MN Poet Highlight: Bill Holm
Advice
Someone dancing inside us
Learned only a few steps:
The “Do-Your-Work” in 4/4 time,
The “What-Do-You-Expect” waltz.
He hasn’t noticed yet the woman
Standing away from the lamp,
The one with black eyes
Who knows the rhumba,
And strange steps in jumpy rhythms
From the mountains in Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
Something unexpected will happen.
If they don’t, the next world
Will be a lot like this one.
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Bill Holm
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For an entire generation of Minnesotans, Bill Holm embodied the public poet—his sweaters and snowy hair bright fixtures at Midwest literary festivals, his resonant voice a familiar presence on A Prairie Home Companion, and his poetry a reminder to communicate the beauty found in the hidden places of our lives. In books like Boxelder Bug Variations, The Dead Get by with Everything, and The Music of Failure, he transformed the overlooked—an insect, an ice-crusted street, a man nursing a cup of weak coffee—into evidence that the ordinary is never truly ordinary.
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Born in 1943 on a farm outside Minneota, the grandchild of Icelandic immigrants, he carried within him the long vowels and mythologies of his ancestral homeland, a country that he recognized as a spiritual sibling to his birthplace. He became fluent in the language and later spent his summers writing in Hofsós, Iceland. Although he often joked that he “never recovered from growing up in Minneota,” Holm was a lifelong resident of southwestern Minnesota, and his home state remained the artistic anchor of his work.
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A graduate of Gustavus Adolphus, he was a teacher by vocation and temperament. Holm spent the last three decades of his life as a professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, urging his students to find humor and truth in the seemingly mundane. He retired from teaching in 2007 but remained active as a writer and public speaker. Holm died on February 26th, 2009, leaving behind a body of work marked by a belief in the power of language, curiosity, decency, and the value of introspection.
