Tell me about your involvement with the Winter Book.
December third is when that finally gets done. They wanted me to do a gathering of Minnesota writers, an anthology. I picked out a bunch of writers and asked them to send me poems. There are 12 writers, and I tried to pick people to show the diversity of Minnesota literature. And, of course, you have to have Robert Bly, because he’s the godfather of all of us. And a bunch of writers who I thought didn’t have a sufficient audience, who are geniuses, and needed either to be put back into the public eye, or to be put there in the first place. It’s a nice book—it will have an insane variety.

What is the significance of the title, There Is No Other Way To Speak?
It’s from a poem by Anna Meek, it’s a line from a series of four small poems. They are fierce political poems. She is not pleased with the current administration, the war in Iraq, or the progress of American democracy. But that was a lovely line, so we picked that for the title of the book.

You write a lot about the different places you’ve lived. How does a sense of place affect your writing?
Well, all of my books are full of quotations from and allusions to and stories about literature all over the world. I quote the Chinese and the Icelanders and the Norwegians and the Spaniards and the French and the Germans. I think it’s the obligation of literature to not be provincial.

I mean, when people say something about place—obviously I’m from Minneota and I live there again, and I live there not because I think it has the best food in America or the best climate or the most glorious scenery, but it’s where I’m from, and it’s cheap, and I have a job there. And also, I know Minneota, and it’s where my memories are of my childhood and the old immigrants.

So I’ve used growing up in Minneota for material for some of my books and it enters into all of them. And one of my ideas is, if you don’t know where you’re from, how can you tell what any other place is like? So if you’re going to write an essay or a book about China or about Madagascar or about Iceland, you have something to compare it to. You have to be from someplace so you’ve got something to say—you’ve got bedrock under you. So Minneota, for better or worse, is my bedrock, because that’s where my ancestors emigrated, that’s where they’re all buried, and that’s where I grew up.

Do you think it’s important for a person to understand their cultural heritage as well as where they’re from?
I think they should understand their history. I mean, by cultural heritage, I hate the business of labeling American writers as a Midwest writer, a regional writer, an Indian writer, a black writer, a woman writer. I think that’s the least interesting thing about a writer. I mean a woman knows she’s a woman and an Indian knows they’re an Indian. And I know that my grandparents spoke Icelandic. Big deal. Then your job is to sort of become a part of history, to become a part of culture, and to become a part of literature. And to amass to yourself everything. I saw a magazine title for Jewish lesbian feminists. And I thought, if there were a brilliant poem in that magazine, if there were a brilliant essay, that magazine had three ways of absolutely guaranteeing that I wouldn’t read it. By God, if you’re going to be a writer, if you’re going to work in the culture, then the whole world is your oyster. If you’re a writer, you have to somehow enlarge your view of things.

Since rural areas tend to lean Republican, how does it feel as a liberal to be living out in Minneota?
When I was a kid, it was very much DFL in western Minnesota, because all the small farmers credited Roosevelt with saving their farms in the Depression, and they thought only the rich farmers and the bankers and the sons of bitches had money enough to vote Republican. That’s still true, by the way. So my father was a fierce Democrat, and also the farmer-labor movement was strong in western Minnesota.

Up until when, would you say?
I would say up until the 1960s and the 1970s, and two things did it in. First of all, the collapse of small farms, and then, oddly enough, goddamn abortion. It’s wrecked American politics, absolutely wrecked it. So to save a fetus you vote against your own economic self-interest and you destroy yourself and your neighbors. It’s very interesting, but there it is.
Now it’s Republican out there, and of course, I live there. I begin my poetry readings by attacking Bush, by attacking the war, by attacking the drift of American life, and it’s clear to anyone who reads my books that I’m an unapologetic and unregenerate leftist. I mean, good God, there’s a poem about Paul Wellstone in there about my grief at his death. So that’s my job.

Do you get into conversations with neighbors about politics?
I teach school, you know. And I’ve got so many relatives in Minneota, that we sort of argue with each other for sport. But I don’t find my neighbors particularly right wing in Minneota. I don’t find them particularly reactionary. And I don’t find them—and this is the wonderful thing—I don’t find them very born-again. They tend to be kind of old-fashioned Catholics, and old-fashioned Scandinavian Lutherans who don’t really like this business where you turn around and shake hands with strangers and wish them peace. “This guy might be crooked, I don’t know if I want to shake hands with him!” “We like slow hymns.” So crazy Christianity has so far mostly stayed out of the West.

What do you think people can do to effect change in the current political climate?
The first thing to do is to get the current administration out of office, to impeach them, arrest them, and try them. I want to see the whole lot of them in prison. Wolfowitz, Bush, Cheney, Condoleeza Rice—the whole damn lot of them. Is that a little treasonous? Arrest them all? I mean Nixon was a small villain compared to what’s going on in the United States. He was a sufficient villain, I was quite happy to see him go. I thought he was the Prince of Darkness at the time, but I didn’t believe it could get worse. But it has.

