Bob Holman’s poetry has traversed genres, styles and media since the 1970’s, when he began Writing, Performing, and directing Poets Theater productions by Mayakovsky, Artaud, O'Hara & others
@ St. Marks POETRY PROJECT. 

It was also at St. Mark's where Holman began his career as an arts administrator, following four pivotal years (1977-81) as a poet with a salary for the CETA Artists Project, the largest Federally-funded artist project since the WPA.  Here he discovered that most every business in NYC could use a poet on staff – so long as they didn’t have to pay for it.  Among his assignments: scribe for the Village Halloween Parade, oral historian for the Poetry Project, poetry teacher for 6 year-olds in Chinatown, founding Words To Go, a traveling troupe of poets. Among his cohorts:  Norman Pritchard, Pedro Pietri, Sandra Maria Esteves, Marc Levin, Candida Alvarez, Dana Reitz, Dawoud Bey, Carlo Pittore, and many others.  His experience was put to immediate use when he was hired as Poetry Project Coordinator, host, and workshop leader from 1976-84. His Poets Theater Workshops at St. Marks evolved into Festivals at LaMama, featuring artists such as Taylor Mead, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Curtis, Ann Magnuson, Eileen Myles and many others.  His first book, Tear to Open (This This This This This This), was published by Power Mad Press (Barg/Chassler/Lesniak) in 1979; it was launched at the Museum of Modern Art. A couple years later PANic*DJ! Poems/Raps/Songs was released by University Arts Resources (Darryl Chin/Larry Qualls). In 1981 he directed 4 Plays by Edwin Denby for Ada Katz’s Eye & Ear Theater with sets by Elizabeth Murray. Elizabeth and Bob married in 1982; later that year, their daughter Sophie was born; Daisy came along two years later. In 1985, Holman served as the host of “Lines,” a radio series for the Detroit Institute for the Arts (George/Chris Tysh). With Miguel Algarin, Lois Elaine Griffith and Roland Legiardi-Laura, Holman was instrumental in reopening the Nuyorican Poets Café, which had been closed for the 80s – AIDS, crack, gentrification. After a hajj to Chicago to visit Marc Smith, Holman brought the Poetry Slam to the Nuyorican and the Spoken Word Movement began. Among the poets whose baccalaureate come from the Slam at the Café: Paul Beatty, Saul Williams, Tracie Morris, Maggie Estep, Edwin Torres, Willie Perdomo, Beau Sia, reg E. gaines, Dael Orlandersmith, Sara Jones, Mike Tyler, Mahogany Browne, Jive Poetic and the Nuyorican’s current Director, La Bruja. (For more, see Clare Ultimo’s history (she designed the Nuyorican logo) and Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicsz’s Words In Your Face.) During Holman’s tenure at the Café, Spoken Word became a world-wide phenomenon, spawning projects The United States of Poetry (PBS),  Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged, and HBO Def Poetry Jam, which won a TONY on Broadway. In 1992, he won a Bessie (Off-Broadway) Award for Performance Excellence for his work at the Nuyorican.

In 1993, Holman became a professor of writing at The New School For Social Research, where he taught "Exploding Text: Poetry Performance" for three years. That year, and again in 2001, Holman was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow.

Holman co-edited Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, an anthology of Nuyorican poetry which received the 1994 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. In his June, 1995 New Yorker profile, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. described Holman as “The postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti.”

At the forefront of the intersection of poetry and film, Holman’s work in television began in 1987 when he became producer and host of WNYC-TV’s short film series “Poetry Spots.” Over six seasons, Holman produced fifty-five “Poetry Spots,” and won Emmy Awards for Local Arts Programming and Editing in 1988 and 1992. From 1990-92, Holman produced and performed in “Words in Your Face” for PBS, and appeared in MTV’s “Spoken Word Unplugged” and “Smokin Word.”

