Music of Harpsichords and Boxelder Bugs

I first met Minnesotan Bill Holm in the late 1980s.

It began with this slim volume, published by Milkweed Editions in 1985.  I was working as a research writer at Utah State University in Logan, and was vice-president and thus in charge of arranging programs for Bridgerland Audubon Society. My friend Diane Browning was also a writer, and active in Audubon and folk and chamber music groups.  She had opened a bookstore in a picturesque old house on First East.  She called her store A Book Store.  

One day I was browsing at A Book Store, and Diane handed me this slim yellow book.  Utah has its share of boxelder trees, and Utahns know boxelder bugs well.  Red and papery, they appeared in Logan in the spring, crawled around on the windowscreens in my office building--also an old house--and, although harmless, drove our secretary crazy.  So there was that.  

Diane and I put our heads together and read about Bill Holm.  He was an English teacher.  He not only wrote poems about insects we knew, but he lived in a rickety old house in Minneota (that's not a typo), with several thousand books, a couple of pianos, a harpsichord and a clavichord, which he played at odd hours of the night.   How interesting is that?  We looked at each other.   Might he be our entertainment for the annual Bridgerland Audubon banquet?

So Bill Holm came to Utah.  He told stories and recited poetry, and he demonstrated how hymns could be converted into ragtime piano tunes, and he enchanted the gathering of birdlovers. Bill is an imposing man of Icelandic descent, with reddish hair and a booming voice. People want to hug him.  He wanted to meet David Lee, the pig poet (later Utah's poet laureate), while he was in Utah, and we helped with that, and Bill and Dave became good friends.  Years later, when I was working on the Huntsville Festival of Books, both Bill and Dave came to Alabama and read their poems, and I wrote a newspaper article about them.

As I recall, the bug poems came about, Bill said, because his students were lamenting their lack of inspiration.  Nothing interesting ever happened to them in Minnesota.  They told him this more than once.  Exasperated, Bill replied, "you can write about ANYTHING!"  He pounded his fist on his desk.  At that instant, a boxelder bug happened to be walking across the desk.

  

Bill pointed.   "Write about that boxelder bug!"  Because Bill always did his own assignments, he wrote about boxelder bugs, too, and composed music for them to boot.  Boxelder Bug Meditations, which includes artwork, was the result.  It has inspired a play.

Bill has written and published other excellent books since then (http://www.billholm.com/), and I can recommend them all, but I always come back to this unusual book, which demonstrates the clarity and elegance and skew of his writing.  His introductory essay on boxelder bugs ends thusly:  "Whitman said: 'A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.'  So is a boxelder bug."

Here is one of the poems:

THE BOXELDER BUG PRAYS

I want so little

For so little time,

A south window,

A wall to climb,

The smell of coffee,

A radio knob,

Nothing to eat,

Nothing to rob,

Not love, not power,

Not even a penny.

Forgive me only 

For being so many.