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GUEST SPOT “Mouth Almighty” on the Cutting Edge
of Multiculturalism’s Future Tech by
Daniela Gioseffi GIOSEFFI: “We followers of advant-garde
poetry—in these wild and crazy times of media expansion—know you’ve been
dubbed a member of the “Poetry Pantheon 11” by The New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates,
Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Bob.
You’ve been crowned “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” in The New York Daily News, “Poetry Czar” in The Village Voice, “Dean of the Scene” in Seventeen: The five-part video series you helped produce for PBS,
The United States of Poetry, aired nationally in spring, 1996. How many poets
were featured? HOLMAN: Over sixty: Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Rita Dove, Allen Ginsberg,
Tracie Morrison, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Reed, Naomi Shihab Nye, and former President
Jimmy Carter, poets of many backgrounds, rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign
Language poets, and Slammers. GIOSEFFI: And, The United States of Poetry is now a book anthology from Harry
N. Abrams Publishers, currently in its second printing, and it’s a CD from
Mouth Almighty. What’s Mouth Almighty? HOLMAN: Mouth Almighty Records is a label
especially for oral poetry with music, distributed by Mercury Records,
founded in January 1996, and for which I now punch the clock. We’ve got
fourteen poetry CDs on our list. GIOSEFFI: You’ve graciously shown me
around the studio introducing me to your simpatici
co-workers. Mouth Almighty is actually THE label for oral poetry with music,
and it’s much more vital than, say, Caedmon—these days. You’ve appeared
widely on TV: “Nightline,” “Good Morning America,” “ABC News Magazine,” MTV’s
“Spoken Word Unplugged,” and even “The Charlie Rose Show”! You’ve done it
all, Bob, maybe even topped Bill Moyers for bringing poetry to the American
people. What’s next? (We settle into
office chairs at Mouth Almighty studios in front of bottles of soda water one
hot September afternoon.) Despite your avant-gardism, and anti academic,
Bohemian stance, you have fine social graces, better than many professorial
types! You’re such a busy media mogul of America’s slam and rap poetry scene!
I’m pleased you could grant a special interview for VIA. HOLMAN: We go back a long way, Daniela. GIOSEFFI: Remember when we started in
poetry in the early 70s with Pedro Pietri, our inventive Afro-Cuban poet
friend? We read at Dramatis Personae together with Pedro and Amiri Baraka,
among other people in the days before there was a Nuyorican Café and a
multi-cultural movement. I sang poems to my Nubian lyre and you, Pietri and
Baraka rendered dramatic recitations back before rapping and slamming were
in. “The Last Poets” now on one of your Mouth Almighty CDs were performing
way back then with their drums and music! HOLMAN: Oh, yeah, and you Daniela. You
were an experimenter, a performance poet—choreopoem dancer with your own
wild show then. GIOSEFFI: I’ve always been an independent
on the fringe, but a lover of the avant-garde since those early days when I
performed in Soho happenings. My first grant award was in multi media poetry
from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1971, so I understand where
you are coming from. I know you’ve toured the country performing your own
poems, too. You’ve become a specialist in sound since helping to produce so
many slam sessions and most notibly, “The United States of Poetry,” a video
series, aired on PBS networks througout the country. You’ve promoted poetry
into daily life by all possible means: you’ve won three Emmys over six
seasons producing Poetry Spots for WNYC-TV, received a Bessie Performance
Award, twice been Featured Artist at the Chicago Poetry Video Festival and
won International Public Television Awards for “The United States of Poetry”
and “Words in Your Face.” The later production for PBS’ s “Alive TV9” was
hailed by The New York Times as a
“breakthrough for the new oral poetry outside the academy”: You’ve done so
much! Now what could possibly be next? HOLMAN: There actually is a new media
project which is the next step past “The United States of Poetry.” It’s “The
World of Poetry!” Washington Square films, which produced USOP, has just
received word that we are going to get money from—of all places—the National
Endowment for the Arts, which has been all but knocked out of the box by
conservative elements. The NEA has just decided to plunk down a nice chunk of