Now people might be catching on.
Well, the rest of the world has already caught on. You know what the vote for Bush would be anywhere in Europe? In Iceland, it would be a hundred to zero. You could not find an Icelander who would have voted for him. You couldn’t find a Canadian who would have voted for him. You couldn’t find a Mexican who would have voted for him. We’re the only people dumb enough to have voted for him.

I had no problem determining that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was not a part of Al Qaida, and that this was an entirely unnecessary grudge match. It was a gratuitous war, and I was ashamed of my country for fighting it. I’m still ashamed of them. I’m not ashamed of the soldiers. I mean, my students go into the National Guard—I’ve got two women in my classes who were deployed to Iraq. One of them’s pregnant, for Christ’s sake. And one girl’s boyfriend just got shipped away, and she came to class all teary. And, you know, she needs my opinions of the war like she needs a hole in her head. Because you feel terribly sorry for the human tragedies of this. And for people who are being conned and manipulated and brutalized.

There are lots of kids in school who joined the National Guard, became weekend warriors so they could get the college tuition. It was the way to do it. You know, you were from the farm, or your old man wasn’t going to pay for you to go to school, and you wanted to get a college education? It was a great deal. What’s the National Guard supposed to do? It’s supposed to be right there, johnny-on-the-spot when the hurricane hits New Orleans. To do the work of the National Guard. It’s supposed to be helping the poor, helping the cities, helping national disasters. That’s the real work of the National Guard, not fighting some goddamn gratuitous and unnecessary war.

Do you think the tide is turning?
Yes, of course. Yes, I hope so. I was much cheered in St. Paul—Randy Kelly was a pretty good mayor, actually. Nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly competent guy, you know. He balanced the books, he didn’t have his hand in the till, he went to meetings. He washed and changed his socks, and got federal grants. He was a little more conservative than I’d prefer, but that vote against him was strictly for that endorsement of Bush. There’s no sign that Chris Coleman is going to be a more efficient mayor of St. Paul than Randy Kelly, but he at least had sense enough and is the scion of Democrats not to do anything as dumb as to endorse George Bush. So Kelly isn’t the only politician who is going to suffer from that.

How does all of this affect poetry?
Well, American writers—if you want to understand the United States, if you want to understand Minnesota, probably the Star Tribune is not the place to start. The place to start is with Fred Manfred and Tom McGrath and Carol Bly. And now, to read Phebe Hanson’s poems about growing up in a Lutheran parsonage, or to read Faith Sullivan’s novels about what it was like to be alive in a small town in Minnesota in the 1930s and 1940s—nobody does that better than she does. And I started reading Sinclair Lewis again. If you want to understand America, read Lewis’s novels. He had us pegged dead-on. He really did deserve the Nobel prize. He was a very great writer. And Main Street is still a smoker of a book. And his book about George Bush, It Can’t Happen Here—his book about fascism coming to America—it’s an eerie book to read, 1935. And if you want to know about your favorite TV evangelist, Elmer Gantry is a nice place to start. He has a wonderful book about the corruption of evangelists and what religion is like in America.

Are you spending the winter here or do you have plans to travel?
I spend most of the winter here. I go to Arizona in February, to a little town eight miles from the Mexican border where somebody loans me a house, and it’s the town where Jim Harrison lives, so I get to eat with Jim Harrison, who is the great gourmet in American literature, and also a delightful man and one of the best writers in America. So it’s a place where writers go and retired professors—there are no golf courses. One town in Arizona uncorrupted by golf. It still votes Democrat and it’s full of weird intellectuals and real Mexican restaurants run by people who speak Spanish and make their own tortillas and salsa.

Are you working on a book right now?
Yup. Working on a book on Iceland. It’s called The Windows of Brimnes—that’s the name of my little house on the north coast of Iceland. It’s 50 feet from the sea, it’s about 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, and I go there for three or four months in the summer and run a little writers’ week for two weeks in May and June. Then the rest of the summer I sit and I write and look out the windows. When I look out the windows, they look west over eight miles of Arctic fjord and a range of 4,000-foot mountains and sea birds and islands and seals in the harbor, and I look at the United States, you know. And I see: just over there is Greenland and then there’s Canada and there’s my house in Minneota.

The book is going to be about what we look like from that vantage point. I’m also doing a little book on cabins for Minnesota Historical Society Press—that’s a very good press. They’ve got books that are already out by Will Weaver and John Hassler on barns and churches. So they called me and wanted a book on cabins—summer cabins. And I have a little something to say about that, about the desire to retreat in nature. Maybe I’ll write that in Arizona. Wouldn’t that be nice, to sit out on the deck of a little house in Patagonia in February, wearing shorts, and drinking good Mexican coffee, and thinking about cabins in northern Minnesota?

Bill Holm and participating writers of There Is No Other Way to Speak, MCBA’s 17th annual Winter Book, will read on Saturday, December 3, at 7:30 p.m. in the Marshall Fields Performance Hall at Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S. For more information, see www.mnbookarts.org.