Bob Holman
Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti."
Early years
Holman was born in LaFollette, Tennessee in 1948 and raised in Harlan, Kentucky, the child of "a coal miner's daughter and the only Jew in town." His father committed suicide when Holman was two. After his mother remarried, Holman was raised in rural Ohio. He attended Columbia College and graduated in 1970 with a degree in English. At Columbia, Holman studied with Kenneth Koch, Eric Bentley, and Michael Wood but claims that his "major poetry schooling," was "the Lower East Side, with Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Anne Waldman, Miguel Piñero, Hettie Jones, Ed Sanders, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Pedro Pietri, David Henderson, Steve Cannon, et al."Live poetry
St. Mark's Poetry Project
Since its founding in 1966, the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York has been "a major force in contemporary American literature." Holman coordinated the readings at the Poetry Project from 1977 through 1984 and was on the Project's board of directors from 1980 through 1984.CETA Artists Project
Holman was an original participant in the Cultural Council Foundation's CETA Artists Project, the largest federally-funded artist project since the WPA. His jobs as a public poet included being the scribe of the Village Halloween parade, creating an oral history of the early years of the St. Marks Poetry Project, and teaching 6-year-olds at an after school project in Chinatown. He participated in "Words to Go," a mobile troupe of writers and poets that toured New York City in 1978 and 1979. Other members of the troupe included Pedro Pietri, Sandra María Esteves, Roland Legiardi-Laura, Madeleine Keller, Nathan Whiting and Cassia Berman. An anthology of these poems, edited by Bob Stokes, was published by CCF.Nuyorican Poets Café
Since its founding by Miguel Algarín in 1973, the Nuyorican Poets Café's purpose "has always been to provide a stage for the artists traditionally under-represented in the mainstream media and culture." As co-director of the Nuyorican, Holman introduced slam poetry to the café in 1988 and emceed the venue's slams through 1996. In 1993, he founded the Nuyorican Poets Café Live!, a touring company of poets."Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café"
Holman and Algarin were co-editors of the anthology entitled "Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café." Published in 1994, "Aloud!" was a winner of the 1994 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.Bowery Poetry Club
Holman is the founder and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, which opened to the public in September 2002. Billed as "a Home for Poetry," the club sponsors poetry events every night, and workshops and readings in the afternoons. In an interview with The New York Times shortly after the club's opening, Holman said, "They say no one has ever gone broke running a bar in New York, but we're going to give it a shot." In 2004 the club won a Village Award from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. The awards are given "to help... recognize the people, places, and businesses that make a significant contribution to the legendary quality of life in Greenwich Village, The East Village and NoHo."Bowery Poetry Books
In conjunction with YBK Publishers, Holman founded Bowery Poetry Books in 2005. Since then the imprint has published 13 titles, including works by Taylor Mead, Janet Hamill, Fay Chiang, Paul L. Mills and Black Cracker. It also published an anthology entitled "The Bowery Bartenders Big Book of Poems."Bowery records
In 2007 Holman released a CD entitled "The Awesome Whatever" – produced, and with music, by Vito Ricci—on the Bowery Records label.Theater/ Poets Theater
Holman studied with Steven Gilborn and Eric Bentley at Columbia, where he played Baal in Baal by Brecht, and Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett. In 1971 he co-founded the Woods Hole Theater Company with Karen Cutler, Philip Himberg, and Shaine Marinson,where he was Gogo in Waiting for Godot, and created a community version of the Wizard of Oz.
Holman has directed and/or produced a steady stream of plays during his career, most of them written by poets. These include:
- Ted Berrigan's "Clear the Range" at St. Clement's Episcopal Church Theater, 1977
- "4 Plays by Edwin Denby" at the Eye and Ear Theater, March 1981
- Ed Friedman's "The White Snake" at the Eye and Ear Theater, May 1982
- W. H. Auden's "Paid on Both Sides", at the Eye and Ear Theater, May 1983
- A series produced at St. Mark's Church between 1988 and 1990 comprising Millicent Dillon's "She Is in Tangiers: Life and Work of Jane Bowles", Vladimir Mayakovsky's "Mayakovsky, a Tragedy," Tristan Tzara's "The Gas Heart", Antonin Artaud's "Jet of Blood", and Holman's own collaboration with Bob Rosenthal, "The Cause of Gravity"/"The Whore of the Alpines"/"Bicentennial Suicide."
- D. Zhonzinsky's "Stop at Nothing" at The Kitchen, 1992
- Pedro Pietri's "Eat Rocks" at New Dramatists NYC
- Ed Sanders's "A Night at the Rebel Café" at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2003
At WNYC-TV and WNYC-FM
In 2004–2005, Holman was Poet-in-Residence at WNYC-FM, a storied public radio station in New York City.
Mouth Almighty/ Mercury Records
In 1996, Holman, Sekou Sundiata, and Bill Adler co-founded Mouth Almighty Records under the auspices of Mercury Records. Over the course of the next three years the label released 18 titles, including recordings by the Last Poets, Allen Ginsberg, and Sekou Sundiata, two CDs of short fiction from The New Yorker magazine, and a two-CD set of readings of Edgar Allan Poe produced by Hal Willner. Mouth Almighty's four-CD box set of readings by William Burroughs, produced by the poet John Giorno, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999.In 1997, the Mouth Almighty slam team, coached by Holman, won the National Poetry Slam.
In 1998 Mouth Almighty released Holman's own "In With the Out Crowd," produced by Hal Willner.
"United States of Poetry"
In 1996 Holman, director Mark Pellington, and producer Joshua Blum teamed up to create "The United States of Poetry," a critically acclaimed five-part PBS television series. The program featured over 60 poets, rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign Language poets and Slammers. In a review for The New York Times, John J. O'Connor wrote, "Wandering all over the map, geographical and literary, 'The United States of Poetry' unabashedly celebrates the Word. These days, that's downright courageous." Identified as "the brainchild of Bob Holman," the series is described as "an excellent presentation of 20th Century poetry" on the website of the Academy of American Poets.The television series was accompanied into the market-place by a book and a soundtrack recording. The book, published by Abrams Books, was co-edited by Holman, Pellington, and Blum, with an introduction by Holman.
The soundtrack, underscored with music by tomandandy, was issued by Mouth Almighty Records. In a review for 'The New York Times', Stephen Holden wrote, "The illustrates how thoroughly the lines between literature and popular culture have dissolved over the last 40 years."