change into a major project for poetry. “The World of Poetry!” will take on
the world in all of its gorgeous multi-linguality as the USOP took on these
states. The main difference being that we don’t have a series as the ultimate
goal. Instead we will simply be commissioning poets to work with film
directors so that we don’t have to switch them into any sort of themetic
context or any kind of time formula. The poems will be available as they are
made on the Internet through Quick Time and through other means of downloading
digital video. The film makers will also be working on interviews of straight
video documentaries of poems. . . . But the big idea is to
move into a new type of video anthology for the online media where poetry is
going to be found in the future. Ultimately, eventually we will have some
kind of a series, or a feature film, or perhaps “the making
of. . . .” What’s going to be sensational is the ability to
find the place to go for some media poetry of say, East European women poets
if you are interested in that, or poems about ecology or nature, or poets of
a certain language, to compare literatures, for example. So, that’s “The World
of Poetry!” I’ll start work on that in just a few weeks. We’ll have a large
series at Biblios for the world, and hopefully we’ll be a little meeting stop
for an internatinal poetry community—where the only rule will be no US
American English poems. Poems will be read in their original languages, with
a focus on translators as they’re translated into English. We’ll do brief
interviews, have an open mike, poems in other languages. GIOSEFFI: So, it’s going to be other
languages, but you’re going to have English translations? HOLMAN: The series here at Biblio’s (a
bookstore reading series in Manhattan) will have translators—but the problem
for any kind of global access is that we are going to have to have the poetry
translated into a ton of languages. Whether we’ll use “stupid software” or
whether we’ll have a bevy of translators available, like the monks doing
their illuminated letters, or whatever, remains to be seen. Right now the
important thing is capturing the poets’ performance in the original style of
language—being given its due in whatever films or poems come out of the
project. GIOSEFFI: Right, but first you’ll be
recording the poets’ poems in their own languages. What a huge endless
project! HOLMAN: I hope it lasts me at least the
rest of my life! GIOSEFFI: I think it should, indeed. If
you’re going to get everything into all the major languages. It’s
mind-boggling! HOLMAN: We’ll start off in the original
language and then we’ll see where it leads us, and into which languges. And
then there’s also the idea of—though I’m not a big one for voice over translations—so
that means we are talking about subtitles. Maybe it will be subtitles, but
maybe, there will be a way to graphically represent the poem in another
language where those graphics can become part of the visual scheme of the
filmed whole, so that the elements of concrete and visual poetry can have an
impact on the way the poem is translated and what we’ll see on the screen.
Maybe a year from now, I will start shooting, but right now the idea of how
we’ll translate into many languages is developing. GIOSEFFI: But, I don’t understand why the
NEA is going to give money to foreign language poetry rather than US. HOLMAN: Because the project will be based
here and our American production company has proven itself to be a leader in
this new poetry. . . . GIOSEFFI: So, the idea is that you have
the proven track record in presenting poetry in varied oral media and visual
ways and that the project would be a diplomatic outreach, perhaps toward an
internationalizing culture of the World Wide Web? HOLMAN: Yes, cultural outreach,
absolutely. The production will be centered here in the USA with US film
makers creating it. We’ll be taking some production tours around with US film
makers, so that it crosses over into sociological realms and other artistic
principals. GIOSEFFI: Okay, but this is not a part of
Mouth Almighty, or is it? HOLMAN: No, but it will be nice for Mouth
Almighty to do the sound track. We did the soundtrack for the United States
of Poetry and you know, it’s a wild little trout line that gets spun out when
you make a film or TV series of poetry—and then the next job you find
yourself in spin offs of that project from the sound track. And the reason is
the music and CD’s of this company are a place where art and commerce have a
real tight relationship, so that a record label like Mercury can afford to
