Caws & Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets [first edition]

This collection of prose writings by an internationally known poet includes an autobiographical essay describing Hollo's remarkable odyssey from the time he left his native Finland for the United States as a high school student until he settled in Colorado in the late 1980s. Other pieces in the collection, ranging from brief pieces ("caws") to more extended "causeries" (informal essays), include "Some Aereated Prose for a Panel on 'experimental writing,'" "Gregorio the Herald" (a tribute to Gregory Corso), discussions of other poets, among them Tom Raworth and Francis Ponge, "What Was It Like: A Remembrance of Allen Ginsberg's Howl," and a sampling of a lifetime's observations on poetry and poets. What emerges is a lively, unabashedly opinionated, always personal poetics forged in association and friendship with numerous "New American" poets: the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the Language poets, and the perennially unclassifiable and enigmatic.