Anselm Hollo

ANSELM HOLLO

FAIR POETRY EATS TREMBLING MATTER

Remote Omar 
		 lyrical bug 
	or bearded time cloud
our public flits through earth
	belovéd yard of Allah

"Your century
		    or mine?"
	My century 
			My pleasure 

"My dear that's dashing! Positively Valhallian!"
			--Christina Plutarch?
	or was it Ted for lunch with Rossetti...

all now remain in waters far from kin

	remains of enormous gringos
	punctuated by The Other

Notes

The Names

"Remote Omar": Apart from its enjoyable interior resonance, the line refers to Persian poet Omar Khayyám (?-c.1133) who was memorably Englished by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) and later quoted by Ogden Nash (1902-1971) in his lines "I myself am more and more inclined to agree with Omar and Satchel Paige [c. 1906-1982] as I grow older: / Don't try to rewrite what the moving finger has writ, and don't ever look over your shoulder."

"...Positively Valhallian": Valhalla was the pleasure dome to which slain Scandinavian warriors were transported from the battlefield by large and fierce angelic females, known as Valkyries, for continuous after-hours entertainment until the end of the world (a.k.a. Ragnarök).

"--Christina Plutarch?": Clearly, a brief moment of confusion on the intergalactic internet--possibly even a flashback from a future when Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) and Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 48-c.121), both of them writers on philosophical subjects, may seem practically contemporary. A prolific educational author whose influence extended well into medieval times, Plutarch spent the last thirty years of his life as a priest at Delphi. Rossetti was a celibate priestess of the High Anglican deity, her last work being The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse.

"or was it Ted for lunch with Rossetti...": The Rossetti of this line could also be Christina's brother, Dante Gabriel (1828-82), poet, painter and translator, whose turbulent career as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would seem more compatible with the life and times of New York School member Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), poet of major verbal leaps and bounds both at, and even when out to, lunch. The scribe suspects, however, that it is Christina, to whose sonnets a younger critic has recently compared Ted's work (happily available again in a Penguin Selected Poems). Unlike either Christina or Dante Gabriel, Ted liked to refer to friends in his poems by their first names. The scribe regrets any possible confusion arising out of his adoption of this practice; now that you know which Ted is intended, you should hasten to the nearest book emporium and acquire a copy of the Selected. It will restore some sanity to your life.

Commentary

The 'author', who is quite postmodernly used to dwelling inside inverted commas, and prefers the term 'scribe', is invoking a number of temporal precursors and considering the ways in which their "fair poetry" ("fair" in any sense) ingests their "trembling matter" and possibly survives for a while (until Ragnarök) in some non-corporeal form, while the corporeal ones are transmuted into "bug" or "cloud", and the "public" also "flits through earth". The play on "remain" and "remains" in the last three lines may, tangentially, refer to theoretical and canonical arguments of recent years. The piece, like the one to follow, belongs to a fourteen-part sequence called Survival Dancing.

WAS THAT REALLY A SONNET?

"human being" 
has government

		    (thought
			you were so tiny

"real thoroughbred infinity"
this, we don't have in life

nevertheless & 
thanks to you
I'm me once in a while 

living this moment in English

"he tossed his clothes 
into the past tense"

presence: really tough job
compared to natural flutter

Note

No names in this one, but three sets of full quotation marks. Most days, it can seem quite hard to utter the term "human being" with a straight face. As for whether it "has government", well, this country presently seems in the clutches of what Ezra Pound describes in Canto LXII (paraphrasing John Adams): "republican jealousy which seeks to cut off all power / from fear of abuses does / quite as much harm as a despotism" (The Cantos, p. 344). "real thoroughbred infinity" is an equally nice but questionable notion, and "he tossed his clothes / into the past tense" is a moment of old-time narrative that may indicate the futility of attempts to describe spontaneous abandon. The two yous in the text may be one and the same; the I claiming to be me "once in a while" probably is. The title is really an afterthought and may be spoken by the reader.

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