Mark Silverbeg: We met first in Cape Breton, where my university was hosting a conference on ‘Singing Storytellers’ which focused on the tradition of the bard—both historically and in a contemporary context. Does the idea of the bard resonate with you? Do you see your work in this context? Are performance poets contemporary bards of a kind?
Bob Holman: For the poet, words are everything, with the word bard near the top of the list. Even though bard may be a bit more precious than poet and poet, lord knows, is precious enough. But I like the heft of it, its brevity and its Celtic origins. The Welsh word for poet is Bardd and in my poem Ffwciwch Oma, Dwin Ffwcin’ Dysgwr Ffwcin’ Gymraeg! (“Fuck Off, I’m a Fuckin’ Welsh Fuckin’ Learner!”), written for the 2015 Stomp (Welsh National Poetry Slam) I call myself Bardd Americanaidd tumfatt (“Stupid American poet”). [Published in Sing 12-13]
I’m not called on to use the word all that often, but the way it harkens back to the days when being a poet was a real job always gives pleasure. I probably use the word griot more often, simply because my work with Papa Susso and other poet/musicians from the Jeliya tradition of West Africa simply doesn’t resonate with the contemporary definition of poet. In fact, though Papa had been visiting the US for many years when we first met, I was the first person to ever use that term to describe what he did. He was a “keeper of the oral tradition,” sometimes a “praise-singer.”
The bard definitely does take you back in time to a traveling singer of tales who shows up at the inn and weaves together stories that are both the news and art to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. And yes, I do see myself in that tradition, as far-fetched and romantic as that might seem. Not that I use that answer at a party—as I mentioned it’s hard enough to get away with saying one is a poet, followed by the inevitable “are you published?” then the “Here we go again.”
The Spoken Word Movement of the 90s, hip hop and the poetry slam, went a long way to reassert performance as part of the poet’s job. The anthology that came out of the Nuyorican is called Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and is, of course, a pun. The poems all were read aloud at the Cafe; the oral tradition is now allowed back in the canon.
So as we stand at the precipice of Third Consciousness, from orality to literacy to digital, poets have a choice in selecting the medium they will use and there’s nothing wrong with taking all of them.[i] Ginsberg for me was the Bard. Whether wheezing away on the harmonium, backed up on Blake by the angelic chords and vocals of Steven Taylor, or doing “Birdbrain” and “Punk Rock, You’re My Big Crybaby” with The Clash, he was allowing his voice to expand to the fullness and nuance of the poems, the ineffable and momentary mystery blend of rhythm and sound.
“Language is nested in sound,” as Walter Ong says. The job of the bard is to let meanings fly into the audience’s ear.
MS: Thinking about those three modalities—oral, written, and digital—makes a lot of sense, and I can see how your work has taken advantage of all three directions. I’d like to talk a bit more about the first two and hear your thoughts on the relationship between the poem for the page and the poem for the stage. Is there a difference? Or is all your work of ‘one piece’?
BH: For me, the poem is always The Poem. In my lifetime, my own writing has moved from pencil to “ink pen” (as it is called in Kentucky) to typewriter to electric to Selectric (with memory!) and then to computer. But it doesn’t matter the means of production–the Poem becomes Itself (“is written”) and then is manifested in the world by all means possible: spoken, performed, hand-written, mimeoed in a chapbook or zine, printed in a glossy, published in an anthology, in a book, made into a broadside, fine-printed with an etching inspired by the poem, uploaded as a PDF or Word file on the net, you-get-the-picture poem. In each of these instances the method of reproduction/distribution itself has a different impact on the reader/hearer (slant rhyme to McLuhan’s “medium is the message”). But in all cases, The Poem is the same. As Eternal as the word “eternal.” To “understand” orality, oral consciousness, is to know that even though the words of the poem may change in every performance, The Poem is the same.
For argument’s sake, I like to say: There is no such thing as a Performance Poem (viz. my poem, “Performance Poem”). On the other hand, when composing an occasional poem or when commissioned to write something, I am aware of the conditions in which the poem will be presented, and that in turn has an effect on what I write/make. We can start/stop right there, with MAKING, which works in all three consciousnesses: orality, text, digital. MAKING is the translation of the Greek root for the word “poetry”: poesis. The basis of poetry is that it is made, created, whether in the mouth, scribbled onto a bar napkin, or tapped onto a computer screen. And Everything has an impact on the poem as it is being made, so it follows that if there’s a designated performance or placement, that will affect the poem-making. (Examples include “Invisible City,” written for the biennial Ideas City conference hosted by The New Museum, the praise poem for the US Delegates at the Kolkota Book Fair 2008, and all the poems written for the Chuck Close collab, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, which needed to be concrete poems to visually stand up to Chuck’s daguerreotypes.)
