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SPEAKER: The following program is made possible in part with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

BILL HOLM: Minneota, to me, is a place where I don't have to talk about books, and literature, and the arts. And when I come back, I can either not talk at all, a rare thing for a compulsive talker. Or I can talk soybeans, or I can talk weather, or I can talk gardening. And the places that I see are, of course, familiar to me. Yeah.

There's no greater pleasure for me than to come home to Minneota and to sit out on my front porch, and talk to the neighbors when they come by and to have coffee in the morning and sit and watch the birds feed at the bird feeder in the backyard. And to read what I please and have the conversations I please, and to simply stroll around and look at things that I suppose I've looked at all my life, and still see in new and different lights when I look at them again.

It's somewhat like Thoreau, who was always asked why he never left country, or if he had ever traveled. And he said, of course, I have traveled widely in Concord. So I suppose I am in the process of having traveled widely in Minneota I have not covered the whole town yet, but I'm in the process.

KIM HODGSON: This is Bill Holm. Poet, essayist, musician, and Icelander, from Minneota in Southwest Minnesota. Bill Holm is 6 and 1/2 feet tall, fiercely red-headed and red-bearded under his green seed corn hat, and is currently employed as writer in residence at Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Just a little North of the Twin Cities.

Unlike many of us during these confusing times, Bill knows exactly where his roots are, loves them, and returns to them again and again. Weekends, vacations. Whenever there are a couple of uncluttered days in his life, the 200 miles between White Bear Lake and Minneota prove no barrier to Bill. He returns to the place where his memories begin.

From the outside, Bill Holm's Minneota home has little to distinguish it from any other house in any other small prairie town. The inside, too, is not particularly extraordinary, except one soon notices books overflowing from every shelf and table, and musical instruments. Piano, harpsichord, and clavichord, are discovered not always quite where one would expect them.

As a weekend visitor in Bill's home, your mornings begin in the kitchen, with Bill reciting from memory a bit of Yeats, or a poem of his own, while he brews you egg coffee, and builds a breakfast that'll stay with you. A necessary appliance of this kitchen is, it turns out, the harpsichord. And without doubt, somewhere between the first smells of coffee and the drinking of it, Bill, still in his bathrobe, will sit down at this instrument and dash off a few arm lengths of Bach or Scarlatti, or if he happens to be in a waggish mood, he might rag you a hymn.

Later in the day, you'll surely do a walking tour of Minneota, during which you will visit a few of Bill's oldest friends. Almost as surely you'll be given a short tour of Northern Lincoln County, with its Prairie Hills, its farm homes and barns, its lonely graveyards and churches. And through it all, the tales he'll tell, like an old Icelandic Bard with myth, poetry, and song, recreating the origins of the race. And if the origins of European settlement in Southwest Minnesota go back barely a century, no matter. Bill will give it a history worthy of an empire. And before he finishes, you may find yourself believing that Minneota is indeed the center of the universe.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BILL HOLM: was, in fact, born on a farm eight miles North of Minneota, Minnesota. Farm has been homesteaded about 1880 by my Icelandic grandfather, Svein. The house sat on a Hill surrounded by trees, countable and the fingers of one hand, and miles of prairie rolling off toward South Dakota. My mother decided that I would read books and die without calluses on my hands. But my father would have preferred a son who took slightly more interest than I did in cultivating soybeans and repairing combines.

When I was 18, what I wanted most in the world was to see the city limits of Minneota receding for the last time, in the rear view mirror of an automobile driving East. New York, Boston, Washington, where men didn't spit their snooze into brass spittoons. Where they wore suits instead of clean bib overalls on Saturday night. Where women did not wear shapeless print dresses and discuss the price of eggs and the newest hot dish recipe, but were elegant and witty with painted eyebrows and long black gowns.

By gradual steps I did make my way East through college, graduate school, and into a teaching job on the Atlantic Ocean, as Far East as the American consciousness can move. However, a strange thing happened. Rather than finding genuine culture and civility, martinis and paté, conversation about Italian movies and politics, I found an empty-hearted rootlessness, books used as blunt instruments, a sneering disbelief that Midwestern farmers might have souls, much less intellect.

So I began, much to the skeptical amusement of the Easterners I knew, to tell Minneota stories of fierce winters, of eccentric old Icelanders who died of broken hearts, of treeless hills full of wild flowers in Lincoln County, of pioneer graveyards with peculiar names in Norwegian, Polish, Belgian, Icelandic, of cleaning hog houses with a tender nose and soaking tired bones in an old, curved legged bathtub-- of country school with its brass bell, glass-doored oak bookcases, and half moon outhouses.