take a chance on the economics of bringing poetry to a larger audience. It
can also have a little reflection back on itself, as doing a good thing—which
is helping poetry to survive in an anti-poetic age—there’s that dynamic to
the whole thing. GIOSEFFI. Capisco! Sì, sì, signore! As the big publishing companies used to
dabble in poetry and some still do for that important reflection—helping
“literary culture” or poetry—its most avant garde element, lyric soul-to-soul
communication—to survey. But, it’s the age of huge multinational
conglomerates so that a company like Bertelsmann based in Germany owns not
only Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell but all the repro-rights to Elvis Presley
and all the huge conglomerate of Barnes & Noble Book Stores, too, and on
and on. HOLMAN: Exactly. Who would have thought
that we’d know these corporate genealogies, us poets? Not me, but it’s a
horrendous age of the triumph of capitalism. Everyone ends up working for
some kind of corporation. And when you watch the big face-offs, it’s between
Disney and China as to whether the film about the Tibetan Dali Lama can be
made. It’s a crazy world and it’s hard to keep your footing as a poet—without
having to run the rapids; and how do you keep your life and your art walking
hand-in-hand? I find myself working for a corporation—which draws a lot of
criticism, as opposed to say working for a university which seems to be a
safe heaven for poets—but which causes poetry to become walled off from the
lives of most people. I’m working in oral poetry for a major record label. Is
there a purpose in getting these CDs to a Walmart or a K-mart so that a kid
can find poems in the same format as rock & roll or rap? I don’t know for
sure. We’re two years into the operations of Mouth Almighty. But, what I do
know is that the fourteen records we’ve released are as carefully honed and
as full of good poetry as the best poetry books that are coming out right now
and that I’m very proud of. . . . It’s a scary and a risky
place to be, but that’s how I live my life. I think of it often as the
MTV-ization of poetry, but you can as well call it the poetization of MTV! The
point is to get the poem on television in a form that will make the poet
proud of it, that won’t embarrass the poet, so that the poet still feels in
possession of the poem—the maker of the poem. The collaboration between the
director and the poet was my job with “The United States of Poetry.” GIOSEFFI: I wanted to ask you, did each
poet presented in the video series chose the way the poem was presented
visually and dramatically, or did you as director chose the costume, the setting?
Did Pedro Pietri—who, by the way, has traveled in Italy and been translated
into Italian and published in Milano—did Pedro, for example, decide to be
taped at a phone booth with a dog walking over and around him? HOLMAN: Mark Pellington was the director,
and some of the ideas, like the staging of Pedro Pietri’s poem—one of the
best of the American century—came from Steve Kemill, the art director. GIOSEFFI: In other words you didn’t go to
the poets and say how would you like to present your poem or have it staged
for video? HOLMAN: Oh, yes, we absolutely did. Every
single poem in the series began with a phone call to the poet: “Well, if you
were going to see this on TV, how would you like it presented?” GIOSEFFI: So, Quincy Troupe decided to be
taped sitting in his favorite chair at home with his child and wife on the
couch? HOLMAN: Yes, some of the poets, like
Quincy, for one example, were more involved in the creation of their
video-poem setting than others. . . . We shot Sparrow’s poem
right near the library on Fifth Avenue in the rain with all the umbrellas
around. What happened for most of the poets is that they were quiet when we
asked how they wanted to shoot their piece, but that’s how the collaboration
began. We’d suggest something and the poet would come back with an idea or
they’d say, “You decide, you’re the film makers, but just give me final
approval.” Josh Blum, my co-producer, was the guy who walked into the
Nuyorican Cafe and said this ought to be on television and we’ve been
collaborating together for eight years now. He’s a New York City guy who
understands art and has a great sense of business, too. . . . GIOSEFFI: There was a good deal of play
and parody on the television media, and on the idea of the TV commercial,
too. . . . But, I noticed you don’t mention Bill Moyer’s
