“THE POSTMODERN PROMOTER
WHO HAS DONE MORE TO BRING
POETRY TO CAFES AND BARS THAN
ANYONE SINCE FERLINGHETTI.”
— HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.,
THE NEW YORKER
Photo by Chris Felver
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 his job: poet. From slam to hip-hop, from performance to spoken
word 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 ny
Times Magazine, Holman is the author of over
20 poetry collections.
He has published three books since 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 documentary Ginsberg’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.
Btw, bOB IS AVAILABLE FOR READINGS, WORKSHOPS, SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS, FILM SCREENINGS, AND OTHER EVENTS
•••BOOK BOB•••
WATCH NOW!
bob Holman Releases 2 Books
The (un)spoken & life poem
written 50 years apart
Bob recently released two books—Life Poem and The Unspoken —written fifty years apart; his shift from a hippie kid from Kentucky to pursuing an alternate existence in New York City to a preeminent groundbreaker in the spoken word poetry movement, which, as you can see from the book cover, is now — The Unspoken! The books’ release via YBK/Bowery Books was celebrated on 12/6 in New York with an SRO party at HOWL Happening that found Holman taking his performance through the audience, out onto 1st Street and back onstage, the wireless mic poemizing all the while.
Life Poem is a recently discovered book-length poem Bob wrote at age 19, new to poetry and first in its thrall. Filled with “jounce and pounce,” as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote at the time, it’s a hippie diary full of communes, Vietnam, romance, and a driving love for language that has lasted a lifetime (so far). The Unspoken is a collection of recent works, finding Holman, now a grandfather in his 70s, still devoted to poetry, but with decades of experience, memories, joy and loss to inform it. There are poems of all sorts: personal, confessional, performance, “shorties” (Every Word/In a poem/Is a poem), poems set to music, poems to be danced to, poems to be shouted, whispered, chanted, sung. There are poems addressed to his late wife, the painter Elizabeth Murray; to their children and their children’s children; and Praise Poems, based on his work with West African griots, to many of the artists and poets he’s encountered over the last half-century.
The books serve not only as bookends to a lifetime immersed in words, performance, and the avant-garde, but also show the evolution of an artist, an art form, and a neighborhood: a spoken word scene that’s gone from Allen Ginsberg to Lou Reed to Eileen Myles to Mahogany L. Browne.
Read more about The Unspoken and Life Poem’s party at the Howl Arts official website and watch a full video of Bob’s live reading below.
Video by Nicholas Motyka
POETRYSPOTS.COM
CREATED BY NEW YORK POET BOB HOLMAN IN 1987, POETRY SPOTS WAS A SERIES OF SHORT POETRY RECITATIONS COMMITTED TO VHS TAPE AND PRODUCED FOR WNYC-TV. THE "NON COMMERCIAL-COMMERCIALS" WERE BUILT
AROUND A POET PERFORMING A SINGLE POEM IN A LOCATION OF PERSONAL OR CONCEPTUAL SIGNIFICANCE,
FROM TINY KITCHENS TO CONEY ISLAND. ACTIVE UNTIL 1993, THE SERIES WAS THE FIRST OF ITS KIND AND
INTRODUCED NEW YORKERS TO A WEALTH OF POETS IN THEIR MIDST. AS THE IDEA OF POETRY FILMS SPREAD,
"POETRY SPOTS" WOULD BECOME A COMPENDIUM OF FILMED POEMS FROM ACROSS THE COUNTRY.
THE WEBSITE IS A COMPREHENSIVE POETRY SPOTS ARCHIVE DRAWN FROM HOLMAN'S DIGITIZED TAPES.
CLICK HERE FOR A 2020 INTERVIEW WITH THE SERIES CREATOR ABOUT THE PROJECT'S HISTORY AND LEGACY.
© Bob Holman 2023