Art & Public Policy
Bob Holman |
Biography
Bob Holman was founding editor of the NYC Poetry Calendar (1977), curated reading series at St. Marks Church (he worked at the Poetry Project for seven years), the Whitney Museum, the Public Theater, and other locales. He has toured the world with his "amazing traveling word show," and is Artistic Director of the touring company Real Live Poetry (washingtonsquarearts.com). He is a firm believer in the United States of Poetry, with recent stops at National Poetry Slams (he coached the 1997 championship Mouth Almighty team), the Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and the American Sign Language Literary Conference in Rochester, New York. He has been awarded three NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, been funded by the NEA, New York State Council on the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. In 2004, he became a Def Poet, appearing on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. In 2000, he hosted the International Poets Cabaret at the Frankfurt Book Fair where he also premiered his SemiCento, a polyglot poem gathered line-by-line from poets around the world, and he performs regularly with David “Pere Ubu” Thomas in the punk opera, Mirror Man. He presented his paper, “The Reemergence of the Oral Tradition in the Digital Age” at the Pan-African Literature and Languages Conference in Asmara, Eritrea; and is the recipient of Curbstone Press’s “Honored Poet” award. In summer 2002, he was the Featured Artist at the First International Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, screening USOP, judging the competition, and performing his multimedia poem “@the Café” with a live DJ. In 2003 he was awarded the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers Award” by Poets & Writers, and represented the USA in Poetry Africa in Durban. In 2004, he performed in Warsaw, teaching a workshop in performance poetry, and in Denmark, at the huge Roskilde Rock Festival.
In 2001, NYU’s Fales Library acquired his Poetry Media Library, calling it “the finest of its kind,” and has recently received NEA funding to catalogue and digitize the collection. In 2004-5, Holman was Poet in Residence at WNYC Radio , New York’s NPR station, reading a poem, generally contemporary and related to the day’s events, on Morning Edition every week or so; he is also that station’s guide to spoken word recordings, appearing monthly on Sound Check. Work has begun on a radio series, “Live from the Bowery Poetry Club!”
From 1998-2002, he was Visiting Professor of Writing and Integrated Arts at Bard College , where he adapted and directed John Ashbery’s book-length poem, Girls on the Run and SUDDEN EKPHRASIS!: The Poetry of Robert Kelly. Since 2003, he has taught Exploding Text: Poetry Performance at Columbia University, as a graduate course in the School of the Arts.
The Bowery Poetry Club, located at the corner of art and entertainment, “at the foot of First” in downtown Manhattan, opened in fall 2002 and is a dream realized. This seven day a week poetry place is “a beacon on the Bowery,” according to the New York Times. Bob Holman has spent a life in poetry, and the Club, with a coffee shop, bookstore, bar and performance space, is its physicalization. A non-profit, Bowery Arts & Science, Ltd., works with the Club for educational, outreach, and technological pursuits. Open door twixt art and technology, content and media. In short, the Bowery Poetry Club is poised to be the nexus of the new poetry for the new century.