“Language of Life” series in your introduction to The United States of Poetry—your book from Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
based on the series. HOLMAN: Yeah, I probably should have, but
let me just say something about the kind of poetry we put on our series. “The
United States of Poetry” wasn’t meant to display the sixty best poets in the
country or the sixty best poems, but to show the muscle of poetry as an art
form throughout the nation and among the people. We wanted people to see the
variety of poetry that’s being written and know that they can make up their
own minds about what’s good poetry, or who the best poets are. The country’s
so fractured by race and cultural divides, which should in fact be points of
connection and respect, but in fact we are beginning to hear from some of
these cultures for the first time and it’s the poets who are speaking out
for their cultures. . . . If you have a young voice just
discovering itself as we do on the series, for example, an eleven-year-old
poet, simply for that poet to proclaim: “I am” in the unfettered, borderline
rhetoric of someone just learning how to speak. It’s a
beginning. . . . GIOSEFFI: Yes, my students loved the
ingenuous boy who kept forgetting his poem and starting it over. It was a
charming piece. And then you had a very elderly woman in
contrast. . . . You had a great variety of manner, style,
diction, and culture and age group. You were showing every aspect of youth
and age and culture. HOLMAN: To get back to this thing about
the Bill Moyer’s series, Bill is not a poet and he approached poetry through
the lens of the Geraldine R. Dodge, bi-annual National Poetry Festival—which
is the largest county fair of poetry that there is. GIOSEFFI: That’s for sure. It’s right
near my home in rural Northwest Jersey and when I was invited to read in that
festival, I was amazed at its scope. HOLMAN: Yes, I think between Moyers’s two
series, “The Power of the Word” and “The Language of Light,” he really
brought the asthetic dimensions of poetry to a large audience, but, his approach
was a documentary approach. Let’s go where the great poets are and film them.
He gave more space the second time around to poets like Claribel Alegria,
Sekou Sundiata, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, that is poets who speak from other
cultures, than he had in the first series, and that’s good—but it’s very
different to see, say, Sekou on the stage with his band, in front of an
audience, than it is to see Amiri Baraka in “The United States of Poetry”
where everything has been especially produced for video with the full funk
sound behind it and special visuals. And we took an interpretive risk, a new
kind of poem, without a guide, without a host, and implicit in this is that
the person who guides you on your tour of poetry is “you.” You decide if the
poem is good or not and if you like it. You can hit “Rewind” if you like, but
there is no philosophical discussion or interview, just the poem performed
for video and the viewer is the judge. GIOSEFFI: Capisco! Sì, no conversation about it, no voice of authority, no
middleman arbitrating taste or concepts of creation, just wonderful sound
production and interesting, colorful visuals, and the poet herself or himself
telling it. HOLMAN: Yes. My co-producer, Josh Blum’s
tenent was that, first of all, we have to try to make good TV. And if you are
surfing the channels and you come across a poet standing at a podium, and you
are a poet, you might be thrilled and stay tuned, but if you are not
. . . and you’re the other ninety-nine percent of the population
and you come across something unusual—like say the poet, Sparrow, rising out
of the crowd of umbrellas on Fifth Avenue and thanking the people of New York
for returning things that he’s accidently dropped on the street through the
years, you might say, “What’s this?” and stay tuned. One of the things that
Vendler said about Moyers is that there was all this talk, but the precursors
of the tradition of poetry weren’t there. We tried to highlight texts on
screen from William Carlos Williams, Dickinson, Whitman, or Langston Hughes,
here and there, punctuating that tradition of the past to say: where do the
poets of the present, whether Joseph Brodsky or Allen Ginsberg, where do they
come from? Out of the tradition of American poetry! GIOSEFFI: Of course, in the tradition of
slam or rap poetry, we tend to think of poets who speak well or declare
dramatically. Those who are interesting to listen to and can be heard well,
but that doesn’t bother me as I come from a tradition of theatre and
