A Couple of Ways of Doing Something

Poetry Reading & Book Signing

Thursday, March 28, 2013   7:00pm

Members FREE, Not-Yet Members $10

A Couple of ways of Doing Something, a book (from Aperture) and exhibition of daguerreotypes by Chuck Close and poems by Bob Holman, is part of an energetic tradition of collaboration between New York poets and painters, including Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, and many others.  Holman has been especially involved, and  has directed poets’ plays with sets designed by Elizabeth Murray, Robert Kushner and David Hockney. His collaboration with Ms. Murray turned into a larger collaboration, a 25-year marriage and two children. They also collaborated on a book, Cupid’s Cashbox. Bob Moskowitz contributed black and white drawings for Holmans’s book, Beach Simplifies Horizon. Holman  has also published a collection, Picasso in Barcelona, in the voice of the painter, and his new book, due in May from Coffee House Press, Sing This One Back To Me, includes poems for Van Gogh, Kandinsky, and a new poetic form called the “Rothko.” Still, Holman,  founder and artistic director of the Bowery Poetry Club, is a poet most often connected with the oral tradition, live performance, and poetry in digital media: spoken word, hiphop, slam, poetry films, endangered languages.  Dubbed “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word”  (NY Daily News), “Poetry Czar”  (Village Voice), and “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen Magazine), he studied poetry at Columbia where he now teaches: he finds it fulfilling, becoming the guy he used to laugh at (he also teaches at NYU). He has published sixteen books of poetry if you include CDs and DVDs, which he does and is currently in production on “Language Matters with Bob Holman,” a 90-minute special on Endangered Languages for PBS produced by David Grubin with Holman as host. He is also a beekeeper, with three hives on the roof of the Bowery Poetry Club. His mother, a native of Harlan, Kentucky, lives in Tarpon Springs. 

A Couple of Ways of Doing Something book on sale at FMoPA Museum Store for $50.