"Crazy Laughter: Seven Years with the Spirit of Arthur Rimbaud", features “Brownies for Breakfast” and “Bonobo Wannabee”, plus settings of Holly’s translations of Rimbaud’s poetry.
Musicians include Danny Carnahan, Sylvia Herold, and Maureen Brennan of Wake the Dead, Shira Kammen, Adam Miller, Charlie Hancock, Marcia Sloane, and Francy Vidal and Edmond Badoux of Chaskinakuy.
“At fifty-one I was living on the northern California coast,” writes Holly. “One foggy August day in a fit of boredom, I rented a movie: 'Total Eclipse,' starring Leonardo di Caprio as Rimbaud. I hated it so much I watched it twice, and stormed around the house cursing at it. The next day I drove into Mendocino to return it. Walking down Ukiah street, suddenly Rimbaud was right there. It wasn’t possession trance – I was still there. But it wasn’t imagination either.
I took down my yellowed copies of 'Illuminations' and 'A Season In Hell.'
'Yet you will set yourself to this work. All harmonic and architectural possibilities stir around your seat. Your memories and your senses will be nothing but the nourishment of your creative impulse. As for the world, when you emerge, what shall it have become? In any case, nothing that it appears to be now.'
These aren’t poems, they’re spells!
Was Rimbaud, as he claimed, 'a musician who has invented something like the key of love?' Was he, as I have come to suspect, the heir to a long-suppressed European shamanic tradition?
'At first it was an experiment. I wrote silences, nights, I notated the inexpressible… I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues…I who called myself angel or seer, exempt from all morality…'
Since 1998 Holly has devoted herself to Rimbaud’s "infamous, inept, obstinate, mysterious work" of creating a poetic language "accessible some day to all the senses; sound, scent, color…thought catching thought and pulling." The result is "Crazy Laughter."
"Crazy Laughter."'
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