In 1995 Holman pushed poetry further beyond the page when he founded the world’s first spoken word poetry record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, where he served as Vice President of Artistic Development until 1999. To ensure a permanent home for the arts in Lower Manhattan, in 1995 Holman founded Bowery Arts and Science, the non-profit arts organization where he served as Executive Director until 2005, and currently serves as Artistic Director.

As creator and producer of the award winning, five-part PBS television series “The United States of Poetry,” Holman released his first long-form intersectional work in 1996. Featured at the Sundance and San Francisco Film Festivals, “USOP” won the 1996 International Public Television Award (INPUT). Holman’s poetry films have won awards at Berlin’s Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in 2002, 2004, and 2010. His experience melding poetry and media informed his professorship at Bard College, where from 1998 to 2002, he served as Visiting Professor of Writing and Integrated Arts. From 2007 to 2010, Holman was Visiting Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and he is currently on leave from the Columbia University School of the Arts. He taught at Princeton in 2017.

In 2001, Holman founded the Bowery Poetry Club, which continues to play host to much of the programming from Bowery Arts and Science. For his decades of work in service to the arts community in New York and beyond, Holman has received numerous community awards, including the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award in 2003, NYU’s Community Citizen of the Year award in 2005, the Elizabeth Kray Poetry award from Poets House in 2006, Zebra Film Festival’s “Founder of Poetry Video” award in 2010, the 2011 Hearing Our Voices Award from Voices Unbroken Incarcerated Youth Program, the 2011 Villager Award from Greenwich Village Historical Preservation Society, and the 2012 Urban Word Champion Award.

Holman began his current work with the poetry of endangered languages while tracing the lineage of performance poetry to its root in orality and the world’s oral traditions—particularly those of West African griots—a quest captured in the 2010 LinkTV documentary film, “On the Road with Bob Holman.” While traveling from West Africa to Israel and the West Bank for “On the Road,” Holman became dedicated to protecting and preserving the world’s endangered languages. In 2010, he co-founded the Endangered Language Alliance, where he currently serves as co-director.

West African oral traditions play an influential role in Holman’s recent poetic work. Holman explored the griot tradition of praise poetry in his collaboration with Chuck Close, A Couple Ways of Doing Something, Holman’s praise poems serve as concrete analogues to Close’s daguerreotype portraits. Sing This One Back To Me, a 2013 collection from Coffee House Press, builds on poems sung to him by his friend, mentor, and collaborator, Gambian griot Papa Susso.

While the New York arts community, to which much of Holman’s career has been devoted, remains a primary focus of his, Holman has now shifted his lens to the global community of language. Language Matters with Bob Holman, a documentary exploring the endangered language crisis, aired nationally on PBS in January, 2015. Filmed around the world, “Language Matters” takes viewers to a remote island off the Australian coast, where four hundred Aboriginal people speak ten distinct indigenous languages, all at risk; to Wales, where Welsh, once endangered, has recovered; and to Hawaii, where Hawaiians are fighting to save their native tongue.

In 2016, he became a selector for Poet's Corner at St John the Divine, and in 2017, Bob was the creative consultant to Alonzo King's LINES ballet company, which resulted in FIgures of speech, inspired by endangered languages. He taught Exploding Text: Poetry Performance at Princeton University in 2017. In 2018, Holman was awarded the Premio Ostana Chambra d’Oc Award for endangered language advocacy, and performed with the Ukrainian poetry rock band, Sirhy Zhadan and the Dogs at LaMama. He also wrote the Foreword to Zhadan’s book of poems, What We Live For, What We Die For (Yale). In 2019, he gave readings in Chile, and made a poetry film in Rapa Nui (Easter Island). During the covid, He published two books written fifty years apart: Life Poem, a book-length poem written in 1969, and The Unspoken, recent and selected poems, as well as bob Holman’s India journals, chronicling the making of ginsberg’s karma, a dociumentary of the beat poets in india.

If you’ve read this far, you know that part of bob’s mission is to get all the poets on the same page. way back in 1978, he did just that, co-founding the nyc poetry calendar! (see NYT Book review below)

© Bob Holman 2023