The Music of Failure

My brother informed me this evening that my friend, the Minnesota poet and essayist Bill Holm, died yesterday.  For those not acquainted, the post I left about it over at one of my virtual haunts is a fair enough introduction.

I met Bill for the first time through my father, who loved getting to know local writers and took me to see him at a reading in some quirky rural rural town venue, some oddball town hall or rustic church.  I remember he came in the back door and kind of wandered over to a corner where an upright piano stood, and started picking out a tune by way of introducing himself.  I heard him read again later at a presentation of several Minnesota authors my father organized at one of his churches, but I didn’t get to know him until he came to give a reading at my college.  I hung out with him a little while afterward, smoking cigarettes and talking about literature and the (first) war in Iraq.  I saw him a few other times and exchanged the occasional letter.

Our correspondence (like so many others) had dropped off since I became a father.  Perhaps a year ago I’d come across his address at Southwest State University and tried an email which bounced back to me.  It was probably a misbegotten effort anyway, as he was an unrepentant Luddite who claimed to own neither computer nor television, and who I don’t doubt had little time for the internet.  I’d been meaning to write him a letter for a while; I wanted to thank him for his last* book, The Windows of Brimnes, that I’d read much of in various hospital chairs during a family medical emergency, and to tell him about the idea I’d had to get to know classical music better by looking for the many works mentioned in his essays and poems among the offerings of the digital music service I have a subscription to (perhaps I’ll finally get to this project now).  The letter never got written, never got sent, put off like so many things these days.

Don’t put off writing that letter any longer.  It may be later than you think.

I can thank Bill Holm that I’m not wholly ignorant of classical music, and for the fact that I have more than a cursory knowledge of Walt Whitman: I still think the essay The Music of Failure is one of the best things that has been written about America.  Tonight I opened Leaves of Grass for the first time in a long while.

Joy, shipmate, joy!

(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)

Our life is closed, our life begins,

The long, long anchorage we leave,

The ship is clear at last, she leaps!

She swiftly courses from the shore,

Joy, shipmate, joy

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 27, 2009 at 1:08 AM



*last book published in his lifetime, as it turns out - Bill Holm's last writings and a retrospective of his life's work were posthumously published in The Chain Letter of the Soul.