Bob Holman is equal parts spoken word performer, professor, impresario,
activist, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, filmmaker and host of Language Matters (2015 Documentary of the Year, Berkeley Film Festival), to Bob Holman it’s all just part of the job.
He’s a poet. From slam to hip-hop, from performance to spokenword to digital and film, he’s been a central figure in
redefining poetry as it exists on, off, and beyond the page.
Dubbed a member of the “Poetry Pantheon” by the New York
Times Magazine, Holman is the author of over 20 poetry collections.
He has published three books since the COVID, including two written 50 years apart, Life Poem, a book-length poem written when he was 19, and the new and selected The Unspoken, Plus Bob Holman’s India Journals, the making of the documentaryGinsberg’s Karma.
As a professor, he’s taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard,
and the New School. As an arts administrator, he’s served as coordinator and curator at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and was the original Slammaster and a director of the Nuyorican Poets Café.
A scholar of oral traditions in West Africa and beyond, Holman
co-founded the Endangered Language Alliance, where he currently serves on the Board of Directors.
Interview by John Wisniewski
1.Bob, why is it important to promote great poetry?
It is not. Sorry to break the news, John. Great poetry needs no introduction, just read the damn poem. Great poetry is the opposite of promotion.
2.could you tell us about growing up on the Lower East Side?
No. I grew up in Tennessee, Kentucky, and rural Ohio. I came to New York for college, I guess you could say I grew up here. My first visits to Loisaida were to the Nuyorican, then the St. Marks Poetry Project, and growing up there was the best thing imaginable.
3.any favorite poets?
Yep, Paul Beatty and Eileen Myles have written fiction about writing poems that is true, which is impossible to do (they did it!). Rose Lesniak’s What the Dogs Told Me is superb. I will be following Bashō’s Narrow Road into the Interior this fall.
4.tell us about the film On the Road with Bob Holman.
Gambian griot, Papa Susso, my primary source re: First Consciousness/The Oral Tradition, was planning a trip to his “hometown village,” Sotuma Sere, and invited me to come along. Ram Devineni, filmmaker and ofttimes collaborator, thought this would make a great film so we got some funding and I took off for what we then called On the Griot Trail. The path led from the major embarkation point for enslaved people, Gorée Island off Dakar, through visits with griot musicians Toumani Diabaté, Balliké Sissoko,and Vieux Touré in Bamako and Nia Funke, and finally to a search for the ghost of Ted Joans in Timbuktu, a visit I had tried to make 25-years earlier. There we also recorded the astonishing sung poetry of the Tuaregs, the nomads of the Sahara, which began Episode 2. Nathaniel Mackey’s powerful lyrical Ondomboulou poems had introduced me to the mask-making Dogon tribe people, and on our visit there we were able to document a rare mask dance celebration, some of which was set to a secret shamanic language. Episode 3, filmed in Israel, investigated the miraculous revival of Hebrew after not being spoken outside the shul for 700 years, and the endangerment of the vernacular Jewish languages Yiddish and Ladino. This was a LinkTV series, now available on my website and YouTube. Ram Devineni produced, Beatriz Segnier and Lamont Steptoe shot, and Karamo Susso was on sound.
5.Do you enjoy collaborating with other artists?
Well, I’ve worked with Ram Devineni, filmmaker and close friend, on too may projects to count. I’ve worked in Poets Theater for many years, from Jarry and Apollinaire to Auden, Baraka, O’Hara, Serhiy Zhadan and Suzan-Lori Parks. Most recently I played David Burliuk, the Ukrainian Futurist, in Slap!, collaborating with the Ukrainian-American theater company, Yara Arts. Susan Hwang, Julian Kytasty and Virlana Tkaz are creating Slap! with me, and we have devised other plays as well. Bob Rosenthal and I have written and produced four plays collaboratively, including Ted Berrigan’s Clear the Range. I wrote ”The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” for Ralph Lee and Casey Compton’s Mettawee River Theater Company. I collaborated with producer Hal Willner on my first album, In with the Out Crowd, that featured Wayne Kramer (MC5), Chris Spedding (Sex Pistols), and Bobby Neuwirth (Bob Dylan) on guitars. My second album, The Awesome Whatever, is a live studio album with my main musical collaborator, Vito Ricci. (Hear both albums on all streaming platforms.) I’ve produced records by Thomas Sayers Ellis’s poetry big band, Heroes are Gang Leaders, and a spoken word album, Fresh Pond Road, by Ama Birch and musicians. My wife, Elizabeth Murray, and I collaborated on a book of poems and drawings, Cupid’s Cashbox. And Chuck Close and I collaborated on A Couple of Ways of Doing Something – his daguerreotypes, my concrete praise poems, that Abrams published and toured in museums all over the world. Archie Rand and I collaborated on 50 paintings exhibited at the Freight & Volume Gallery in NYC – Invisible City. Bill Adler, Sekou Sundiata and I collaborated, creating the spoken word label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury. In 2022, I ventured to Canterbury to perform the New Canterbury Tales with frequent collaborator David Thomas and his band, Pere Ubu. I made The United States of Poetry for PBS with Josh Blum, producer, and Mark Pellington, director. And Producer/Director David Grubin and I worked closely together to make Language Matters, also for PBS. Recently, I’ve started working with filmmaker Paul Moon; our We Are the Dinosaur, conceived, shot and edited in less than a week, will be released soon.
So I guess the answer is Yes, I like to work collaboratively.
6.are there any young poets whose work you
Champion?
I’m 75. When I was coming up, the Yale Younger Poets Prize went to a poet under 40. Now poets are slamming in their teens. Amanda Gorman is the Inaugural poet at 22. Go figure!
7.any future plans and projects?
I hope so
John Wisniewski is a freelance writer who has written for Chiron Review, L.A. Review of Books, Toronto Review of Books, and AM FM magazine. He currently resides in Long Island.