And most of all, the rich variety of characters in small towns, and how it was possible to know, and tolerate, and forgive, and love them, in ways not available to the guarded privacy of the large city. As my mother used to say, Minneota is just like that book by Grace Meticulous, Peyton Place, only better. The stories were true, and you knew all the actors.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Minneota was full of accents and languages when I grew up there in the 40s. Very Icelandic with its trilled consonants, the nasal A's of the Norwegians, the flat, guttural sound of Flemish. You could drive 10 miles and hear Polish, German, and Swedish. It was like Northern Europe compressed into a single, thinly populated County in the middle of the American continent. Strangers to the prairie would exclaim about the boring monotony of the landscape, mile after mile of flat fields.

But to a native, even a single section of land was like a continent. Here, a cornfield. Cultivated, civilized, straight, and square, next to a stony pasture full of those strange visitors from another planet. Cows, next to that, a rolling gully or a slew of cattails. And if you were lucky, a coffee colored river with its dark groves of willow, Cottonwood, and Boxelder, along the bank. Then a blue blooming flax field stretching up to meet that enormous, intimidating, magnificent sky with its tornadoes, thunderstorms, stars clear as sword points heading toward Earth on winter nights.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

While the Twin Cities and the East Coast tried to imagine them small, the people were as large hearted and tempestuous as the sky above them. I learned to love poetry from one of them, an old Icelandic carpenter named Einar Hallgrimsson. Einar was a bachelor, had been inside a school only a year or two in his life, I suppose, but was literate and well read in several languages, and could turn an elegant phrase in at least English and Icelandic.

He and my father loved to drink whisky and argue. And when I was a small boy, perhaps 10 years old, I would tag along with them to Einar's magical house. He built it himself in an alley in Minneota, and it was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling in every room. Even in the bathroom, one could meditate at eye level with Goethe, Emerson, the Icelandic sagas, and the National Geographic from 1898 to 1907.

Einar would say, your father and I are going to discuss business in the kitchen. Now you sit here in my green chair and read some poems. When we are done, I'll come and read one for you. The business was, of course, a pint of whiskey, some adult stories, and perhaps an argument about the stupidity of politicians, or the narrow mindedness of Lutheran ministers.

When they were done, Einar would come back into the living room, move me out of his green chair and read perhaps the shooting of Dan McGrew. A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the malamute saloon, and the kid that handles the music box was hitting a big time tune. Or a Shakespeare sonnet, or Longfellow's village blacksmith, or even an old Viking poem in Icelandic. He made no discrimination between these poems. He loved them all. They were the air he breathed.

And these poems went into every cabinet he ever built out of wood. I never met a professor as intelligent as Einar. Southwestern Minnesota is still full of Einar's if one looks for them. In a city, they can remain hidden forever. But in a town of 1,000 or so, genius will out. Robert Bly lives on his farm outside Madison, his head buzzing with more ideas than all of Long Island. Fred Manford strolls over the Laverne prairie with his enormous feet, and they hear the reverberations in San Francisco.

Franz Richter lives in an old farmhouse by Clarkfield, drawing his delicate peasant girls and sly eyed trolls, and brooding like some sudden storm on the prairie sky. My friend Raleigh Johnson carves Tolstoy, Gandhi, Sanford, Haugen, and old deaf Torgersen, out of the same block of wood, and decorates the town with them.

RALEIGH JOHNSON: I've often been accused of modeling my Viking heads after Bill. Some people say there is a likeness, but I don't know if that's true or not. It's just that Bill probably does look like a Viking in the sense that he's very heavy beard and reddish hair. I mean, I'm sure some Vikings had fiery red hair just like Bill's.

BILL HOLM: The prairies are as full of these characters as of soybeans and barns.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

He was a large, strong, profane man who loved whiskey, and stories, and laughter. His spirit was made of velvet and feathers, but he had the alligator hide of a blond man, who sat on a tractor in the wind and sun too long. He dragged me with him into the power house, the Minneota liquor store, when I was a fat, pimply boy. While he and uncle Avey Snidel with his clawed thumb, the only remains of his hand, and Einar, the mayor, Halgrimson, and the farmers North of town sat around drinking and waiting for the combine to get fixed.

He would God damn this, and God damn that. And finally some farmer would sneak off down the street to the hardware store, and come back with a handful of 60 penny spikes. And Bill Holm with grunts and ah's would do his trick. He took an old red handkerchief full of oats, dust, and sweat, out of his striped overalls pocket, and wrapped it around the spike. He bent the handkerchief, and when he unraveled it from the iron, it came out a perfect V.

