After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, Bob Holman founded, with Sara Miles and Susie Timmons, the NYC Poetry Calendar, a free monthly publication with all the readings and poets "on the same page". This led to his first poetry job in 1977: with the CETA Artists Project, the largest federally-funded artist project since the WPA. This in turn led to a run coordinating the Monday Night Series at St. Mark's Poetry Project and his later becoming the Coordinator there.
Holman was instrumental in the reopening of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1987, and was the original slammaster there. He is generally credited with bringing the poetry slam to New York City, where it eventually penetrated the mass media and commercial markets.
Holman was initially a controversial figure in the poetry slam scene. Some, including Poetry Slam founder Marc Smith, had said that Holman brought out the worst parts of poetry slams, including commercialism (his poetry recording label, Mouth Almighty, sponsored a winning team in the 1997 National Slam), whimsicality (Holman coined the phrase "the best poet always loses", and created the "Hideous Sudden-Death Haiku Overtime Round" for ties), and a who-cares attitude. Others felt he brought a sense of irony and openness that helped define Slam as a performance genre rather than a school of poetry.
In 2002, Holman founded the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, where he is the proprietor, and regularly, host. The Bowery Poetry Club is home to a weekly poetry slam called NYC-Urbana, held on Tuesdays. In a 2005 interview, Holman said,
Holman has directed plays for poets' theater, including work by Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Mayakovsky, W. H. Auden, Edwin Denby, John Ashbery, Robert Kelly, Ed Sanders. He appeared in the improvisational opera "Mirror Man" by David Thomas of Pere Ubu. Holman was one of the founders of Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, with Bill Adler, Jim Coffman and Sekou Sundiata.
Teaching positions have included The New School and Bard College; currently, he is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University School of the Arts and at New York University. Along with Margery Snyder, Holman is one of the poetry guides at About.com.
He was married to artist Elizabeth Murray, who died in 2007. They have three children.
From Holman's website ( Bob Holman):
"From Slam to Hiphop, from performance poetry to spoken word, Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry in our culture. Recently dubbed a member of the "Poetry Pantheon" by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Holman has previously been crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" (New York Daily News), "Poetry Czar" (Village Voice), "Dean of the Scene" (Seventeen), and “this generation’s Ezra Pound,” (San Francisco’s Poetry Flash). His latest collection of poems, a collaboration with Chuck Close, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, was first exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during the Venice Biennale and will be published by Aperture in fall 06. The TV series he produced for PBS, The United States of Poetry, won the INPUT, International Public Television Award; he founded Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, the first ever major spoken word label, in 1995; ran the infamous poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café from 1988-1996; and was a host/administrator at the St. Marks Poetry Project 1977-84. He is currently Visiting Professor of Writing at the Columbia School of the Arts and the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, Founder/Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, and Artistic Director of Study Abroad on the Bowery, a certificate program in applied poetics."
