Anselm Hollo

Paavo Anselm Aleksis Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland. His father, Juho August Hollo (1885–1967) — who liked to be known as "J. A." Hollo — was professor of pedagogy at the University of Helsinki, an essayist, and a major translator of literature into Finnish. His mother was Iris Antonina Anna Walden (1899–1983), a music teacher and daughter of organic chemist Paul Walden. He lived for eight years in the United Kingdom, and had three children (Hannes, Kaarina, and Tamsin) with his first wife, poet Josephine Clare. He was a permanent resident in the United States from the late 1960s until his death. At the time of his death, he resided in Boulder, Colorado, with his second wife, artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo.

In the 1960s, Hollo lived in London, England, and worked at the Finnish section of BBC World Service. One of his tasks there was to write radio dramas in Finnish, together with another Finnish poet, Matti Rossi. The music to their productions was written by Erkki Toivanen. Around this time, Hollo was also beginning to make a name for himself as a poet in the English language. In 1965, he performed at the "underground" International Poetry Incarnation, London. Also in the same year, the first customer of the Indica Bookshop, a certain Paul McCartney, is known to have bought, among other things, the book & it is a song by Anselm Hollo the day before the bookshop was officially opened. In 2001, poets and critics associated with the SUNY Buffalo POETICS list elected Hollo to the honorary position of "anti-laureate", in protest at the appointment of Billy Collins to the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hollo translated poetry and belles-lettres from Finnish, German, Swedish, and French into English. He was one of the early translators of Allen Ginsberg into German and Finnish. Hollo taught creative writing in eighteen different institutions of higher learning, including SUNY Buffalo, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 1985, he taught in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where he held the rank of Full Professor. Several of his poems have been set into music by pianist and composer Frank Carlberg. Poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley named their son Anselm Berrigan after Hollo. Hollo became ill during the summer of 2012 and had brain surgery. He died from post-operative pneumonia on 29 January 2013, at the age of 78.

Michael Horovitz, ed. (1969). Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain. Penguin Books. Edward Lucie-Smith, ed. (1970). British Poetry since 1945. Penguin. Jon Silkin, ed. (1973). Poetry of the Committed Individual. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-042159-9.