After a while, some farmer would pick up the bent spikes that had clunked to the bar and hang them together like links in a fence. Many a souvenir of strong hands went home out of the Minneota liquor store that way. I sat by in amazement, thinking of Mozart and Wordsworth, knowing I would never be half the man my father was, and wondering how he got that way. After a while, a couple of farmers who had gone one whisky over the top of the dam would begin arguing about the right time to sell cattle, or the right fertilizer for the soybeans, or who had the cleanest barn.

The voices would rise. The fists would begin closing and moving around the glasses and beer bottles threateningly. My father, who liked loud talk but hated quarrels, would come up behind them and put one of those vice grip hands on each neck affectionately. Hell, boys, let's have a drink over here. I'll buy. And the fight would end before it started. Throttled by the Steely feeling of that spike bending thumb pressing into the necks. I understood then that the strongest man never lifts a hand. He makes peace around him with laughter and tricks, with a velvety, dark violence resting underneath it, as on a cushion.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I happen to be an Icelander, and because both my parents grew up speaking Icelandic. And this is a poem about what you inherit from people.

When she went to Iceland at 60, to see her father's farm,

The relatives looked down at the boney knuckles and the veins popping up,

And said, see, she has the Josephsohn hands, even after 100 years.

In his own house, there were no attacks on Franklin Roosevelt.

And when the Republican uncle made fun of FDR, he would bellow grandly, you crooked son of a bitch.

See, they would all say, that insufferable giftless and arrogance.

Now, when I bellow at parties, or look down at my own hands.

Knuckles growing and veins rising as I age,

I think, how can I live with all these dead people inside me.

I'll have to eat like a grizzly bear before the winter denning to feed them all.

Dragging whole carcasses miles across the tundra inside my body.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I once knew a woman in Virginia who had a marvelous name, Svarna Rosamund Gudmundsdottir. And I would tell her stories about all the Icelanders in Minnesota, and she found that difficult to believe. So I talked her into coming out and seeing me in Minneota And she had a marvelous time talking Icelandic to my mother and to all the old Icelanders in Minneota. And I took her around on the grand tour. And three or four poems came out of that experience.

The first one is a poem about a bar in Taunton, where my mother worked, Tibbett's bar. And I took her down there, and figuring we would run into some old Icelanders, and we did. So this is what happened. She and I are in a noisy bar full of farmers on a Saturday night. One of them, born of Icelanders, and almost totally drunk now, is awestruck at this beautiful woman and comes to talk to her. He is embarrassed in his drunkenness and says everything wrong.

Hey, Billy, who's this one? Half the time you got some black haired fin who never says a word. She whispers to him. She speaks of Icelandic to me. He can think of nothing but a vulgar old song that men sing when their horses pull them home, half conscious in the back of a wagon. The horse plods down the road, and the invisible broken voice rises from the floor of the wagon in the darkness.

(SINGING) They lost me dog ugliest little lot.

I was so drunk I couldn't tell day from night. It is the voice of his father 60 years ago. When the yellow haired woman laughs again, he hears the laughter of his mother putting the horses away. He gets a sheepish look on his face, and just grunts a little.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

They took her also to the Lincoln County Cemetery. And I suppose for an Icelander, this is a peculiar experience to see all these names in Icelandic and the grammar in Icelandic so many thousands of miles from home. And the immigration happened long enough ago so that it's not really in the consciousness of Icelanders, or very likely of Norwegians, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Belgians or anyone else.

So that it's somewhat like seeing your own country 100 years ago, and your own relatives, and people that you've lost touch with. So this is what happened in the cemetery. Icelandic graveyard. A woman and I are in an old Icelandic graveyard on a windy, treeless hill in Western Minnesota. She has never been here. She sees her own name on every tombstone. Sometimes she died an old lady, surrounded by children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, like the petals are on the center of a flower.

Sometimes she died as a child who could barely speak, without the water of God on his hairless head. Sometimes her name is spelled right, and sometimes not. It is a good thing to have died so many times, to feel so often the death shudder in the bones. So that now, the muscles are practiced at it, and it can be done with the graceful, delicate movements of a dancer.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I also took her to the round barn while it was still intact, and she found an old horse harness there, and I did some singing. It belonged to Elvira and Victor Josephson, who were cousins of mine, and whose father, who was one of the first Icelanders to came over, paid for my grandfather's passage from the old country. And my mother's original homestead was about a mile away from the round barn.

They were wealthy farmers and had been to the University, and had evidently gotten a design for a round barn there. So they built it on the Riverside, and it was a famous, famous barn, around Minneota and in Lyon County, because it was the only one of its kind. And in a country full of square barns and square houses, there was something marvelously Baroque about that round cupola and the round roof rising above the trees.

