Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Anselm Hollo (1934-2013)
Tom Raworth on Hollo in The Independent (obit Jan. 31, 2013)
Anselm Hollo PennSound page
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.