Bob Collins
Bill Holm, whose death we learned about today, was a frequent voice on Minnesota Public Radio and has left plenty behind to listen to.
It appears the last time he was on, however, was Christmas 2007, with the Holiday Stage Session. Unfortunately these archived shows are in RealAudio.
A few months before that, he was Garrison Keillor’s guest on A Prairie Home Companion.
In 2004, during an appearance at the College of St. Benedict, he read from many of his essays.
His poem, “Wedding Poem for Schele and Phil” was read on Writer’s Almanac in May 2003.
The University of Washington hosts the Bill Holm Center. Several lectures are available on its Web site.
The MPR books site also has extensive links surrounding the 2000 Milkweed Editions reissue of The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth.
Update 12:07 p.m. – MPR’s Marianne Combs will have a look at the life of Bill Holm tonight on All Things Considered. We’re also trying to get some of the digitized audio encoded to a Flash player.
Update 12:36 p.m. — MPR’s Michael Wells has found this 1987 appearance on the old MPR Morning Show:
Update 1:13 p.m. – Garrison Keillor has released this statement:
Bill Holm was a great man and unlike most great men he really looked like one. Six-foot-eight, big frame, and a big white beard and a shock of white hair, a booming voice, so he loomed over you like a prophet and a preacher which is what he was. He was an only child, adored by his mother, and she protected him from bullies and he grew up free to follow his own bent, and become the sage of Minneota, a colleague of Whitman though born a hundred years too late, a champion of Mozart and Bach, playing his harpsichord on summer nights, telling stories about the Icelanders, and thundering about how the young have lost their way and abandoned learning and culture in favor of grease and noise.
He thundered with the best of them though he had a gentle heart. He was an English prof who really loved literature and he could buttonhole you and tell you he’d just finished reading Dickens again and how wonderful it was. He got himself into print pretty well and anyone picking up his “Windows of Brimnes” or “The Music of Failure” or “The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth” will get the real Holm.
He hated Minnesota winters and maybe that’s what killed him, flying back from beautiful Patagonia to the wind-swept tundra and thinking about having to shovel out his house in Minneota.
I’m glad he got to see Barack elected, which restored some of his faith in his countrymen. I wish I’d been there to catch him as he fell. I hope his Icelandic ancestors are waiting to welcome him to their rocky corner of heaven. I hope his piano goes to someone who will love it as much as he did. I hope that people all across Minnesota will pick up one of his books and see what the man had to say.
4:34 p.m. – David Doody’s tribute.
7:15 p.m. – This video has just been posted on YouTube, from Holm’s tribute to Paul Wellstone.
