Confessions of a Bibliophile
A love story in which our protagonist runs out of shelf space?again
March/April 2001
Bill Holm Utne Reader
Here in the harsh north, today, April 17, is the first flicker of something like spring. The plastic comes off the windows and the wind makes its first appearance inside my old house since October. The new warming air blows up aureoles of dust from the piles of books in window ledges, on coffee tables, rising from the floor in the cobwebby corners. The piano and the harpsichord are heaped with two-foot stacks of scores: Haydn, Clementi, Fats Waller, the Hamburg Bach, James P. Johnson. In the front hall sit a couple of cases of fresh books waiting to be unloaded. Maybe the kitchen table? We can always eat out. In his 50s, a man needs a motto for his life to sew it together with some sense of direction. Here's mine: He ran out of shelf space, again.
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Imagine Walt Whitman living on the wind-swept plains of western Minnesota. Picture him in the body of a ruddy, six-foot-six-inch, white-bearded 57-year-old Icelandic American who inhabits what he calls a 'Luddite house, the home of many books but few machines.' Cram in a kit-built clavichord and two zpianos—an upright and a grand—and you begin to get a glimpse of poet and essayist Bill Holm in his lair. 'To write I need a table, a pencil, and a piano,' he explains. 'The gods don’t care about a few wrong notes,' he has written, 'if you strike them with a full heart.'
Author of more than a half dozen books, Holm lives in Minneota, Minnesota, an Icelandic-influenced small town whose history and people he explores in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth. Originally published in 1996, the book has recently been reissued by Milkweed Editions, his longtime publisher. Though closely tied to the place he grew up in, left, and then returned to, he has also written about the wider world. Coming Home Crazy (1990) chronicles his experiences teaching in China. Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary (2000) tells of visits to Iceland, Molokai, and Madagascar. Holm, who teaches English at Southwest State University in nearby Marshall, recently bought a fishing shanty 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Iceland—a place to get away from the hectic pace of life in Minneota (population 1,417).
—Chris Dodge |
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