But once the poem is done (“I ain’t finished one yet”—Sekou Sundiata), that’s when the fun begins. I teach a course called “Exploding Text” where the poem on page becomes a score for cross-genre collaboration. Which is my attitude towards the poem’s utility: explode the text. While I love the playfulness of Auden’s “makes nothing happen,” I’m an Olsonion projective versifier myself, “energy projected from the poet through the poem to the reader/hearer.” A poem isn’t written till it is read. The poet writes half a poem, the listener, the other half. Get it? Got it. Good.
As we move into Third Consciousness, Ong’s notion of a secondary orality becomes more complex. Secondary orality is the uses of orality by those living in an age of literacy. I make a distinction between bully languages and others. Bully languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, et al., are the 700 languages that have written traditions. The remaining 6300 languages primarily carry themselves orally; 6300 languages which in toto are spoken by under 1% of the world’s population. These are the world’s endangered, treasure languages. They are the living oral tradition, and new poems created in these languages are not made in the same way as spoken word poems in bully languages.
Poems created for the world of poetry slams, for performance on stage, for digital delivery have emerged since the 90s, the birth of the contemporary Spoken Word Movement. They take on aspects of hip hop, of performance art, of theater, of film. Poets in these communities are, as poets have always done, writing for their friends.
MS: What about the community that makes up the audience for Spoken Word? Is there something unique about this audience compared to the “average” poetry audience, if there is such a thing?
BH: Spoken Word audiences remind me of the pit at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare’s day. Audience interaction is invited. At slams, there’s a whole litany of choreographed responses that came out of Marc Smith’s Green Mill slams—from finger snaps to boot smacks, hisses to whoops. Talking back to the poet happens a lot more in Africa. Call and response makes listening active.
MS: The response you’re talking about is actually active. It’s easy to say (as critics and teachers often do) that writing requires the participation of a reader to make meaning, but you’re talking about something else, I think, something that can’t happen with solitary reading, which in certain circles (the university? the library? the study?) has been the main model for literary engagement.
BH: Sure. 50% of the poem’s creation is the reader reading it/audience hearing it. The difference is that Text is so efficient we’ve gradually forgotten the usefulness of Orality. You “get” a poem in different ways in each of the three consciousnesses. It took a long time for Orality to evolve into Text consciousness, centuries before people stopped reading everything aloud, centuries to evolve reading to yourself. The first libraries were the noisiest places in town—everybody reading aloud simultaneously! The space in your mind where you create the scene of the book when you read to yourself is perhaps the most precious gift of reading, but it’s one that took a while to evolve. It’s my theory that it was the evolution of this interior space that created the novel as a form. Poetry’s varying line lengths allow for more of a sense of Orality, aliveness, on the page.
MS: You call the bard a “traveling singer of tales” and clearly travel has been a key part of your work: I’m thinking of those journeys shared in The United States of Poetry, On the Road With Bob Holman, and Language Matters, for example. A lot of North Americans probably think of travel as leisure, but as you say, for the bard in the past, travel was a necessary part of “the real job … of being a poet.” Can you talk about what that job means for you? What kind of work do you hope you’re doing? And perhaps one more addendum to that question—thinking of Ginsberg, whom you mentioned as the contemporary bard—is this work necessarily political? or entertaining? or both?
BH: Poetry is not “necessarily” anything. Well, one can say it’s “language art” and that every poem is a new definition of poetry. In Orality (First Consciousness), it’s poetry that makes language sing, in Text (Second Consciousness) it brings the page to life, and in Digital (Third Consciousness), well, we don’t know yet, but it seems that one thing is to allow poems to be instantly available to nearly everyone.
