Bob Holman

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."[2] His father committed suicide when Holman was two.[2] 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."[3]

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[14]
• Ed Friedman's "The White Snake" at the Eye and Ear Theater, May 1982[15]
• W. H. Auden's "Paid on Both Sides", at the Eye and Ear Theater, May 1983[16]
• 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[17]

Between 1987 and 1993 Holman was the producer and host of "Poetry Spots" for WNYC-TV, a public television station in New York City. In a foreshadowing of the technique used in "The United States of Poetry," each "Poetry Spot" was a short film built around a single poet performing a poem.[18] The "Poetry Spots" series won New York Emmy Awards in 1989 and 1992.[19]

In 2004–2005, Holman was Poet-in-Residence at WNYC-FM, a storied public radio station in New York City.

In 1994 Holman, Sekou Sundiata, Bill Adler and Jim Coffman co-founded NuYo Records, a record label devoted to the spoken word. Its first two releases, distributed in conjunction with Imago Records, included "Grand Slam: Best of the National Poetry Slam"[20]

This venture was revived in 1996 as 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,[21] Allen Ginsberg,[22] and Sekou Sundiata,[23] two CDs of short fiction from The New Yorker magazine,[24] and a two-CD set of readings of Edgar Allan Poe[25] produced by Hal Willner. Mouth Almighty's four-CD box set of readings by William Burroughs,[26] produced by the poet John Giorno, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999.[27]

In 1997, the Mouth Almighty slam team, coached by Holman, won the National Poetry Slam.[28]

In 1998 Mouth Almighty released Holman's own "In With the Out Crowd," produced by Hal Willner.[29]

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.[30] 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."[31] 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.[32]

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.[33]

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 [soundtrack] illustrates how thoroughly the lines between literature and popular culture have dissolved over the last 40 years."[34]

Among Holman's first teaching jobs was a stint in July 1991 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which had been founded at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado by Chogyam Trungpa, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Holman's course was entitled "From Rap to Zap."[35] Between 1993 and 1996 Holman was a Professor of Writing at The New School for Social Research,[36] and from 1998 through 2002 a Visiting Professor of Writing and Integrated Arts at Bard College.[37] In 2003 Holman relocated to Columbia University's School of the Arts where, as a Visiting Professor of Writing, he taught the graduate course "Exploding Text: Poetry Performance."[38] In 2007, as a Visiting Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Holman began teaching a course called "Art and the Public Sphere."[39] From 2010 to 2016, Holman suspended his teaching activities to focus on the Endangered Language Alliance. Holman taught his oral poetry syllabus "Exploding Text: Poetry and Performance" at Princeton University in the fall of 2017.[40]

Holman performing with Papa Susso at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2016

New York University's Fales Library is the home of The Bob Holman Audio/Video Poetry Collection, a multimedia collection documenting spoken word performances and productions between the years 1977 and 2002. Key items include spoken word projects featuring and/or produced by Holman himself.[45] Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales Library, has said Holman's collection "is a magnificent resource for anyone who cares about New York's spoken word scene during the last 40 years. No one else has such documentation."[46]

Holman performs poetry on a periodic basis with griot and kora player Papa Susso.

In June 2017, Holman performed with Serhiy Zhadan as part of the show "1917–2017: Tychyna, Zhadan and The Dogs"[47] at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, directed by Virlana Tkacz.

• The United States Of Poetry, (Directed by Mark Pellington), PBS, 1995[48]
• On The Road With Bob Holman, Rattapallax, 201,[49]
• Witness Downtown Rising Renga, (Directed by Nikhil Melnechuk), 2012,[50]
• KHONSAY: Poem of Many Tongues, (Directed by Bob Holman and Produced by Steve Zeitlin), 2015[51]
• Language Matters With Bob Holman, (Directed by David Grubin) PBS, 2015[52]

• Bicenntential Suicide: a novel to be performed, w/ Bob Rosenthal, Frontward Books, 1976.[53]
• The Rainbow Raises Its Shoulder/When a Flower Grows, Chinatown Planning Council, 1979
• Tear to Open: This this this this this this, Power Mad Press, 1979.[54]
• 8 Chinese Poems, Peeka Boo Press, 1981[55]
• SWEAT&SEX&Politics!, Peeka Boo Press, 1981
• PANIC*DJ: Performance Text, Poems Raps Songs, Larry Qualls and Associates/University Arts Resources, 1988.[56]
• Cupid's Cashbox (with drawings by Elizabeth Murray), Jordan Davies, 1988.[57]
• Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, (Co-edited with Miguel Algarín), Holt Paperbacks, 1994[58]
• Bob Holman's The Collect Call of the Wild, John Macrae/Henry Holt & Company, 1995.[59]
• Beach Simplifies Horizon (with illustrations by Robert Moskowitz), The Grenfell Press, 1998.[60]
• Picasso in Barcelona, Paper Kite Press, 2011[61]
• Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, (Co-edited with Carol Muske-Dukes), Farrar, Stauss and Giroux, 2011[62]
• A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (a collaboration with Chuck Close), Aperture, 2006.[63]
• Sing This One Back To Me, Coffee House Press, 2013.[64]
• The Cutouts (Matisse), Peek A Boo Press, 2017

Holman was married to artist Elizabeth Murray until her death in 2007. The couple had two daughters, both born in the early 1980s: Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman.[65]

• Official website
• Bowery Poetry Club
• The Fales Library Guide to the Bob Holman Audio/Video Poetry Collection
• , Bob Holman on discogs.com