performance poetry, and I’d rather not hear a mumbling poet who can’t speak
well with any sense of dramatic presentation. I’d rather just read their book
if they can’t speak well, but you have a poet, Peter Cook, who is signing, a
non speaking poet and all sorts of variety of styles and presentations on
USOP. . . . I loved how you mention in your introduction to
your book based on the series, how Plato wanted to ban poets from his
Republic because they embroider things and don’t tell objective truth. Most
poets probably don’t realize that Plato wanted to ban them, but Plato said
lots of stupid things. . . . Still, despite your wonderful
series, and Bill Moyers’s, this is a world of sports as opiate of the masses,
a country entertaining itself to death with Hollywood fantasy, and some poets
criticize the idea of the slam, saying, “Oh, that’s so American to have a
slam, to turn everything into a competition, even poetry!” HOLMAN: Ha! It is very American. Yes. GIOSEFFI: I had to judge a slam when I
was a workshop teacher at a Robert Bly conference in 1996, and some,
especially the European poets said that, but others had great fun with it. It
was a lark and Bly and I judged together and it was great fun. Also, most
editors would give themselves a bit of token space, to say “This is who I am
and where I’m coming from,” but you didn’t in USOP. Why is that? HOLMAN: Well, I’m in the precursor we
made to this, “Words in Your Face,” and as it is I have to wear my poem-proof
vest when I’m out in the street. Because a great number of poets are not included,
and it makes it easier for me to say, well I wasn’t in it either! It can
only be selective. And, I’m very lucky that I have a CD coming out this
spring from Mouth Almighty. I certainly like to get out and shake my rattle
just like every other performing poet, but I’m just too busy to think what
video I ought to make myself. . . . I was so busy on the
production side. But, I love my poets, they are the new heroes of this
country and I get my name out there a lot, because of my work in these extra-poetical
means. Every poet defines the job of being a poet for themselves. I just
happened to have these skills and it’s enabled me to continue a kind of
activist poetry—and, it also pays the rent. GIOSEFFI: I know I had to catch up with
you on the road via e-mail to set up this talk and it took some doing—but
speaking of writing poetry for book form, with all your myriad activities and
travels, how on earth do you survive as a poet yourself, Bob? How do you have
time to write? HOLMAN: I want to give you a copy of my
book, The Collect Call of the Wild,
and I do have a weekly column on the Internet, and I continue to write. I
just got my poems together for my CD from Mouth Almighty, too. True, I don’t
have as much time as I did before I had this job. But, like most poets I
have such a backlog of “the world’s greatest poetry,” that nobody’s ever
heard or seen, that I can begin to recycle some of that and work on it—and it
will be new as far as anyone knows. GIOSEFFI: Yes, the Internet is the whole
new deal. Bordighera has a homepage, Mouth Almighty has one, even I have an
e-zine for which I just won a grant, Wise
Women’s Web. I’ve seen you all over the Internet and I know your
collection of poems, The Collect Call
of the Wild, out in 1995 from Henry Holt & Co. You were proclaimed.
“the first poetic drop-kick into the new millennium” by Next magazine and “Impressive (to say the least)” by Robert
Creeley, on that book. It’s your fifth book. You also co-edited, with Miguel
Algarin, Aloud! Voices from the
Nuyorican Poets Cafe, also from Holt and an American Book Award winner. We’ve
had Miguel in our VIA Guest Spot. Aloud is currently in its third
printing. You helped reopen the Cafe in 1989, and helped run the infamous
Poetry Slams there from 1989 to 1996. You brought rappers like Monie Love,
KRS-1, Michael Franti, and others into the poetry orbit. Since 1993 you’ve
co-produced the reading series “Rap Meets Poetry”—which led to “Fighting
Words” on MTV. You’ve curated reading series at St. Mark’s Church, worked at
the Poetry Project, the Whitney Museum, and the Public Theater among other
locales. You’ve toured the United States and Europe with your “amazing
traveling word show, “and you’re the Artistic Director of the touring
company, “Real Live Poetry.” You’ve been awarded a New York Foundation for
the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, been funded by the NEA, New York State
Council on the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, and you’ve taught “Exploding