Well, eventually Elvira and Victor died and they were the last members of their family. They were twins and died within a month or two of each other, and left a wonderful old Victorian house full of antiques, and books, and newspapers that had been piled there since 1890. And cat manure, and broken down furniture, and coffee cans full of money and all the things one expects to find in houses of elderly bachelors and spinsters or educated people who never go out. And the farm was sold after the two of them died.

The house burned down, and most of the grove was taken out and planted into a field. But the barn stayed there. And it's only this spring finally being torn down. But it was a marvelous place. You could walk into it and it still smelled the way an old barn should smell with the old ghosts of the cattle smells in it. And there was something, something odd about being in a round barn. The shingles had started to fall off the roof.

And for years and years people had shot pigeons in the cupola, so that was full of holes. And strange patterns of light like a kaleidoscope would come in through the roof. And the wind, which always blows on the prairie, would whistle in through the missing shingles and make a wonderful clatter. But you could stand in the middle of the barn and you could speak, and it was like an echo chamber, like a resonating chamber. The sound would carry around the whole dome of the barn. So it was a cathedral to raising cattle.

We go to an old round barn by the river, a woman and I. The barn is full of the smell of old hay. Wind whistles through the missing shingles in the high dome. The iron stalls are empty now. We still see the footprints. The iron stalls are empty now, made by cattle. We still see the footprints of hooves on the black dirt, made by cattle long since dead and eaten. She takes down from a nail, an old horse harness, the leather dried and cracked. From Iceland, she says, and caresses it.

We go into the empty hayloft, 50 high, shaped like a cathedral dome. The last sunlight is blown into the holes in the dome by Prairie Winds, and makes the floor shine like a polished ballroom. I walk under the dome, open my mouth, and sing an old Italian song about the lips of Lola, the color of cherries.

[SINGING IN ITALIAN]

The sound rolls around the dome and grows. When it comes back to me, it is transformed into the neighing of horses.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BILL HOLM: If you drive Southwest of Minneota, and the County road that runs by the Norwegian church, the land begins rising in tiers of glacial gullies that run off on both sides of the road like some giant stairway. Each hill somewhat higher, and each gully deeper than the last. Look Northeast after 9 or 10 miles, and you see that you have driven over the tops of the grain elevators in Taunton and Minneota. They are themselves 150 high, and are a couple of hundred feet below you.

The road has not curved, but you have driven up several hundred feet. The spiritual and geological beginning of the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains. At the top of the highest hill, you seem to have reached Timberline. The country opens up. Piles of gray stones everywhere, thin soil, low scraggly bushes, farms farther apart. It's the best you can do in Western Minnesota, for the feeling of Alpine tundra. The tops of these rolling gullies and hills in Lincoln County.

If there had been Irish Saints on the prairies, they would have built their beehive huts on these hills, meditating in the dry and rarefied air, with stones and grasshoppers and prickly purple thistles around. Looking down in the darkness at the yard, lights twinkling on the more prosperous farms around Minneota, and Taunton, and Porter, and at the red eyes, at the tops of the elevators, glowing like little devil fires, ready to pounce on the grain trucks and to flour and mutilate cattle in the silent night pastures.

As Saints everywhere always knew, you have to get up a few hundred feet in order to see good and evil clearly. And you can't be distracted by too much luxuriant vegetation. Trees and flowers are unnecessary. A few stones and thistles in old boards are just right.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

BILL HOLM: On top of those hills are two old churches, that I always take people to. The first an old Icelandic Lutheran church, which is one of the oldest churches in this part of the state. Not one of the oldest buildings, but one of the oldest congregations, built on a bare hill with a cemetery next to it. And the church is marvelously Lutheran in sight. It somewhat seems to stand for whatever virtues there were in Lutheranism.

Plain and oak, with a strange yellow light that filters in, nothing so Baroque as stained glass, and all as the wind howling through the windows. When you walked into that church and saw the little reed organ, and the plain oak, and the bare altar in the pulpit, you knew you were in for intellectual activity, and you had to sit up straight in your hard oak pew and listen, because there was going to be thought going on.

About a mile down the road toward Ivanhoe, is an old Polish Catholic church, which looks like a medieval cathedral built in the middle of a cornfield. The church of Saint John Cantius at Vilna. And Vilna is absolutely the opposite of the Lincoln County Lutheran Church. You walk into it and you stop thinking immediately. You're in a huge vaulted room, with brightly painted colors, and a white altar in a pulpit that seems to hang from the ceiling, be carved from the roof of the church.

