Anselm Hollo, The Tortoise of History

The Way They Pop Up Now
late in this lifethe dead and the living
Technicoloror black and white
different parts of the brainbegin talking to each other
small children reappearand now they’re either dead
or alive as film directorsrecord producers high tech designers
but some ancients are still present tooeven more ancients than this brain life
looks out the windowthinks squirrels are not very contemplative
but the cats watching them are
There is a sweetness to the foreword by Anselm Hollo’s widow, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, that opens the posthumous volume The Tortoise of History: poems by Anselm Hollo (Coffee House Press, 2016):
Could Anselm have possibly foretoldthat The Tortoise of History, this peculiar compilation of old and newmusings, revisitations, letters to past and future, love notes    to friends—and to me
was an inevitable foreshadowing of this day, when I, his Janeywould stop the endless fuss, unplug the phone, sit quietly    for 20 minutes,
and then settle into his chair, in our kitchenand read thisbook—aloud, in his cadenceand reallytake in
this “message in a bottle”?
I’ll admit, my reading of the late poet and translator Anselm Hollo’s extensive work isn’t nearly as complete as it should be. My engagements with his more than forty titles is limited to but four works: the chapbook Tumbleweed (Weed Flower Press, 1968) (generously gifted from the publisher, Nelson Ball), and larger trade collections Maya (Cape Goliard Press, 1970) (generously gifted by Nicky Drumbolis), Pick Up The House (Coffee House Press, 1986) and Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001), meaning that my take on this posthumous volume is limited (at least, based upon what it could be). How does one easily assess a potential “last volume” by a writer with such a lengthy career? In the poems collection in The Tortoise of History , Hollo swivels his short meditations on small turns in short lyrics and the occasional longer sequence, composing staccato moment after moment in a first-person cadence that runs through the length and breadth of what I do know of his work, such as the poem “Crocus,” that reads:
Hello yellowcrocus she sayssnaps a picture    looks away    turns to seethe deer that later swallows the crocusoh well    Springwill spring
The collection wraps up with an essay on the Greek poet Hipponax, via William Carlos Williams, and Hollo’s own take on the “halting meter” he discusses, through a sequence of poems. As Hollo opens his short essay:
William Carlos Williams ends Book 1 of his Paterson (New Directions 1992, p. 40) with a quote from John Addington Symond’s two-volume Studies of the Greek Poets, prefacing it with an “N.B.:”
“In order apparently to bring the meter still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure. These deformed and mutilated verses were called choliambi, lame or limping iambics. They communicated a curious crustiness to the style. These choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is to human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting meter, the Greeks displayed their acute aesthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt—the vices and perversions of humanity—as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist.”
There is an echo of this quote, one that Williams found relevant to his search for a new measure, in the final lines of Book 5, the last complete installment of Paterson(p. 236):
                        We know nothing and can know nothing                                                                             but                        the dance, to dance to a measure                        contrapunctally,                                                  Satyrically, the tragic foot.