(Reprinted with permission from East-Village.com.)
Backstage at the Bowery Poetry Club there’s a kora hanging on a wall. Only a few of the poets, singers, comics, and performance artists who work the BPC’s busy stage have ever played one, but anyone who’s heard poet/proprietor Bob Holman on the subject will understand why it’s there.
This harplike instrument is the favorite of the griots of West Africa, the traveling poets/storytellers/historians who carry in their heads (and hand down through their families) the musical and social traditions of the Mandinka or Mande peoples. Poetry is at the center of everything that happens in the villages of Gambia, Senegal, Guinea, and Mali. It’s performed for the whole populace, not embalmed in classrooms and anthologies. This oral tradition predates the West’s conception of poetry by thousands of years, and if you’ve ever experienced it directly –- perhaps by hearing Gambian griot Papa Susso, whom Holman brought to the BPC for a series of lectures and performances, full of jazzlike solos and spontaneous outbursts of dance –- you might just conclude that a society organized around poetry and music is a lot saner than ours.
So the BPC has a house kora. This may be the only club in NYC that has one, and it isn’t just decoration; it gets taken off the wall and played. The BPC is that kind of community, aware of its roots and busy keeping them alive. Holman imagined the place, built it, and runs it; in a sense, he’s a griot of the local arts community, a longtime pillar of institutions like the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Café. East-Village.com’s Bill Millard recently caught up with Bob and gathered his thoughts on the Bowery’s history and future, his own hotspot’s role, and the place of free expression at the core of American life.
Bill Millard: The East Village is in transition; it’s got a great bohemian past that it’s fighting for in some places. What are your comments on how the neighborhood is changing and how an arts scene can be a switchpoint driving it toward a thriving cultural style, rather than more Starbucks, more Duane Reade, more high-rises?
Bob Holman: We used to direct people to this place by saying that we’re across the street from CBGB’s. But with CBGB’s closing, what the hell are we going to say? The insurance bite gets tougher and tougher for joints like this. How many years do you want to do that? If you don’t get support but instead are treated like a tenant in a Monopoly game, how much of that shit do you want to take? You can hear a bell tolling out there, and I’m worried that it’s for us. There are positive signs: there’s Phil Hartman and his Federation of East Village Artists, and there’s the Howl Festival. There’s what’s going on at the Parkside Lounge. There are the grassroots joints like Steve Cannon’s A Gathering of the Tribes and Clayton Patterson’s Outlaw Gallery and Shalom’s Fusion Arts Center. There’s the poetry triangle of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and the Bowery Poetry Club. The Bowery is positioning itself to possibly be the first crossover place for poetry, and by the grace of having a fantastic staff and getting a good placement real-estate-wise, we’re able to still exist. But the kind of Disneyfication that happened at Times Square –- and in a way also happened at the Meat Market –- has now got its eyes set on the Lower East Side, the East Village, and the Bowery. The central dynamic of the Bowery is social-service organizations. They’re the result of the days when the Bowery was the national headquarters for homeless, out-of-work men, from the Depression on and even before. Two doors away from us, the Greenwich Houses halfway house was sold out almost overnight about six months ago and now is becoming apartments. The transience that you’re talking about is the very nature of the neighborhood. This is the neighborhood of change; whether you’re talking about the Yiddish-speaking socialists of the Lower East Side or the Irish or Italian immigration waves that came through here, or the Puerto Rican and Dominican bastions of Loisaida, you’re talking about how this neighborhood has gone through its incarnations. But once it gets sold through real estate adventures that look on culture as a bottom-line capitalist draw, rather than the attraction of the local art, the dug-in survivor poets, musicians, and theater people, then the neighborhood will flip just the way that Times Square flipped. Anchors of all forms are critical: that the nonprofits be supported, that an institution like CBGB’s be supported. If you can have tax breaks for mega-corporations, why can’t you have a tax or rent break for a cultural center that’s done what CBGB’s has here? It’s the spirit of the place. Once it gets commercialized, the place loses its soul. Then we have definitely become a nation of consumers instead of a nation of citizens.
