Letter to a Young Poet

This query arrived last month in the poetry.guide mailbox:

Dear Mr. Holman,

...I am a 10th grader who goes to the Jewish Academy of Metro Detroit. In my English class, we are doing our poetry unit. My group is doing a project on slam poetry. We find it interesting, especially since we can relate to the poetry and its themes, and because the time period in which slam poetry evolved is so close to now. I picked you to do my report on, because I think that your poetry is cool and powerful. I feel that I can relate to it and to the message it conveys. I was thinking that it might be interesting to have a personal view (i.e., yours) on your poems, your life, and how you started being a slam poet. By “personal view” I mean, when and how you came up with the poems? Was it a result of a specific event? Did you have a certain purpose in mind when you wrote them? The specific poems on which we would like commentary are “1990,” “A Jew in New York” and “AIDS.” Thank you very much in advance....

While poets are certainly not always their own best critics, the Margy-Snyder-half of the poetry.guide team convinced the Bob-Holman-half that his responding notes on these three poems are worth sharing with you, our readers. (Use the linked titles to read the poems themselves.)

“1990” has an interesting history. When it was written, I was at the peak of my work as a performing poet -- I had been touring the US and Europe for years with a musician, my Main Motor Scooter Mr. Vito Ricci, and this was culminating with a gig at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, a 999-seat auditorium where Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain had spoken.

This was at the moment when I just spent a year reopening the Nuyorican Poets Cafe where I began the first Poetry Slams in NY. The collision of poetry, slam, Nuyorican, hiphop, multiculti, performance -- well, poetry was on fire and the spark flash explosion was the Cafe.

I wrote “1990” to give a way into the multitude of absurdity in the midst of political tumult, to give a personal disbelief in the midst of global burps whiplash infodrowning. But it was a long poem, and I was not going to read it at Cooper Union, picking musical and more perf pieces instead.

At the last minute, I decided to include it. The audience was packed w/ a lot of the new young poets from the Nuyorican. The poem got audience response right from the top and kept going higher and higher, raised the roof, brought down the house. For a decade it was my signature poem -- it was the only poem to appear on the Knitting Factory’s “Best of” series. It’s been used in numerous high school speech competitions.

“A Jew in New York” was written as an identity poem, perhaps the most popular mode in Def Jam poetics. But being a mongrel half-breed, the poem is of necessity more complex than most shout-I-outs. I especially like the hinge between the verses, where my name switched from Geller to Holman. There are a lot of versions of this poem out there -- here’s the “final.”

As for “AIDS” -- it was written in 1989, at the height of the plague. It’s self-explanatory, eh?

Keep in touch,
Bob

The poems themselves:

• “1990”
  
  
• “A Jew in New York”
  
  
• “AIDS”