2010 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award Winner for Poetry!
“One of the few…writers I revere rather than merely read.”
– Jim Harrison
THE CHAIN LETTER OF THE SOUL
New and Selected Poems
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions
$18.00 Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 978-1-57131-444-4
http://www.billholm.com/
www.milkweed.org
Our Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award Winners will be featured on…
… on September 13!
SEPTEMBER 13 BOOK SEGMENT
Click here for more info.
“For it is life we want. We want the world, the whole beautiful world, alive — and we alive in it. That is the actual god we long for and seek, yet we have already found it, if we open our senses, our whole bodies, thus our souls. That is why I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along in whatever future will come.”
– Bill Holm, 1943-2009“One of our country’s few essential contemporary writers.”
– Ted Kooser“The sage of Minnesota, a colleague of Whitman born a hundred years too late.”
– Garrison Keillor“His whole persona comes with a clear mandate: DO NOT DUPLICATE — as if anyone could if they tried.”
– Jim Heynen
Collecting the best and the newest poems from Bill Holm’s oeuvre, THE CHAIN LETTER OF THE SOUL paints a portrait of a man of great heart, broad vision, and startling prescience. Fans will recognize many of their favorites from Boxelder Bug Variations, The Dead Get By With Everything, and Playing the Black Piano, and new readers will be introduced to an enduring voice of American literature.
Featured now in the 2009 MBA Catalog –
Books – A Reader’s Catalog
– at participating MBA member bookstores!
Be sure to buy this book from your favorite locally owned and operated Midwest independent bookseller!
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MBA BOOKSELLER INFORMATION
Booksellers — Earn up to $100 in rebates from MBA for promoting THE CHAIN LETTER OF THE SOUL!
Midwest Connections rebate form for THE CHAIN LETTER OF THE SOUL (PDF)
THE CHAIN LETTER OF THE SOUL by Bill Holm is featured on the front cover of the 2009 MBA Catalog.
This book is available from Milkweed Editions, Publishers Group West, or from your preferred wholesaler. Be sure to contact your PGW rep for more information about this title.
MBA and Milkweed Editions want your comments and reviews for this new memoir. Please send them to us so we can share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!
DOWNLOADS
Please download these PDF files and print out the sign and shelf-talkers to use with your Twin Cities Live “What to Read Next” displays of these books.
SIGN FOR TCL SEPTEMBER 13 FEATURED BOOKS (PDF)
SHELF-TALKERS FOR TCL SEPTEMBER 13 FEATURED BOOKS (PDF)
- Full-color sign/flyer (PDF)
- Book photo (JPG) — high resolution
- Author photo (JPG) — high resolution
- StarTribune obituary article on Bill Holm
- St. Paul Pioneer Press article on CHAIN LETTER and Bill Holm
- Minnesota Public Radio obituary of Bill Holm
- Midwest Connections rebate form for THE CHAIN LETTER OF THE SOUL (PDF)
- Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials
ABOUT THE BOOK
AND AUTHOR
BILL HOLM
“Bill Holm, one of MN’s greatest champions of the arts, passed away not too long ago. The Chain Letter of the Soul is his last book–a new and selected poems (heavy on the new) that is not at all one of those thrown together collections. It is a great testament to his life and his writing.”
– Hans Weyandt, Micawber’s Books, St, Paul, MN
Upon Bill Holm’s untimely death at age 65 in 2009 from massive pneumonia, Garrison Keillor called him “the sage of Minnesota, a colleague of Whitman though born a hundred years too late.” Known and loved for his outspoken essays and poems, his lively public talks and performances, his decades of service as a teacher—not to mention his keen and insightful wit, his enthusiastic love of art and music, and his fearless opinions—Bill Holm was an American original.
The Chain Letter of the Soul gathers together the best of Bill Holm’s work as those who love the late poet also gather to celebrate his legacy.St. Paul Pioneer Press
Updated: 10/29/2009 05:13:29 PM CDT“It was always a good day for Milkweed Editions publisher Daniel Slager when big Bill Holm dropped into the press’s Minneapolis office with a sheaf of papers filled with new writing.” ‘Bill would say, “I don’t know if there is anything worth anything here. You tell me,” ‘ Slager recalls. ‘Bill was a prolific writer, and this was his way of saying he wanted an opinion. He’d sit in my office and laugh and talk about the poets he loved, like Walt Whitman.’“Holm, who died unexpectedly in February at 65, was a popular poet and essayist, raconteur and musician.
“A bearded guy who stood more than 6-foot-6, he looked like a cross between Santa Claus and a Viking. His students at Southwest Minnesota State University at Marshall adored him because he was given to pounding a podium and urging his audiences to “Resist much. Obey little,” a quote from Whitman.
