Humanophone

by Janet Holmes

The poetry in Humanophone , the third volume from award-winning poet Janet Holmes, celebrates composers and creators such as Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their “mind’s ear.” Taking its title from a George Ives invention―an instrument made from a group of humans, each of whom sings a single note, arrayed like a xylophone― Humanophone appears on its surface to be about music. But its real subject is the artist’s creative dilemma―how to deliver a new idea, whether it be a song or a poem, through existing media. Holmes works language into a variety of forms both familiar―syllabics, couplets, villanelles, sonnets―and engagingly new. With everything from kumquats to abandoned wedding pictures, Clara Bow to Bill Robinson, Keats’s belle dame to Dante’s Francesca, feng shui to a recipe for octopus, Humanophone celebrates how the body shapes art from the world it is given. In Humanophone , Holmes not only chronicles events such as Harry Partch’s transformation of glass chemical containers from the Berkeley Radiation Lab into the melodious and beautiful Cloud-Chamber Bowls, but also traces a playful path through the familiar, as a trombone’s upwards glissando becomes “a backwards pratfall/in brass.” Engaging a broad array of subjects, Holmes’s poetry is as delightful as it is thoughtful, as simple as it is complex.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2001

About the author

Janet Holmes is an award-winning poet and author of four books of poetry: F2F; Humanophone; The Green Tuxedo; and The Physicist at the Mall. Her awards include grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Loft-McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota Arts Board; the Minnesota Book Award, the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book of the Year award, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Award, and two inclusions in the Best American Poetry series; and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Fondation Ledig-Rowholt (Switzerland), and Fundación Valparaíso (Spain). Since 1999 she has served as director and editor of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry literary nonprofit press based at Boise State University, where she teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing.