Braided River consists of a major selection from forty years of Anselm Hollo’s published work, as well as a selection from his most recent, uncollected work. It describes a “braided” lifetime’s endeavours to generate text that reflects a twentieth century existence in Europe, including England, and the United States of America. A native of Finland, Hollo has been anthologized and discussed as a “British” poet in the Sixties and early Seventies, later on, as an “American” one.A lifelong associate of the Beat, Black Mountain, New York (One and Two), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E schools of U.S. American Poetry, Hollo hopes to convey to younger writers the amazing variety and strength of the writing (both poetry and prose) that has emerged from those quarters in the past fifty-odd years, and that has been strongly connected to the most active work created in the United Kingdom. This body of work represents the United States’ true contribution to modern and postmodern world literature, and it exists, to this day, in glorious independence from what poet/essayist Charles Bernstein has called ‘official verse culture.’ Hollo’s aim is to acquaint younger writers with this vigorous, multifarious, rhizomic tradition of U.S. American writing. He also hopes to demonstrate the multi- and cross-cultural connections that have influenced it, something he practises in his Boulder classes, examining twentieth century European poetry and French poetry in particular, and in his translation workshops.