And the sound echoes around and around mysteriously. And you whisper in one end of the church and can hear it in the other. And the place is full of strange light from the beautiful old stained glass windows that are still in Polish. So the mind turns off absolutely. And there's some spiritual activity in that church that there wasn't in the Lincoln County church. So they seemed to stand somehow for the two parts of anyone's life, I guess, particularly my life, the rational, and the emotional, or the male and the female in Jungian terms.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

BILL HOLM: When I grew up, Western Minnesota was organized into two pitched and sometimes warring camps-- the Catholics and the Lutherans. We were told in Luther league that the Knights of Columbus stored guns in the basement of the church for the coming revolution, and took oaths in blood to murder Lutheran babies who could not be forcibly converted to the true church.

Presumably, the Romans would burn all the extant copies of Luther's second catechism, thereby extinguishing all possibility of intellectual freedom and human growth. It was an adult Lutheran minister who told these things to children who knew no better. And I have hated him for 25 years for doing it. Farming the land with Ezra Taft Benson in the Department of Agriculture was trouble enough, without making furtive attempts to start the Thirty Years' War all over again in Lyon County.

There was a Catholic bank and a Lutheran bank, a Catholic grocery store and a Lutheran grocery store, a Catholic garage and a Lutheran garage, in Minneota. And you took your business where you preferred your theology. If you crossed the line, there was talk about giving them the business. My father was a skeptic at least, and probably an agnostic at heart, and would have no truck with such nonsense. He drove Catholic cars and ate Catholic hamburger. I did not appreciate his fearlessness and good sense sufficiently at the time, and salute him now for it publicly, wherever he is.

I grew up like Phoebe Hanson in Sacred Heart, imagining that Catholics had a mysterious sexuality and joy that were not available to chilly hearted Scandinavians with pursed lips and dried souls who disapproved of everything that smacked of delight, or laughter, or genuine reverence for divine mysteries. When Catholics got married, they had long, mysterious ceremonies, conducted in a smoky Southern language no one could understand, with incense, and bells, and gold robes.

They got married in the morning, and drank whiskey and ate ham and told stories in the afternoon. And then finished off the day by hiring a band, drinking more whiskey, and dancing the polka, the schottische, and the old time waltz all night, ending up at dawn with hugging, and lovemaking, and well-wishing and a divinely ecstatic hangover. When Lutherans got married, they read Saint Paul, issued warnings, had coffee, shook hands, and went to work the next day. That presumably was why so many more Catholics seemed to be born. Everyone said they were taking over.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When I was a boy, it seemed to me unspeakably romantic, and joyful, and I envied Catholics. I lived for midnight mass on Christmas eve, a single respectable time for a Lutheran to be present inside the brick bastions of Rome on the prairies.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's been many years since I've been a regular churchgoer, though I am a church musician. And I regard Bach as being one of the greatest gifts that the church ever gave to the human race. And the Lutheran Church gave that gift, so it's a lovely and wonderful thing. But there's an ecstasy in his music, which is not really explained by theology. And Robert Bly has a little poem about listening to Bach, which I think describes Bach about as well as he can be described, by not describing him.

He says, there is someone inside this music who is not well described by the names of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of hosts. So I spent one Sunday morning playing the whole Goldberg Variations very slowly with all the repeats. It takes about two hours, and it's an incredible experience to do it. I got done and I thought about the fact that one worships by playing that music. So this is a little poem about that.

A building with 30 carved stones taken from a ruined Lutheran Church. In this church, priests made love on the altar, and the name of Saint Paul was not spoken. Wine was given in huge goblets because it was wine, and wine is enough. The organist played always in G major, the same tune slowly. And the priest mumbled to himself, whoever loves G Major loves God.

The church was buried in the rubble from one of the nameless wars fought for the love of God. The 30 stones were carried out in a boat, pulled on a brook by swans. No one has ever named the faces carved on those stones. They are still wet from the river, and from swans breathing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When you play Bach, you realize that whatever the failures of the human race, they have this one small success to their credit. So it makes you rather proud to be a human being briefly. But music is a way of meditating, and it puts the conscious mind to sleep, so that the unconscious works. And particularly playing Bach is very good for that. Playing fugues, for me, at any rate. I think people go at these things differently.

But there was a wonderful story about Pablo Casals. And I would agree with him exactly, and it states, what I would say about this, better than I could state it. [COUGHS] Casals was a cellist, but he also played the piano. And every morning when he got up in Puerto Rico, he would go to his piano before he spoke to anyone, and he would play two preludes and fugues from the well-tempered Clavier.