Text: Poetry as Performance,” so I know no grass will be growing under your
feet, especially with this new international project on your hands, “The
World of Poetry.” I’ve selected the following sample of your poems for VIA
readers: Grazie molto for taking
time out of your busy schedule to talk with VIA, Bob. HOLMAN: My pleasure, Daniela! Poem once when I was little I knelt before an
onion, Dug my arms into the ground up to my
elbows And prayed for my fists to turn into
potatoes. The sky was all owls closing in and a sow
bug Waltzed deftly across my eardrum. It went
like This: dimde sklittle mouse. A golden
melody Popped and cascaded, I could not tell
inside Outside. Tongue, tongue lay there a
lucious Cucumber. Gasp. No wonder you were
surprised, As I waited for potatoes, as you paraded Past like a typewriter. I was certainly
surprised. Then the onion opened and inside was a
potato. This
Scratchy Life No security, that’s fine No love, sure, sounds great No blessing in disguise, or out of
disguise either That’s good real goood O! What a beautiful Absolute Walking around, a beanbag of blood Keeping pace with the air, a purple Brilliance abop the brilliance Because the poet tastes The words as she makes ’em The rules and roles are sweeping Up is up wherever The sea unfurls itself your hair To make itself the sea One Sea In Antarctica live King Penguins Who patrol the borders of the seas. Resigned, disgruntled, with bugs In the tips of their oily feathers, These once regal creatures have learned What regal really means. The start Of bitter, the tart of loss, their dives Bungee and grope for substance, A depth to depths. Get at political bop. Segue the individual penguin IRS-wise, A faux system in which God hollers
!Dante! Who abruptly tosses his stylus down To dance God’s ministrations. I pulled These crusty cases out of the docket
holder: The twelve per cent of U.S. population That is Black, the fringes around my
lover’s Lovely cunt to sing the language that
seduces I will beat you up I will beat you Up drum drum to grow old upon love To curse in numerous languages to Enumerate numerous to whip Elephants over Alps to proclaim Victory the triumph of science Is history. Penguins rule! In Antarctica live King Penguins Who patrol the borders of the seas. They busily adjudicate the line twixt Indian ocean and Pacific, the two Chinese Seas, how far the nets’ economy deeds The shirr-run of cod. Now about that
Retirement Account — the Pension Plan was put into Mutuals, see, looking for the best
return, Spreading risk, demanding return, little Risk, even invested in the company you
work for (Have retirement account from), so to do
the best To get the dividend and increase profit They downsized you, I am sorry for irony. I mean, sorry for everything. We know
everything Seeing that we watch TV constantly,
“monitor The monitor,” I believe is the phrase,
the truth is We so busily watch we do not see The two candidates are twin-headed Monsters of the same faux system,
capitalist Body, which locks the whole thing in
place. This is ok since you are rich and control the media
which gives Us shows like “Martin” and “Roseann” that
delude Things are basically ok. Are they? It is
a question, The Penguins answer “Aye aye”, and I, I
sign off here. (The Penguin Poet [cf. Poetic Penguins by
Wm Boyd]) The Death of
Poetry You were invited there You overslept again What’s your excuse this time You missed the boat/vote/rote/ moat/bloat/goat The book was printed up The words all ran together The pages black with ink Make faux po’s use invisible stink It was a fluke that you were inside of
the coffin as they swung it upon their shoulders Wasn’t it a real nice graveride? You’re finally inside in (inside) Real nice riptide Woho The Death of Poetry Mercifully fast Only lasted a millenium or two Billenium Posnoozetry: The Art of the Past No mo po po get down to bidness Po’s no show Ho ho ho - good riddance The view was dark/hark/lark/bark/park The time was passing slo/motion/go/potion The day was calm and a foggy, cool and a
balmy, April is the cruelest o’coolest The creeps were creeping out Launching eulogy missiles at the street The words’ worth an opposite beat! The drummer’s melodizing feet Typewriters on parade Walt’n’Emily rolling grave Nothing left save to save The Death of Poetry It was a computer thing A neuter thing Belligerent knucklehead Brat art teeth shred Flesh word battery nozzle Blue skinny grenade carousal Itchy mean grouse rasp kiss Whatta life death is The Death of Poetry Whatta life death is The Death of Poetry |