HUMANOPHONE . Janet Holmes . MFA Program . Boise State University

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Humanophone

"[This] third book from poet Janet Holmes (her second from University of Notre Dame Press) would seem to be about music, 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. But its real subject is the artist's creative dilemma: how one delivers a new idea (a musical composition, a poem) through existing media. In Humanophone, Holmes not only chronicles such events as Harry Partch's transformation of glass chemical containers from the Berkeley Radiation Lab into the melodious and beautiful Cloud-Chamber Bowls, but also makes music of something as humble as a kumquat:

Go ahead and laugh
at its comic percussive name,
its k-kick against your soft palate,
its dumb uhs and ahs....

With visual and verbal innovation, Holmes traces a similar path through the familiar tools of the alphabet, as a trombone's upwards glissando becomes 'a backwards pratfall/ in brass,' the sequence 'zyxwvutsrqp-ohhhhh.' She is equally at ease with traditional forms such as the villanelle, sonnet, and couplets; as the prodigy musician in one poem makes clear, 'play' has more than a single meaning when applied to an instrument, and the poems in Humanophone clearly have fun with language while dealing thoughtfully with a broad range of subjects."

—from the University of Notre Dame Press catalogue

University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
ISBN 0-268-03055-3. $15.00 paperback. 86 pages.
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