And the reporter asked him why he did that. And he said, it's like a benediction on the house every morning. So that would be a way to begin the day. That must be the way you live to be 96 and marry a beautiful 30-year-old woman when you're 87. So I'm counting on all those benefits from having played Bach regularly and being assiduous in my habits.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In order to live in Southwest Minnesota without committing suicide or becoming an alcoholic, one requires a sense of humor. The weather is awful. Dr. Johnson had the most intelligent thing to say about the weather. Boswell used to keep telling him he was depressed because it rained all the time in London and the sun never shone, and the weather was bad. And Dr. Johnson would rise up to his full height and bellow at him and call him an idiot and say, sir, no intelligent man is affected by the weather here. He creates the weather inside himself.

And I think there's some sense in which you have to do that in Minnesota. Only an idiot would live here. The Summers are unbelievable. Hot, unpleasant, miserable, sticky, dry. The winters are, well, the closest analogy, in the Soviet Union, if you are an exiled political prisoner and you are sent somewhere for a punishment, you're sent to Siberia. Well, the closest weather to Siberia in America is Western Minnesota.

So living in Western Minnesota is approximately like choosing to live in a labor camp in Siberia. So it requires a sense of humor and balance. I lived in Virginia for five, six years, so I had missed blizzards. And I got home for the great blizzard of '75 in the winter. No, this was '76. The first blizzard was '76 in November. And so it was actually the second blizzard I had experienced in Minneota. But I was all by myself in the house.

And the blizzard started, and felt amazingly joyful and energetic. So I went out walking in the middle of the night and went down to the liquor store and had a couple of brandies. And there was a bunch of people snowed into the bowling alley. So we went over and bowled free all night. The Legion Club won't be pleased to hear about that. And finally, all the power in town went out. The heat went out, the lights went out, the pinsetters stopped in mid stroke, and everything went dead.

And there was a strange silence, and you could hear the wind howling outside. So it was about four o'clock in the morning and everyone had been drinking, and I gathered up my coat and put it on and walked home, and it was absolute magic. And people who've never been in blizzards don't believe it. But blizzards are not dark at all. There's an incredible light in blizzard. It blinds you. This is the middle of the night.

The streetlights are out now. The town looks as it must have looked 75 years ago on a night like this. The stone cornices of the old Icelandic department store are covered with snow, and glow in the silvery light that seems to come from underneath the drifts. It is like daylight at 3 o' clock in the morning. The air full of silver dust, long shadows falling off the blackened signs on the bank, the bakery, the pool hall.

It is as if the old Icelanders had risen from the dead on this howling unlit night, strolling down the street arm in arm, delivering long speeches on the New World to one another, in their lilting [? bury ?] language, choosing their words carefully, rhyming now and then. The speech is lost to me in the roaring winds moving up and down the street.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Once in my life, I wrote ecstatic poems for about a month, and then my sense of humor caught up to me again. But for that month, it was quite lovely to live an ecstatic life. I had fallen in love. Yeah. And the weather had cooperated in some way. It was in November of 1975. It was unbelievable to a Minnesotan. It should have been gray, and drizzly, and cold, or snowing and blizzarding. And it was 70 every day, and 60 at night. It was balmy, and silky, and marvelous. And people who hadn't smiled in years went insane, began behaving decently. I have a little poem about that called "Warm Spell"

A long, warm spell in November.

The blizzards still asleep,

Bees hum unbelieving around still blooming flowers.

The leaves piled in compost heaps move around uneasily.

The dried branches lean down in the warm wind, inviting them back.

People who have not spoken in years smile and greet each other in the street.

Relatives forget old quarrels over family heirlooms.

The town atheist publicly declares that God exists,

And the town drunk drinks coffee on his porch.

The Lutheran minister forgets Saint Paul,

And the furrows vanish around his mouth.

Children are conceived in the open air, under trees by the river.

Like the life in the body, this cannot last.

Everyone wastes time joyfully,

Not even remembering old guilts and wounds to the spirit.

An old man on the stoop in front of a beer joint remembers his first lover, and his toes begin dancing around inside his shoes.

So it went on and on. It was unbelievable. [COUGHS] This is a poem written about, after spending an afternoon in the hills of Lincoln County.

Early November in Minnesota,

Warm, bright days and clear nights.

Everyone knows what is coming,

And their faces glow like the fading halos around saints in old pictures.

The cattle lie down in long rows in the feedlot, stare silently at the sunlight,

Licking each other now and then with their long rough tongues.

You can feel the tongue now.

A river of sand moving up and down your back.

And it makes the body vibrate with joy.

You want to make love on a grassy hill with no one but cows for miles around.

No sound but mooing, and the wind, and the grass.

You want to dance under the box elder tree, leap up and splash in the river, Like a hungry old carp catching flies.

The afterlife must be like this,

A gift you stopped waiting for that suddenly came.

You want to praise dark-eyed women,

Hillsides full of blood, red rose hips and nights so clear the stars count each other and glow like golden nails in a polished ebony board.

My cousin feeds sparrows in the back yard. And one of the great delights is watching those sparrows. Sparrows are much more intelligent than people. Morning after first snow, outside my kitchen window. Gray sparrows flap up and down on a sagging clothesline as if it were a trampoline full of tacks. They are doing a corn dance in honor of sunshine and snow.

What joy in a sparrows body as he jumps and eats. A world of red barns and snow, old clotheslines and corn kernels is enough. No brooding on hunger and death. No suspicion among the sparrows. I returned from seeing a woman full of joy and dancing in my body, laid awake all night, putting away old dreams like a man packing for a long trip. Now it is clear.

Her face comes to me and I sink into a sleep like childhood, rising hours later to bright sun, sparrows dancing on the clothesline. In a world of grief, no one has any right to such gifts as I have been given. I will take them, put on my feathers, and go dance on the snow.

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For years, I've been carrying on a not so jovial argument with several of my friends who are Northwoods types. I would be carted out into the forests of Northern Wisconsin or Minnesota and expected to exclaim enthusiastically on the beauty of the landscape. Looks fine, I'd say, but there's too damn many trees and they're all alike. If they'd cut down 20 miles or so on either side of the road, the flowers could grow. And you could see the sky and find out what the scenery is like.

This would be invariably followed by prolonged groans of disbelief, that anyone could be so insensitive as to prefer the dry, harsh, treeless prairies where a man is the tallest thing for miles around, and the lonesome cottonwoods are countable, and stand with their leaves shivering by a Muddy Creek. And the sky is as large and readable as a Bible for the blind. The old farmers say you can see the weather coming at you, not like the woods, where it sneaks up and takes you by surprise.

I was raised in Minneota, true prairie country. When the settlers arrived in the 1870s, the grass must have been waist high, full of wildflowers, and the only trees were the lines of cottonwoods and willows along the yellow medicine river. The farmers who emigrated there were looking not for scenery, but for topsoil, and 160 acres without trees or boulders to break plows and cramp fields was to them unbelievably beautiful.

They left Norway, where the farms were picturesque but small, and poor, and steep. Or Iceland, where the beautiful mountains in their back yard frequently blew up and covered their hay fields with lava and volcanic ash. The wives, as Ole Rolvaag tells us, in Giants of the Earth, were not so enamored by the beauty of black topsoil, and frequently went insane with loneliness, feeling that there was no place to hide on these bleak blizzardy plains. But the beauty of the landscape was in function, not only for the immigrant farmers, but for the Indians who preceded them.

I have a prairie eye. Dense woods or mountain valleys make me nervous. I was at Burnside lake, North of Ely, for a week once, and felt some indescribable longing to be out. Driving home in the middle of the night, I stopped the car South of Wilmer when the woods finally fell away and the plains opened up. It was a clear night, lit by a brilliant moon, turning the blowing grasses silver. You could see for miles. Endless strings of yard lights like stars that had fallen into the tops of the palm groves.

All alone, I began singing at the top of my voice. I hope that neither the neighborhood cows nor the Sheriff of Kandiyohi County, were much disturbed by this unseemly behavior from a grown man. It was simply the cataracts being removed from the prairie eye with a rush of joy.

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I go along every summer on Poetry Out Loud tours, and we go around to small towns in Western Minnesota, and sometimes in Eastern Minnesota, and read in ballparks, and churches, and saloons. This is what happens in Poetry Out Loud tours, when you bring culture to the West. What do you mean, this is not what happens? It's all true details. They have sat up in their wheelchairs, eating their napkins. Clucked their tongues at the Lutherans and the Catholics. And played foosball at the back of the bar. While the traveling troupe laid on them poetry, like a circuit rider laying on his hands.

They thought it was nice. But did not entirely understand why. The next winter, their roosters began laying eggs. The cattle organized a barnyard union, and demanded Beethoven on the transistor radio rather than Johnny Cash. And the snowbanks arranged themselves elegantly in the form of nude women, and would not melt till April. They thought it was anarchists somewhere in the universe, hiding in the corners of old stars, and never dreamed it was those nice young poets they had allowed into their own towns.

