rue Wilson Monday

Author: Anselm Hollo

Publisher: La Alameda Press (2000)

Anselm Hollo's notes on rue Wilson Monday: When I was invited to spend five months in France, in an old hotel long frequented by artists and writers, I decided to write something that would NOT be your typical 'sabbatical poem'—that familiar rumination, by the U.S. American academic (temporary) expatriate, 'on' the Mona Lisa, Baudelaire's grave, or 'how different all this is from back home in Missoula, Montana!'

I believe that rue Wilson Monday turned out to be something possibly more interesting: a hybrid of day book, informal sonnet sequence, and extended, 'laminated' essay-poem, with an aesthetic (dare I say lyricism?) perhaps better understood by our younger generation of poets than by their predecessors, those mid-twentieth-century traveloguists. Works I found particularly inspiring in my endeavor were Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets and Edward Dorn's Abhorrences—books that will make me chuckle and weep to the end of my days.

The book received its title from French poet Guillaume Apollinaire's 1913 poem 'Lundi rue Christine' (Monday rue Christine), a Cubist work composed almost entirely out of verbatim speech from various conversations in a cafe.