ANSELM HOLLO 1934-2013


I just learned that my dear friend and mentor, the poet Anselm Hollo died on January 29, 2013. He’d been ill for nearly a year.
 
I think of a poem of Anselm’s in which he describes a dream of his dead father. He had the dream three months after his father died. The poem, untitled, appeared in his slim and epic 1972 collection, Sensation, and the poem is reprinted in his tellingly titled autobiographical essay, “Anselm Hollo, 1934-,” which in turn appears in his later collection Caws and Causeries. I’ll quote the last half of the poem here.

…I knew where he lay
 went on & entered
 the room light & bare
 no curtains no books
 his head on the pillow
 hand moving outward
 the gesture “be seated”
 i started talking, saw myself from the back
 leaned forward, talked to his face
 intent, bushy-browed
 eyes straining to see
 into mine
 “a question i wanted to ask you”
 would never know what it was
 but stood there & was
 so happy to see him
 that twenty-sixth day of april
 three months after his death

Urmuz is considered the daddy of Absurdism, pre-Tzara and pre-Ionesco. A bureaucrat, a drunk, and an ambulant performer in Bucharest, Urmuz initiated the modern literary revolution in the years before the First World War. I met Florentina Kostulias in London, on her way to Bucharest to uncover the traces of Urmuz. She found his death certificate and the police report of his untimely demise. Our conversation strayed naturally to the dogs of Bucharest, never far from the surface of the local mind, and some extraordinary pieces of dog literature by the great poet Tudor Arghezi were added by Florentina to the lore. The conversation is ongoing: the letters are posted below, from the earliest to the recent. Andrei Codrescu