“Holm left us with three previous poetry collections and eight books of prose, including The Windows of Brimnes, an essay collection edited by Slager that Holm was inspired to write during the months he spent each year at his fisherman’s cottage on a fjord in Iceland.”
” ‘It’s safe to say that no author was more associated with Milkweed Editions than Bill Holm,’ Slager says. ‘Before he died, we had conversations about whether he had enough poems for a new collection. After he passed, it seemed obvious to me we should gather his best work in a book of new and selected poems.’ ”
RANT ON
“The Chain Letter of the Soul includes 33 new poems, as well as selections from “Boxelder Bug Variations” (1985), “The Dead Get By With Everything”(1991) and “Playing the Black Piano” (2004).
“Holm was a prairie populist who inherited his Icelandic ancestors’ love of stories, words and concerns for society. He traveled the world, teaching in China and exploring islands, but he always returned to Minnesota. He loved this country but sometimes couldn’t stand its excesses.
” ‘Bill ranted in person and in his poetry, the way Whitman ranted,’ said Jim Lenfestey, chairman of Plymouth Congregational’s Literary Witnesses reading series, who’s arranging a program celebrating Holm and his work.
” ‘When Bill passed away, it broke the hearts of poets and readers throughout the country. His writing should be taught in every school in America. It is so clear and pungent. His ideas about America were so countervailing to the American mythology but so accurate. Bill anticipated, and wrote about with feeling, the triumphal America of the last decade that broke his heart because he knew it wasn’t the truth about how life is lived.’
“Lenfestey last saw Holm at a Milkweed fundraiser a year ago, and Bill was in despair over the American economy and the fact his beloved Iceland had just gone bankrupt.
“Holm was still grappling with the financial crisis in an untitled poem he wrote in February just before his death:
” ‘A cistern of dead language/drains out from the newspapers and radios/each morning now for months:/mortgage credit foreclosure stimulus/jumpstart consumer bailout package./No one has any idea what any of it means,/much less the stentorian verses that proclaim it./It is a serenade for the winter wind to play,/performed and sung by a company of the deaf and dumb …’
A UNIVERSAL UNIVERSE
“Anyone can understand what Holm is saying in that poem, and Slager says an important part of Holm’s artistic vision was making his poetry accessible.
” ‘Bill was deeply suspicious of jargon or poetry that could be understood only by the initiated — other poets or reviewers. He thought the best of literature was for anyone who could read.
” ‘I think of that as touching on something fundamentally Minnesotan, democratic with a small ‘d,’ this understanding of people. It’s a very decent, humane legacy of Bill’s Icelandic ancestry, as well as his own vision and the way he was shaped by the prairie where he grew up.’
“Holm never had a television set or computer in his home, and Slager thinks that ‘wirelessness’ gave depth to Holm’s writing.
” ‘Bill was really hostile to wiring. That’s all over his work,’ Slager said. ‘There’s a fine line between being misanthropic and being critically intelligent. More often than not, Bill was on the right side of that line.
” ‘That’s where his wisdom was, coming from a long tradition that goes back to Thoreau, Emerson, Thomas Paine, Whitman, wonderful artists with language but profoundly critical of mainstream thinking and values. To me, it feels like Bill might be the last of that line.’
“Almost anything could inspire Holm’s poetry, including the 2002 death of Paul Wellstone in an airplane crash. Holm wrote a poem in tribute to the late senator, the last stanza of which could apply to his own death. Maybe someone will read it at Monday’s program:
” ‘So we go on to write the same poem,/sing the same sad song yet once more/not for the dead who have gone/over to the insensible kingdom/but for us who must now carry on/without them. This time, as so often/before, Death snatched a big one/when we could not stand to lose/his voice, which spoke, not alone, but for us millions who longed/for a world green, alive, about to bloom.’
“Book critic Mary Ann Grossmann can be reached at grossmann@ pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5574.”
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A distinguished group of Bill Holm’s fellow writers read from The Chain Letter of the Soul at a celebration of his life on Monday, November 2, at Plymouth Congregational Church, Minneapolis. Besides Milkweed Editions publisher Daniel Slager, the roster included John Rezmerski, one of Holm’s good friends; Minnesota poet laureate Robert Bly, whose farm in western Minnesota was a haven for Holm when he attended Gustavus Adolphus College; Holm’s wife, Marcell Brekken; Milkweed publisher emeritus Emilie Buchwald, who edited most of Holm’s books; poets/essayists Jim Heynen and Joe and Nancy Paddock; and poets Phebe Hanson, Phil Bryant and Jim Lenfestey.
Please go to http://www.milkweed.org/content/view/263/1/ for more information, including tributes to Bill Holm from friends and colleagues, reviews, and more.