The itinerant artist is a well-known character, whether it’s traveling theater companies, musicians, or poets, from the wandering minstrels in Europe to West African griots to Puerto Rican jibaros. In the 70s I toured with the CETA Artist project’s “Words to Go” van, and these days some slam poets are on a sofa-surfing circuit. The United States of Poetry crew logged 16000 miles through 48 states—I had to wait for Language Matters to get to Hawaii and Alaska, two of only three states who have official languages besides English. (Twenty-nine states have English as the only official language, a horrible idea. Besides helping to keep endangered languages alive, the only reason for an “official language” is prejudice.) There have been a couple of big tours of poets across the country lately. In 2006, Wave Books did the great Poetry Bus Tour, visiting 50 cities in 50 days. Another one was sponsored by George Dawes Green of The Moth; there was the Sister Spit-Mouth Almighty tour; the POEMobile in NYC. Along these lines, Third Consciousness poet Steve Roggenbuck visited all 50 states last year. Go, Steve!
The job of the poet is to make poems and then whatever else you want to do to keep poetry in the lives of the citizenry. Teaching, running readings, publishing, editing, reading, starting record labels, putting poetry books in hotel rooms and auto glove compartments, reading on subways and in taco shops, leaving poems in the Wailing Wall, singing poems in your Mother Tongue, skywriting poems, poems carved into rocks, Gwyneth Lewis’s poem on the Millenium Concert Hall in Cardiff….
MS: That phrase, “to keep poetry in the lives of the citizenry,” seems to describe perfectly what you’ve been doing. Is that the job of the bard? The poet’s job is to make poems and the bard’s job is to spread the word?
BH: Ha! Now there you go, Poet, putting words in my mouth! As I say, it takes a heap of chutzpah to take the leap to say “I’m a poet,” and even more to say you’re a bard (unless you’re talking in Welsh). Why bother? All poets are bards in my book, the book that is not written down. Part of the job is giving thanks to all those who came before, the bards and skalds and troubadours and jeli and azmaris. As poetry reclaims its most ancient traditions it also reclaims its ancient power. I’m looking forward to David the Poet, representing the Gift Economy of the Poetic Economy, taking on the Goliath of Corporate Capitalism.
MS: Do you have a “David” in mind? What will this poetry sound like or look like?
BH: “Poetry” itself is the David. Poetry is the voice of the Individual—that is its great strength. But the Poetry I’m evoking is stripped from the Individual, Poetry as an Idea.
Is this possible? Desirable? An oxymoron? All I know is that Capitalism is all-powerful (corollary: Human greed is boundless) and Poetry the salve that can heal (corollary: Trust in communication is full communion).
MS: That leads me to another kind of communication (and maybe communion) I’ve been wanting to ask about, which is your role as teacher. I’m not speaking metaphorically, of all the ways that poetry or performance might be instructive, but literally—in your role as lecturer or professor at The New School, Bard College, NYU, Columbia, and Princeton (I believe you have a stint coming up).
BH: I’m teaching at Princeton this fall semester. Teaching is a lot of First Consciousness, a lot of talking which means a lot of listening. The idea is to teach how to learn. Poetry is a perfect medium for this, because it’s so open to interpretation. The idea is for the students to be working from their centers, for the teacher to taxonomize (“Hey, have you read Hopkins?” Hopkins, probably not a good example—I’ve seen students who read Hopkins never recover). The other way I learned from my great teacher, Kenneth Koch, who had us read a different poet each week and then write imitations. You sure learned who your lineage was NOT that way.
MS: I’m writing a paper about your series “Van Gogh’s Violin” and your interest in ekphrasis, that is, writing that responds to other works of art. What’s the first artwork or painting that had a real effect on you?
BH: It was in Alice Notley’s workshop at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, I guess around ’73. So much was going on then! Eileen Myles was in that workshop, Charles Bernstein, Patricia Jones, Chris Kraus, Bob Rosenthal, Ed Friedman, Jeff Wright, Rose Lesniak, Greg Masters, Gary Lenhart, Simon Schuchat, Barb Barg, and Michael Scholnick, who died much too soon. Who else? Alice gave an assignment: 1) go to this de Kooning exhibit at an Upper East Side Gallery; 2) stay there till you write a poem. I’d probably never spent more than a few minutes in front of a painting before, but now I had to, and what happened was pretty amazing: it took a while, but at one point the paintings came out of their frames, flowed over the walls, entered other paintings—the whole room became a painting! (NB: I was not on drugs.) So I had my assignment poem. From this moment on, a roomful of paintings became a roomful of potential poems for me, and that’s a technique I’ve used on numerous occasions, including “Van Gogh’s Violin” in Sing This One Back To Me (Coffee House) and the books Picasso in Barcelona (Paper Kite) and The Cut-Outs (Matisse) (PeKa Boo Press).
The next thing that happened was even more amazing. I met Elizabeth Murray. Ada Katz hired her to do the sets for “4 Plays by Edwin Denby,” and I was hired to direct. I’d been doing Poets Theater forever, writing plays with Bob Rosenthal, directing various Ubus, Jets of Bloods, and Mayakovskys. But this was different, and Elizabeth and I went on to collaborate in other ways (two daughters). Her poems became constant inspirations, and on occasion she’d use my hiccups as titles.
I met Papa Susso while researching griots as part of my inquiries into the roots of hip hop; he taught me about Praise Poems, and when I was commissioned to write a poem for an honorary degree that Elizabeth was awarded at the San Francisco Art Institute, Chuck Close heard it and that led to a different kind of ekphrasis, the exhibit and book A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture).
MS: Which other visual artists have been important to you?
BH: When I was reading Pound, his book about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska made a deep impression, as did the film that Ken Russell made about him, Savage Messiah. I tried to get to the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound in France, but never did. I saw some Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1968. The idea that Gaudier-Brzeska could see “through” Chinese calligraphy to originating pictographs, an idea Pound developed alongside Fenollosa’s book, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, was very important to me. When I was at Cummington Community of the Arts, the drawings of Paul Zinkievich came to life for me. I got to Breughel through Williams’s book, Pictures of Brueghel. I got to Picabia, Arp, and even Braque and Picasso through Dada and Surrealist poets. The artists around St. Mark’s Poetry Project—Joe Brainard, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Larry Rivers, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Donna Dennis, Martha Diamond, Trevor Winkfield—were part of my world, and the CETA painters—including Christy Rupp, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Willie Birch, Herman Cherry, Hunt Slonem—were my co-workers. Elizabeth introduced me to a whole universe at Paula Cooper’s gallery. Through her I also met Jeff Way who created many of the sets for various Ubus and other productions of Poets Theater; Rochelle Kraut also did great sets and drawings for early productions. I almost forgot Keith Haring, a friend who often dropped in to read his hilarious, formal poetry at the reading series I ran at Club 57 in the early 80s.
MS: It sounds like poetry and visual art have been linked for you for a long time—and maybe just as important or more important is the connection to the people.
Not just poetry and visual art, but all the arts. I’ve written, directed, acted in plays all my life, collaborated with dancers (most recently Molissa Fenley, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Yoshiko Chuma) and musicians (I have two albums out). But yes, collaboration is important to me: the interplay of art, politics, and the whatever, the people dimension, that results in the poetry places like St. Mark’s, the Nuyorican, and Bowery Poetry. It’s a Life Work—the first book I ever wrote was Life Poem, which was started in an arts community, Cummington. And the next one was a xerox collection of what I’d now call Praise Poems that I wrote for the communards of Heavus Tunus, where I lived 1970–71, in a brownstone in Brooklyn and a back-to-the-land farm in Pennsylvania. You can read some of those poems in Tear To Open (This This This This This This) (Power Mad Press).
MS: There have been so many important artists in your life, but I’d like to turn back to one: Elizabeth Murray. What did living with Elizabeth mean for your relationship to visual art and for your own process of art making?
BH: E and I went on a two-week camping trip for our first date. Changed my dreams. Went on from there.
MS: Changed your dreams in what way?
BH: As if they snapped into focus. From b&w to color.
MS: You talk about color a lot in your “Praise Poem Elizabeth Murray”—about the artist, and I assume the viewer, diving into color, drowning in it….
BH: Elizabeth of course was renowned for her outrageous sense of color. When I was writing the poem, she was doing some of her gargantuan cup paintings—which you could literally dive in!
MS: It’s fair to say that you’re also known for your “outrageous sense of color.” I feel like that’s something I’ve not brought out enough in my essay, but it’s an essential part of your work: your sense of humor.
BH: Well, that’s something that Elizabeth and I do have in common: humor, fun, joy. Art that is human, that won’t take itself seriously all the time, that lets the viewer/reader in on the joke. That’s the way to keep art from being corralled into a cathedral, to keep art as part of life, always.
MS:I’m wondering how similar or different your process is or was from Elizabeth’s? I’m thinking of an interview you did with her for the catalogue from a 1999 show of hers at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery. You ask her at one point to describe “when [she’s] in the passion of work” but she doesn’t, saying “those things should not be discussed.” Do you feel the same? Is there a connection between the “passion of writing” and the “passion of performing”? Are they similar or different?
BH: Elizabeth needed to spend five hours a day in the studio or else. She was disciplined; opera or disco was blasting, the air purifier ducts were tuned, she’d wear a mask, she had her inspiration artifacts, her daily rituals. And when we moved into the townhouse on West 12th St. it meant her studio had to be separated from the living space, and she soon realized the whole move had been a mistake. When the kids came home, they needed to walk into her studio and see her work; she wanted their fresh eyes on her fresh paint. And that was that. We sold this home we had completely renovated and headed back to a loft in Tribeca where her studio was in the same space we lived in.
Her trips to Pearl Paint, the cat food cans to mix the paint in, the cleaning of the brushes. All the stuff and paraphernalia, the unbelievable number of things to prep to paint, it’s amazing you actually get the stuff onto the brush and flicked, stroked, onto the canvas. Poetry is just you and the pencil or typewriter (I remember!) or computer. Then you go back, you don’t have to worry about keeping the words malleable the way there’s a time limit before the paint “sets.” So there’s real differences in the chores of painting versus writing.
But performing is even more different, and that’s where Elizabeth and I really diverged. In our life together, she was happy for me to be Mr. Murray, wife of the artist, and to advance her at parties, etc. In other words, I was performing then, in life. She never had my desire to be on the stage, to take the word out there in that way. Though she put up with it, she was, in fact, my best critic, and even made some costumes for me—a question-mark jacket (not the white one, but the one I used for TV), and the Pasta Mon helmet, which was a mop head plastered on a hard hat with a fork stuck in it. Performing is ONLY the moment, and that temporal sense of art is maybe the most powerful part of poetry for me, the one where I feel I’m in the skin of the bard.
MS: The skin of the bard sounds like a good place to end. Just one last question about the present and the future. What are you working on now? Do you have any dream projects—ones that may or may not happen?
BH: My new ekphrastic book, The Cut-Outs (Matisse), is out from PeKa Boo Press and I read the whole thing at the publication party at the Old Woods Hole Fire Station on Cape Cod last week. Took about eleven minutes and I enjoyed it enormously (plus no one walked out). The poem snips and swirls à la Henri’s scissors technique, so it’s not the easiest to follow, but the poetry does set up a field, his field, of joy and dance and jazz and color and that’s a treat. I tried to get that swing into performance which is a LOT different from hiphop and Ukrainian punk. I like that The Unspoken (get it?) and Life Poem, books written fifty years apart, were published simultaneously by YBK Books, and I have another book in the works, The Tyranny of the Poem: New & Selected.
I’ve never been working Second Consciousness like that, what a surprise.
I am editing an anthology of poems about New York City written in the endangered and minority languages of the place—of which there are hundreds. That’s for the Endangered Language Alliance. Douglas Ridloff’s ASL poem will be a flip-book on the corners. I’d love to see a United States of Poetry 2.0 or a World of Poetry TV series or movie—that’s a dream. The Bowery Poetry Club is opening a media division, Third Consciousness here we come. Hope to continue screening Language Matters (it’s been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Albanian), and Khonsay, touring those films as part of a language awareness program. The poem still seems to offer pretty much everything, if I can just keep opening up to the possibilities. In the fall I’m going to start in on 3rd Consciousness, the book. That’s the job of the poet, you know—just do what you do, so long as it’s for poetry you’ll be OK.
[i] Holman’s thinking here is indebted to Walter Ong. Ong’s key work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), offers a comprehensive analysis of the movement from oral to written/literate cultures and also considers the return of a “secondary orality” with the re-emergence of the voice in electronic cultures like ours. Holman has Ong in mind when he talks about “first-” (primarily oral), “second-” (primarily written), and “third-consciousness” (digital/electronic) as the interview proceeds. Like Ong, Holman seems to give primacy to the oral—with its connection to speech, breath, and spirit. It’s important to note that these three forms of consciousness and expression are not mutually exclusive. Each stage depends on, and contains residual elements of, orality. As Holman put it in a note to the interviewer: “I was awakened by [Ong] to the thrum of orality in literacy, also in digital, and have taken his ideas onwards” (email, 24 January 2021).