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The poets read. There's a faint stink of excrement, ammonia, and the ink in bibles. She sits quietly for the first stanza, then screws up her toothless face. Shit! It's all Shit! They're crazy. Crazy! I don't have to sit here and listen to this shit.

The dignified Norwegian lady sitting next to her, is so used to boredom, that she would sit quietly listening to the Congressional records read in Urdu by a computer. She has survived sermons for 90 years, after all. She reaches discreetly for her ear, and disconnects her hearing aid. The crank goes on.

Shit! Nothing but shit! It's all shit! She will do no such thing as go gentle into that good night. She gets louder and crankier during my poem. I like her even better. I want to kidnap her. First to Minneapolis, then New York, and wheel her into committee meetings, cocktail parties, congressional hearings, celebrations of the mass, and serious cultural occasions. I may even marry her.

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KIM HODGSON: We've been listening to the poems, the essays, and the thoughts of Bill Holm of Minneota, Minnesota. You've heard Bill play music of Bach, Sibelius, Joplin, and others, on the harpsichord in his kitchen, the piano in his parlor, and the pump organ in the old Icelandic Lutheran church, high on a windy hill in Lincoln County. And the tenor voice singing Icelandic hymns, that, too, was Bill's, or at least it issued from his lips. Though in that setting, one could readily believe it belonged to one of those long dead ancestors Bill worked so hard to feed.

Two other voices were heard as well, that of Raleigh Johnson, Minneota's resident sculptor, and Pauline Bardal, who read the Lord's Prayer from an Icelandic prayer book she received at her confirmation over 60 years ago. The idea for this program originated with Joe and Nancy Paddock, poets and residents for southwest, Minnesota, and for Minnesota Public Radio station KRSW in Worthington, Minnesota.

The paddocks also assisted with the program's production. The material was recorded and pieced together by yours truly, Kim Hodgson, with assistance from KRSW's Vicky Sturgeon. Funds for this program were provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

BILL HOLM: Minneota Chevy dealer sells 42 Chevys. And he and his wife win a trip to Athens and the islands, a real cruise, all expenses paid by General Motors. So they're right there on the Acropolis, old sacred hill in the middle of Athens. And the guide talks about Socrates, and the old gods, and the marble statue of Athena that once stood in the Parthenon, and history, and sacred stones, and the Turkish shells lobbed onto the roof in the 18th Century, and the missing pillars resting in states in the British Museum, and probably a lot else also.

And then they all go avenues over and rest up for dinner. It's amazing where Chevy's will get you in America, right? And later, back in Minneota, where blizzards howl, corn grows, and the oldest exposed granite rock in the world is close by in granite falls, where the last glacier gouged out the floor of the Minnesota River Valley, a small chunk of marble cornice sits in the back room of the Chevy garage on top of a pile of purchase orders.

Hunk of the parthenon, Lawrence says to admiring customers. Got her on my trip. And later yet, he is drunk, in the Minneota liquor store, and says to the bartender, who is interested in history and poetry, Tom, I got a present for you, and hands him the chunk of discolored marble. And Tom takes it home, until he hears that Bill Holm, the Minnesota weirdo, is going off to Greece to sleep with the sound of the Aegean in his ears.

And he comes over with the rock and says, here, take this with you. I think it's lonesome. It's been singing in a strange language all night, as if it were a seashell with the ghost of its own voice inside its body. Take it home. It's about the length of an index finger, and nestled so easily in the cradle of the thumb. The top is still white, whiter than my own skin. The color of the old romantic paintings of the Parthenon, with men in white kittens walking around it, having the most intelligent discourse in human history.

Most of the stone is discolored with sand and dirt ground into it, maybe gunpowder. So that it has turned the color of real skin, as if the suffering, and venality, and corruption, and foolishness, that it watched for 3,000 years had made it like the men who watched it, and loved it, and shelled it, and looted it. The corner where it was cut by a chisel is smooth and round. You can feel the leaning hands of Pericles and Aeschylus when you touch it.

But the rest is broken from its mother stone. Jagged, sharp enough to cut skin. This stone is lucky and will go home. If it thinks, and who of us, having lived a year or two on earth, is arrogant enough to deny this marble consciousness, it thinks to itself. I have traveled, seen corn, and winter, and old granite. Heard strange languages. The wind singing in the prairie grass. Chevy's have been sold under me, roared out down the gravel roads to farms owned also by the bank.

I have been handled by Belgians and Icelanders who wondered whether I was a Catholic stone or a Lutheran stone. But now, I'm ready to go home. It's the sea I miss. The moonlight all night and the bare hills. I go on the ocean again to Athens, singing to myself. Lucky stone. Lucky stone. Lucky stone.

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