoken word performers which will have a ten minute time-slot each, plus, a bunch of open mic time at the end for all of you.

We also hand out free spoken word zines for you to enjoy with entries from readers at our previous event.

And Santo Cazzati will be PJ-ing again!

Bring your friends and family, invite everyone you like, this is an open event.

House of Bricks supporting local writers.


Date: Thursday 31st of January 2013
Time: 7pm.

40 Budd street Collingwood Victoria Australia | MapMap opens in new browser window
Web Links
Melbourne Link House of Bricks Spoken Word Link opens in new browser window

Melbourne Link www.facebook.com

Melbourne Link houseofbricks.net

Australian Poetry Review - an open endorsement.



Somebody recently asked me how I 'keep up' with so much poetry news, how I know what's happening. I don't. What you see here are just snippets. And another person asked me why I don't write my own blog more, cast my opinion amongst the clutter and clatter of noise out there. I just pass on what I feel is interesting and what others might miss - and always through the narrow focus of my own interests. Another praised how much I do steer them toward. Thank you.


One poetry critic I have always enjoyed and respected is Martin Duwell. Somewhere in the sunny past Duwell edited and managed a publishing adventure - was it Gargoyle Poets? Today I went to his site and looked up his History to check. It was 'Under Construction'. It is always Under Construction - as is he, as are we. (Maybe the dead are under deconstruction.)

Martin Duwell was also a major reviewer of all books poetic at The Australian for many years, and I bought the Weekend Oz just to read what he said. I respect the man and thank him for his deep intellectual involvement with Australian poetry in an active, truly contemporary sense.

And now you are wondering what all this preamble is about. It is simply I'd like to point you to his blog. I hope you will get as much out of it as I do. He does deep readings of recent Australian poetry titles and in doing so helps readers see the latest contemporary title(s) as 'important' literature, not simply books that pass in the night. He respects the word and tells us why.

Go and enjoy - http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/  The Duwell in the Eucalypt, om.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Win £5,000 for One Poem! Read on ...

Hippocrates Prize logo

2013 Hippocrates Prize: Open and NHS

Deadline midnight GMT 31st Jan 2013
Awards to be announced at Wellcome Collection in London on 18th May, 2013.

Enter online

Rules for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize

With a 1st prize for the winning poem in each category of £5,000, the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 3 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted around 4000 entries from 44 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.

Awards are in an Open category, which anyone in the world may enter, and an NHS category, which is open to UK National Health Service employees, health students and those working in professional organisations involved in education and training of NHS students and staff.

The judging panel for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize is now complete: Jo Shapcott, winner of the 2011 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Theodore Dalrymple, doctor and writer, and Roger Highfield, science writer and Executive for the Science Museums Group.

Co-organizers are medical professor Donald Singer and poet and translator Michael Hulse.

Jack Kerouac's 'COLLECTED POEMS'

Kerouac Collected Poems

Review by JOE WINKLER

...QUOTE:

The Library of America’s new collection, the daunting Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems is a staggering book in numerous ways. It’s sheer size, over 700 pages testifies to a person who thought and lived in his own world of poetry the way some of us live with our mundane daily concerns. He wrote more poems that most of us will read in our lifetimes. This book, masterfully edited and arranged by Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell, brings together many published books of poems as well as a large smattering of unpublished works. Phipps-Kettlewell not only edited this tome, but put together a brilliant introduction entitled “Jack Kerouac, In His Own Words.” The introduction, regardless if you feel you can wade through the 700+ pages of poetry, deserves its own read through. Phipps-Kettlewell cuts and pastes her way through all of Kerouac’s poems to create a vivid sort of autobiography of the man and his thought. On top of this she adds a collection of other poets’ thoughts on Kerouac and adds her own ideas giving us beautiful insights like this:

To be a poet’s poet is to hurt. To hurt singularly, to hurt incomprehensibly, to suffer a wound that never heals, a wound not meant to heal because bleeding is the very nature of this wound–it is a divine gift–it is the wound of a savior.
...

Playing basketball
– the lady next door
Watching again.


- Kerouac


Carry on reading HERE

The Rumpus.net

Dive into the pool of thought, but don't hit your head.
I am a book geek. Are you?

Thanks, Jamie McQueen (McQueen's Bookstore, Fremantle WA)

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Faulkner tells it like it is!

Sign up to get freelance writing jobs:
http://www.FreedomWithWriting.com/?source=facebook&cid=faulkner

You said it, William! I'll get off this machine and write more.

Thanks for the push.

Friday, January 25, 2013

from Black Inc. New Releases ...

India Calling cover image
On the Abolition of All Political Parties
Simone Weil, translated by Simon Leys


‘Political parties are a marvellous mechanism ... If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.’ – Simone Weil

Here Simon Leys translates for the first time into English an essay by the remarkable Simone Weil – philosopher, activist, mystic – which makes a case for the corrupting effect of political parties on political life, and calls for their abolition.

Read the first chapter
Buy the print book

Buy the ebook: Booki.sh, iBookstore, Amazon, Kobo
Oh, what a wonderful idea! Well, maybe we're just going through 'a bad patch', but once again I can't agree with either side entirely. This could be a satisfying read.