On this rainy Thursday in Chicago, the Mrs. and I headed to the Art Institute for a lunchtime concert by Yoko Noge, who blends Japanese minyo folksongs with South Side blues. We also took in the terrific Munch exhibit, a retrospective of the great Norwegian painter.

After coming home, I learned the awful news that Minnesota poet Bill Holm died yesterday. He was only 65. In addition to being one of my favorite writers, Bill was a family friend. He sang at my father's wedding in 1983, and he arrived at my own wedding in 1988 bearing a marvelous gift: copies of recent books by a slew of Midwestern writers, each inscribed by its author with a congratulatory message for Satoko and me.

Bill was one of the great larger-than-life characters I've ever met. He loved to sing, play the piano, drink whiskey, and compose whimsical poetry and fierce essays (or, sometimes, fierce poetry and whimsical essays). He always lurks at the back of my own feeble attempts at fiction: in many ways, my own writing has been an extended response to the experience of meeting him.

I hadn't seen Bill in years, but I kept up with his writing. In fine book after book, he worked through the ethical dilemmas and stubborn passions arising from the historical accident of having been born the grandson of Icelandic immigrants in the town of Minneota, Minnesota. Exploring that problem carried him to Iceland -- but also to China, the American South, Madagascar, and countless other places on earth. It also led him to extended meditations on Bach, Walt Whitman, Ronald Reagan, jiaozi dumplings, and boxelder bugs.

Bill published a dozen books in his lifetime, all of them well worth your while. My favorites are Boxelder Bug Variations and The Music of Failure. I also have a soft spot for Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays, in part because I make a cameo appearance (I am the "son of a friend who has lived in Japan for a long time" who pops up on p. 80). Bill also published the occasional short story.

His 2004 collection Playing the Black Piano ends with a sequence of twelve poems eulogizing a friend who died of AIDS, whom Bill helped nurse in his last months. The final poem is called "Letting Go of What Cannot Be Held Back":

Let go of the dead now.

The rope in the water,

the cleat on the cliff,

do them no good anymore.

Let them fall, sink, go away,

become invisible as they tried

so hard to do in their own dying.

We needed to bother them

with what we called help.

We were the needy ones.

The dying do their own work with

tidiness, just the right speed,

sometimes even a little

satisfaction. So quiet down.

Let them go. Practice

your own song. Now.

As always, Bill points us down the right path. But it's a little hard to take up that particular bit of advice at this particular moment. There's been too much death in the world lately, and it makes me resist doing my piano practice. I'll start practicing again tomorrow, I promise, but for today I'm going to just sit here, feeling sad. Godspeed.

[UPDATE: Minnesota Public Radio quotes another Minnesota writer, Garrison Keillor, on Bill:

Holm was an occasional guest on A Prairie Home Companion radio show on American Public Media. The program's host, Garrison Keillor, called Holm a great man.

"And unlike most great men, he really looked like one. 6 foot 8 inches, 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," said Keillor.

"I wish I'd been there to catch him as he fell," Keillor continued. "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." ]