Rebellious New York City #1: Bob Holman's book The Collect Call of the Wild
Refreshing for me to revisit Bob and then Seth Tobocman of exuberant resistance through culture on the Lower East Side!
Bob Holman performing with Popa Susso.
May 25, 2025
This Appreciation of Bob Holman’s 1995 book The Collect Call of the Wild is the first of two admiring views today into very active figures on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s. Second will be Seth Tobocman and his book You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. I got to read with Bob and with Maureen Owen at the Ear Inn in NYC, November 1986. Later she and I performed under candlelight (no electricity!) on the Autumn 1989 night when Bob re-opened the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe. Both she and he are featured in the 37-Track Rebel Poets’ compilation Worlds Made Flesh—among 15 Poets and 19 Musicians. Seth Tobocman provided the front-cover art for that highly loaded cassette.
Seth and I reconnected in New Orleans, 2006, when we both volunteered with Common Ground in the Upper and Lower 9th Wards, and in the Winter of 2007-2008, when we fought for Public Housing residents who were losing their homes due to demolitions and out-of-town Contractors’ re-developments.
BOB HOLMAN’S COLLECT CALL OF THE WILD Poetry from Henry Holt, 1996 Now here's a volume brimming With stuff worth limning 6 works in one!-- Over 15 years they cover!-- A post-pomo oeuvre, Meaning to bestir yuh! Cuz Bob 's a brio boyo A dandy, breakin' dancer-- Allusive as a McCluha-Pound-- New York streets his home ground-- With batters up and running, Pictures like Chinese masters, Along with moments tender-- P'shock!--P’zazz!--A-plenty So get you to a bookstore-- Get ... Wild upon an airplane-- Holman's antic hustle Dances after Whitman's-- He says everyone ‘s a genius-- Repeat: Everyone ‘s a genius!-- ‘N we’re all potential riches! Bob Holman is a musical poet of high exuberance and fine sentiments. He wants your participation in his poetry. His attitude toward creation (Bring yours! It’s open to all!) extends to energetic promotion of many, diverse people’s writing. Since 1989 Bob Holman has co-directed the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, serving as Host of the Cafe's Friday-night Slam. He's also brought poetry to the public through MTV (--Spoken Word Unplugged--): through PBS (--The United States of Poetry-- five-part series): and through Rock tours in the United States and Europe. Holman’s Collect Call of the Wild gathers from six previous books. It fans across two decades of modernity. Its melange offers a sensorium of memorable impressions Some omissions from prior editions I regret. This selection, issued by a major trade publisher, appears to disavow connection with Sandinist Nicaragua. The title ‘Poem: Masaya’ in Bob's Panic DJ is now ‘Required Reading’: the lovely, clever and deep-felt tribute to Sandino and his sombrero’s ‘light’, ‘It Is Time’, is missing from Collect Call of the Wild: and dedications to Jessica Hagedorn and Maureen Owen--Maureen Owen one of the most original, perceptive and lyric poets of her generation, I think--are for some reason gone. Like Maureen Owen, Bob Holman intends his poetry for ear and eye, imagination and memory. His Collect Call says: 'Poetry is the Language of the Future.' At his best Holman is as direct as Francois Villon and as precise as Eric Dolphy. He practices a formula of Density: Clarity: Epiphany. Poems to his immediate intimates--to his wife, children and father ('a tiny flash, no thing reverses')--are both timeless and late 20th-century. Holman fulfills another poet’s trust: he expresses his time and place. Hip-Hop, New York City, TV, ads--the multifold, sensory saturation of modern, urban living that leaves our synapses snapping to keep up--figure in his work. Sometimes his facility lapses into cuteness or overload--then becoming almost as unmeaning as that which he protests--but his keenest lines make explosions reverberant. Startling and penetrating, these lines themselves create momentary eternities, quivering on the page, like the tingle that floods nape and toes in the instant when the voice within each of us finds its release.
Below are pieces drawn from an extensive Wikiwand biography of Bob that I recommend for conveying the HUGE amounts of work that Bob has done for poetry and poets over—Whoa!—more than 50 years. Praise to his decades
