Dennis Graham Holt (born October 6, 1942) is an American
poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...
,
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and translator.
Born in
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood ...
,
Los Angeles
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
,
California
California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
, Holt graduated from Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles in 1960. Holt subsequently attended the
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...
, the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
, and
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...
(where his graduate advisor was
William Bright
William Oliver Bright (August 13, 1928 – October 15, 2006) was an American linguist and toponymist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages and descriptive linguistics.
Biography
Bright earned a bachelor's degree in lin ...
), receiving from the last of these four degrees in Linguistics (B.A. 1972, M.A. 1973, C.Phil. 1975, and Ph.D. 1986). From September 1966 until November 1969, he served in the Peace Corps in Bolivia, working with cooperative coffee-processing plants in the province of Nor Yungas, and later teaching English as a second language at the Instituto Anglo-Americano in
Oruro
Oruro (Hispanicized spelling) or Uru Uru is a city in Bolivia with a population of 264,683 (2012 calculation), about halfway between La Paz and Sucre in the Altiplano, approximately above sea level.
It is Bolivia's fifth-largest city by populat ...
.
Following his Peace Corps service, Holt returned to Los Angeles in 1970, where he soon became involved with the Venice Poetry Workshop at the
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is a literary arts center located at 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, Los Angeles, California, founded in 1968. The center is based near the beach in Los Angeles's old Venice City Hall, built in 1906. It offers an ...
in the Venice Beach District of the city, an association that continued throughout most of the decade of the 1970s. During the weekly gatherings of the workshop, Holt became friends with a number of the poets who were to be active in the Los Angeles poetry-scene throughout the following 40 years, including some of the poets whose works were collected in the workshop-based anthology ''Venice Thirteen'' (1972): Joseph Hansen and John Harris (the two directors of the workshop), Luis Campos,
Harry Northup
Harry E. Northup (born September 2, 1940) is an American actor and poet. As an actor, he made frequent appearances in the films of Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and Jonathan Kaplan.
Personal life and career
Northup was born in Amarillo, Texas. ...
, and Barry Simons. Others included Steve Goldman, Milan Rastislav Šalka, Lynne Bronstein, Scott Wannberg,
Leland Hickman
Leland Hickman (September 15, 1934 – May 12, 1991) was an American poet, editor, actor, and literary magazine publisher. During his lifetime, Hickman was best known as the publisher and editor of the influential magazine ''Temblor'' which was no ...
,
Jim Krusoe
Jim Krusoe is an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His stories and poems have appeared in '' Antioch Review'', '' Denver Quarterly'', ''BOMB'', '' Iowa Review'', ''Field'', ''North American Review'', ''American Poetry Review'', an ...
,
Michael C. Ford,
Paul Vangelisti, and Bill Mohr.
Holt published his first book of poetry, ''Windings'', in 1973. Since 1978, Holt has produced and published occasional ''samizdat'' bardic broadsheets under various titles, including ''Some Bard's-Eye Views from Santa Cruz'', ''Le Missoulambator'', ''La Fogata Cruceña'', ''The Quincunx'', and others.
In 1979 Holt took up residence in Santa Cruz County, California, where he became active in local poetry events and published one issue of a literary-artistic journal, ''Onicnomachitocac'', which included poetry, prose, & drawings by five others plus himself. During the period December 1979 to February 1980, Holt conducted field-work on the Tepecano and Huichol languages in northern Jalisco state, Mexico, concentrating primarily on the color-terminology of these languages. (Some of his findings are included in Robert MacLaury's book, ''Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages'' )
In 1981 Holt returned to Los Angeles to work with his father on a television-project and there met and later married (in 1982) the artist and writer Carleigh M. Hoff (1950-2005). They soon moved from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, where their son, Leif Hoff-Holt, was born later that year. In 1986, the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island; and in 1992 to East Hartford, and then, a year later, to Hamden, Connecticut. After 20 years, the marriage ended in divorce in 2002. Following a year in Missoula, Montana, in late 2003 Holt returned to Santa Cruz County, where he currently resides.
In addition to the dissemination of his own poems and translations through public readings and publication in journals and anthologies, Holt has been active as an impresario of poetry-readings and other literary events; and, for a total of five years, he produced a weekly poetry-hour, over radio-stations in
Santa Barbara, California
Santa Barbara (, meaning ) is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States excepting A ...
("Damselflies & Hummingbird Pounds", KCSB, 1983–1986), and Bristol, Rhode Island ("Lingering in Deep Pools", WQRI, 1989–1992). With Dawne Anderson, Henry Gould, and others, he was one of the founders of the
Poetry Mission in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1991, and subsequently served as treasurer of that organization, as well as co-editor, with Anderson, of its associated magazine, ''Northeast Journal'' (subsequently transmogrified into ''Nedge'' and edited by Gould).
