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Featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, crowned “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” by the New York Daily News, Bob Holman has performed his poems with a punk band in Kiev, a griot in Timbuktu, a ballet company in San Francisco. As the original Slam Master of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, creator of the world’s first spoken word record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word and slam poetry movements of the last several decades.
He is the author of 17 poetry collections, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, a c
ollaboration with Chuck Close), and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. A co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, Holman’s study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages.
He is the producer/host of films including “The United States of Poetry” and “Language Matters with Bob Holman,” both nationally broadcast on PBS.
[…] Bob Holman is a poet. In our interview with him, we spoke about two of his works, Life Poem and The Unspoken. Although both are new out right now, Life Poem began 50 years before The Unspoken. Life Poem is one continuous poem written over 100 pages. The Unspoken is a collection of recent and selected poems. It began with the title Bob Holman and the Spoken Word Movement. Holman is generally associated with the spoken word/slam culture in poetry. To hear more about both books, including live readings by the poet, listen to the complete interview. […]