My sister, who was in the audience, reports that Tuesday night's memorial event for Bill Holm at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul was quite lovely.  They started out with shots of Reyka Icelandic vodka and finished with a New Orleans brass band.  In between, friends and fellow poets spoke:  Robert Bly, Jim Harrison, Emilie Buchwald, and John Calvin Rezmerski, among others.  

   It sounds like they did right by him.  The program will be broadcast this Saturday and Sunday on Minnesota Public Radio, which is available via an on-line streaming.  If you want to start your day properly right now, here's a brief essay Bill wrote years ago about how crucial it is to "Give Us Our Daily Bach."  The piece performs a nifty bit of counterpart harmony, playing a dominant musical theme against echoes of Whitman and Emerson, two of Bill's heroes. 

   I was lucky enough to get to know Bill a little during his life.  Yesterday, though, in the Chicago Tribune, I came across an obituary for another writer I'd never met or even heard of before.  But he sounds like he was yet another larger-then-life figure.   I mean, wouldn't you be halted in your tracks by the following headline:  "Franklin Rosemont, 1943-2009: Surrealist poet, labor historian"? 

   Rosemont, it turns out, was a teenage IWW "Wobbly" activist when he let out for the Coast to hang with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the other Beats.  Next stop was Paris, where Andre Breton blew his mind.  After that it was back home to Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life publishing radical books when he wasn't writing surrealist poetry collections with titles like Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants. 

   An article by Amy Shearn in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers (print only) laments "Where are the Badly Behaved Writers?"   All of today's novelists and poets seem to be mild-mannered nerds who wouldn't be caught dead dancing naked and drunk in public, Shearn notes.  Most have teaching gigs and other professional responsibilities that simply won't allow for that sort of emotional extravagance.   

   Bill Holm and Franklin Rosemont show that we still have a few folks around who know how to live the poetic life in all its glory.  Alack, though, they seem to be passing away, one by one.