Holt's linguistic research has primarily been directed toward the description of endangered languages of Latin America, including
Pech,
Tol, and
Sumu of Honduras, and
Tepecano and
Sayula Popoluca
Sayula Popoluca, also called Sayultec, is a Mixe language spoken by around 5,000 indigenous people in and around the town of Sayula de Alemán in the southern part of the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Almost all published research on the language ...
of Mexico. In the 1970s, he began formulating a hypothesis that proposes a genetic relationship between the
Uto-Aztecan
The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ...
and
Chibchan
The Chibchan languages (also known as Chibchano) make up a language family indigenous to the Isthmo-Colombian Area, which extends from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia and includes populations of these countries as well as Nicaragua, Costa ...
language-families. This hypothesis has not yet been generally accepted among linguists. For 10 years, Holt served as secretary-treasurer of the
Endangered Language Fund
The Endangered Language Fund (ELF) is a small non-profit organization based in New Haven, Connecticut. ELF supports endangered language maintenance and documentation projects that aim to preserve the world's languages while contributing rare lingu ...
, from its founding, in 1996, until 2006; he also designed the logo of the organization, which, with some additional stylization, is still used.
As an educator, Holt has taught language-related courses at a number of institutions of higher learning in the U.S., including Southern Connecticut State University, Roger Williams University, Central Connecticut State University, Southeastern Massachusetts University (now the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth), Quinnipiac University, and the University of Montana. At the last of these he was suspended and ultimately fired for using his classroom podium as an opportunity to rant against the Iraq War and President
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Bush family and the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he i ...
during a linguistics-class on March 21, 2003.
[Curtis Cartier, "Sidewalk Professor", ''Santa Cruz Metro'', January 21, 200]
/ref> Following his dismissal from the university, Holt opened a bookstore and art-gallery in Missoula, Quetzalcoyotl Books & Art, which he operated for five months.
Selected published works
Poetry
Books
*''Windings: Poems & Fragments, 1962-1972''. Venice, California: Privately published, 1973.
*''Tanka Waka Uta: Explorations in Forms of Japanese Verse''. Santa Barbara: Mudborn Press, 2015.
Journals
*"From a Sequoia Journal". ''Onicnomachitocac'' 1 (Fall 1979).
*"Last Chance". ''Forehead'' 2 (1990).
*"Yuki In Albuquerque". ''Fairfield Review'', Summer 2000
*"Deputizable Imputations del Riaje San Joaquín". ''Exquisite Corpse'' 10 (October 2000)
Anthologies
*''Venice Thirteen''. Venice, California: Bayrock Press, 1971.
*''Linguistic Muse''. Donna Jo Napoli and Emily Norwood Rando, eds. Carbondale, Illinois: Linguistic Research, 1979.
*''Discovered Tongues: Poems by Linguists''. William Bright, ed. San Francisco: Corvine Press, 1983.
*''Meliglossa''. Donna Jo Napoli and Emily Norwood Rando, eds. Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research, 1983.
Translations
*Poems by José Luis Quesada, trans. from the Spanish. ''Momentum'' 4 (Spring 1975).
*"Poemo Sayula Popoluca" by Panuncio Isidoro Rafael, trans. from the Sayula Popoluca. ''The Third Page'', 2002
Review
*"Two Poem-Collections by Native American Linguist Ofelia Zepeda
Ofelia Zepeda (born in Stanfield, Arizona, 1952) is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. She is Regents' Professor of Tohono O'odham language and linguistics and Director of the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at The ...
", Endangered Language Fund Newsletter, 1999. Republished in ''Drunken Boat'' 3 (2001-2002).
Linguistics
Books
*''The Development of the Paya Sound-System.'' Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986.
*''Tol (Jicaque).'' Languages of the World/Materials 170. Munich: LincomEuropa, 1999.
*''Pech (Paya).'' Languages of the World/Materials 366. Munich: LincomEuropa, 1999.
Articles
*"La lengua paya y las fronteras lingüísticas de Mesoamérica" (with William Bright). ''Las fronteras de Mesoamérica: XIV Mesa Redonda, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 23–28 de junio 1975'', 1:149–56. México: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología,1975.
*"Evidence of Genetic Relationship Between Chibchan and Uto-Aztecan." In K. Whistler et al., eds. ''Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society'': 283-92. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1977.
*"On Paya Causatives." ''Estudios de Lingüística Chibcha'' 8:7-15. San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1989.
*"Another Look at Aztec-Chibchan." ''Estudios de Lingüística Chibcha'' 16:81-103. San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1997.
Reviews
*''Vocabulario popoluca de Sayula: Veracruz, México''. By Lawrence E. Clark. ''Language'' 74.2:338-40 (1998).
*''Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics''. By Dell Hymes, ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', Vol. 71.2:233-5 (April 2005).
*''Newe Hupia: Shoshoni Poetry Songs''. By Beverly Crum, Earl Crum, & Jon P. Dayley. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', Vol. 71:3:361-2 (July 2005).
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Holt, Dennis
American male poets
1942 births
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Quinnipiac University faculty
Living people
People from Hollywood, Los Angeles
Central Connecticut State University faculty
Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages