FREEDOM of speech-ifyng poetics tralalalalalolotratralalalala
FREEDOM of lemonade
FREEDOM to remember what you are doing in Montana
FREEDOM to adjust the height of the floor
FREEDOM to eat an all-poetry diet
FREEDOM to not write the poem, write the Other poem
(Holman, “Freedom”)
Bob Holman has been writing “the poem” and the “Other poem” (the poem that expands the text visually, orally, concretely, and in other dimensions) for over fifty years. Holman is best known as a poetry performer, publicist and provocateur—in a word (one he uses advisedly), a bard. A bard is a poet with a vocation to keep moving beyond the page: into song, performance, and other forms of “exploding text” as Holman calls his multiple collaborations. The tradition of the bard, troubadour, griot, jeli, and other traveling singers is intimately connected to the mythos of the journey.
Holman’s long ride began in New York’s East Village in the early 1970s, in an intensely productive and public poetic community described by many critics and poets, such as Daniel Kane and Anselm Berrigan.[1] It includes such highlights as his involvement with the legendary Poet’s Theatre in the 1970s and 80s; his work with Bernadette Meyer, Alice Notely, and others at St. Mark’s Poetry Project; his performances as Panic*DJ, “the plain white wrapper,” in the 1980s; his emcee work at the renowned Friday Night Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s; and his current work as founder (in 2002) and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. Updating bardic techniques, Holman has brought poetry to a large and diverse audience through video, television, and the internet. A recent project is the video poem and visual journey, “What Democracy Looks Like,” a tour of pandemic Brooklyn street art in support of the “Bring Back the Bowery Mural Project.”[2]
One way of thinking about these projects, as Holman explains in the accompanying interview, is through the lens of what he calls “third consciousness.” Following the thought of Walter Ong, Holman is interested in the continuance of “voice”—of primary orality (first consciousness) in both written texts (second consciousness) and in the ever-widening world of third consciousness: television, film, internet, social media.
What links the three modes is poesis—the act of making. For Holman, making is always a social and participatory act. A bard needs an audience to hear a poem before the poem can be complete. This helps explain why Holman’s projects inevitably foreground audience interaction in one way or another. He asks audiences to come along on a journey with him. He invites readers to, as the title of his 2013 Selected Poems puts it, “Sing This One Back to Me.”
This essay explores the idea of a participatory journey by looking at a genre which naturally foregrounds the act of making by staging a dialogue between two makers and two forms, the ekphrastic poem. Ekphrasis is poetry that engages with visual art, speaking to, for, or about a painting, sculpture, photograph, etc. Though typically seen as a meditative rather than a performative genre, ekphrasis has opened many different avenues for twentieth-century poets, from the formalism of John Hollander to the experimentalism of John Ashbery.
Among Holman’s slam, rap, and other performance poems, we find a series of ekphrases: “Van Gogh’s Violin,” “Rothkos,” “Immediately Poems” on Kandinsky, and later books such as Beach Simplifies Horizon (on Cezanne), Picasso in Barcelona, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (with Chuck Close), and The Cut-Outs (Matisse), in which excursions to and from pictures serve as the main terminus for a different kind of bardic journey. While these poems may seem less performative than ones specifically registered as “spoken word,” they can serve as excellent models for watching the dialogue between the poet, the painter, and the viewer.
“Van Gogh’s Violin” is a series of eighteen short poems responding to the painter and his work. Simultaneously, it is a series about that response: a guide and example for talking back to works of art. It examines what can be done with the materials of paint and words respectively. Furthermore, it calls on readers to participate by looking, listening, and, as in this poem, pausing:
“Plying My Trade”
If I sit here long enough
Maybe I’ll figure out what it is (Sing 22)
The series as a whole is a dialogue with the painter and the reader in the form of a diary of the day: from sunrise (marked by the first poem in the sequence entitled “Good”) to “Sunset” (the eponymous title of the last poem).
Good morning, Vincent
It is early May, 1889
Time to get up and paint
Wheat Field with Rising Sun
Hurry before the firmament
Starts to fall apart again
Right now it’s all singing
“Good morning, Vincent!” (Sing 18)
Borrowing the affective power of van Gogh’s painting (a key strategy for ekphrasis), “Good” starts this voyage by marking both the “right now” and “right-ness” of an awakening moment.[3] The simple “good” of its title, which echoes in the first word of the opening and closing lines, suggests something both humble and right in this vision, and in the painting and poem that represent it. The gamble of the poem, and of the series made up of extremely short texts, is that readers will get it in eight brief lines, that we will believe that the poem or painting have captured or summoned what Tibetan Buddhists call “basic goodness.” This is a concept which describes how elementary things—color, light, the existence of a field or a stone wall, the rising of the sun—all the simple, common details of our environments can be seen as just right, all exactly as they should be. Staking its claim in basic goodness is a considerable risk for the poem which, without an affective assent from readers, can be easily dismissed as trivial or sentimental. Importantly, it’s the same risk that van Gogh took in his relatively simple portraits and landscape compositions. It’s a gamble that links the two and effectively marks the start of a journey in which a lot will be required from participants (less intellectually than affectively). This requirement is expressed again at the end of the poem in what might be imaged as an unsophisticated folk song (“Right now it’s all singing / ‘Good morning, Vincent!’”). The call of this song (a gesture toward orality or “first consciousness” that Holman elsewhere calls “the collect call of the wild”) compels our approval—and thus our participation. Like a collect call that requires the receiver to “accept the charges,” this poem—and indeed much of Holman’s work—expects some investment from readers:
Here it is, just where you said
It would be. Your mind is quiet
& your shoes, well, they seem to be going
Somewhere. The road, the road, as was once
Said, or twice, is where we go on. Where
Everything is acceptable . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It’s the company, I’d guess.
That we finally have accepted knowing each other this way,
& that’s the way we find ourselves, little by little, by & large.
(“The Collect Call of the Wild,” Collect Call 24)
The company of van Gogh in this poem (or of Matisse, Picasso, or Rothko in others) provides rest stops along the road: places to pause, reflect, replenish. At the same time, we are accompanied and guided by Holman who, like a good director, requires his readers to be fully engaged. That engagement means finding our way and (“little by little, by & large”) ourselves, through the ekphrastic journey of reading, looking, and responding.
To consent (to “Good” and “for good”) at the beginning of “Van Gogh’s Violin” is to pick up an instrument, metaphorically speaking, and join in the “good morning” chorus. Practically, it means readers open themselves to the possibility of being moved by simple details.
Black bites deeper
Spitting red beside my bed
Struggling through deep forest
Limb line limn time
It’s all detail! Everything! (Sing 20)
The attention to detail, manifest in the tactility of van Gogh’s painting for Holman, encourages readers to view things closely.[4] Holman’s poem focuses on (or better, performs) the way that close-up detail, the subtle change in texture or sound—from limb to line to limn to time—reward our experience of reading.
Paint and words are attempts to make contact with the external world. Works like van Gogh’s and Holman’s are attempts to connect with the world beyond representations and yet, ironically, can only be made through representations. It’s our recognition of the desire and necessary failure of this gambit to reach something or someone that makes the details of those representations, the signs of desire, so fraught with meaning.
“Heightened With White Chalk”
Running chalk over my lips
Ecstasy directly transmitted
To grass blade after blade (Sing 20)
This poem likely references another artist who haunts the series and much of Holman’s work, Walt Whitman. “Heightened” brings together drawing, writing, and kissing in a way that conjures scenes from “Song of Myself”:
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. (Leaves of Grass 33)
Both Whitman’s and Holman’s oeuvres suggest a call and response dynamic that require the reader’s valved voice. Ekphrasis as a genre seems to work this way: the artwork is a call and the poem a response which might (especially in Holman’s hands) become another call, inviting further participation.
One more example of ekphrasis as collaboration can be seen (and indeed “played”) in Holman’s “Rothkos.” A series of twenty-one published poems, the Rothkos are also a set of instructions, a conceptual inducement, like Tristan Tzara’s famous “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” to participate in a project that can generate an infinite number of further poems. As Holman remarks in his notes on the series:
Stare at something long enough and it’s a poem, and if the form, like Rothko’s floating colors, is apparent, I say go for it: Invent Your Own Form. “A poem is a space shot into consciousness,” as Bill Knot informed me circa 1972. Late Rothko is trance-inducing, form as tic-tac-toe exercise, brain made of canvas.
How to Write a Rothko:
-
- A Rothko (poem) is best written while standing in front of a Rothko (painting).
- A Rothko is three lines, three words per line.
- Three of these nine words must be colors, and their position in the poem must be a tic-tac-toe.
- Like all rules of poetry, break at your own risk. (Sing 124-5)
Instruction #4 seems less a warning than a provocation. The series is not just a text but also a game, which asks readers to become players by inventing their own “brain made canvas.” The form can produce any number of variations that allow for Rothkoesque experiments with color, sound, and position or space. In the following poems we see these spatial variations played with the words “off / on / back” and “pull / push / lull”:
“First Lid”
Lift yellow off
Forge violet on
Throw blue back (Sing 24)
“What What”
Red pull swing
Push white string
Lull C green (Sing 25)
As in “Van Gogh’s Violin,” Holman uses ekphrasis as a creative exercise for himself and as an invitation for the reader. In discussing A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, Holman recalls a writing workshop led by Alice Notley where he received similar instruction about engaging with a visual artist. He was told to visit a Willem de Kooning exhibit and “stand in front of the painting until you write a poem. Then after that, you can feel free. You can go to the next one and do that.” “That taught me to look at something that long,” he reflects. “That’s what I would like the rhythm to be in this book” (vii). Holman is speaking specifically of his poems based on Chuck Close’s daguerreotype portraits of twenty artists and friends, but the rhythm he seeks is one built into the genre of ekphrasis itself which is an ongoing negotiation between visual and verbal objects.[5]
The “Rothkos” offer a useful summation or limit case for Holman’s work which has been as much about making opportunities as making poems. Traveling three bardic paths: the orality of spoken word performance; the textuality of the page; and the “third consciousness” of electronic and other new media, Holman likewise invites fellow explorers to (re)create and (re)name the world:
These new truths create this new world
We live here
Tomorrow when I leave
Rename the world (“Truth and Consequences,” Sing 33)
Bibliography
A Couple of Ways of Doing Something. Poems by Bob Holman, photographs by Chuck Close, interview by Lyle Rexer, Aperture, 2006
Berrigan, Anselm, editor. What is poetry? (Just kidding, I know you know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009). Wave Books, 2017.
Edwards, Cliff. Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest. Loyola Press, 1989.
Holman, Bob. The Collect Call of the Wild. Henry Holt, 1995.
—. The Cut-Outs (Matisse). PeKa Boo Press, 2017.
—. “Re: some follow up.” Received by Mark Silverberg, 10 July 2017.
—. Sing This One Back to Me. Coffee House Press, 2013.
Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. University of California Press, 2003.
Van Gogh, Vincent. “Letter 524, To Theo van Gogh.” Arles, 14 August 1888, van Gogh’s Letters, translated by Johana van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/524.htm. Accessed 31 July 2017.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Norton Critical Edition, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, Norton, 1973.
Endnotes
[1] Among the many works chronicling New York’s Lower East Side poetry scene is Daniel Kane’s seminal All Poets Welcome and Anselm Berrigan’s What is Poetry? Just Kidding, I Know You Know (Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletters 1983-2009).
[3] Van Gogh completed the Wheat Field series (May 1889 to May 1890) which depicted the view from his room in the asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence in changing lights and seasons. “Good” may refer to Wheat Field at Sunrise (1890) or Enclosed Wheat Field with Rising Sun (1889), both in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. While van Gogh was confined to the hospital grounds for much of his year-long stay, this did not limit the affective power he found in nature. He wrote to his brother Theo, “Through the iron-barred window I see a square field of wheat in an enclosure . . . above which I see the morning sun rising in all its glory” (Letter 592, quoted in Edwards 104).
[4] Here’s another poem from The Cut-Outs where readers are encouraged, in both abbreviated and emphatic ways, to imagine and appreciate the details—even, or maybe especially, with objects that might be disregarded as insignificant scraps:
Scrap #53
Look!
Look at it!
[5] Holman talks about the process of writing these poems in the introduction to A Couple of Ways of Doing Something: “the daguerreotype was always a player in the poem. And so was the person. I had conversations with everybody, and I also researched everybody, and often I used . . . the image, the artist, the name . . . With Philip Glass, I wrote the poem on a piece of staff paper he gave me, and that gave us the idea of how to move some different graphic elements. . . With Laurie Anderson, I could never get her to sit still long enough to have an interview, but we hung out together at an opening one night, and I followed her around with a tape recorder, and so her comments infuse it. Every poem is built differently” (iv).