So they tell me, get your act together
Write something, make it new for a change
Give up on those errant habits
Go to Chicago
Be there for Birth of Slam
Knock down a few bowling pin icons
Bowling alleys, new stain t-shirts
Statues of lint and a make-my-day jockstrap
I’ll sit in with Scotty and the Rib Tips
Watch true brews slide down that mahogany bar
Run it by my man Sergio over at Weeds as we
Wait for the Queen of Poetry to drive in from el Boss Town
So tune up the poems performed to Marsyas’ flute
Keep the meddlesome chthonic wordslingers cranky
Invent a bonus alley, grab the moon
Climb on top of the speaker system and fly
Write a book and get it out
Invent a pseudonym to review it, rave
Rave rave along the Lake
Rehearse the verse all ears radar Michigan
And fall in love a few times so nobody knows about it
Keep it to myself, a few poems quit, quite, and quiet
Outside of so-called competition and the waving blades
Making slow smoky patterns at the old Green Mill
Copyright © 2024 by Bob Holman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 27, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Scotty and the Rib Tips’ is an homage to Chicago, where I’ve lived a few times. Followed Big Table there—Bill Knott, Andrei Codrescu, and its editor, Paul Carroll, who was driving a cab when I was there in 1970, 1971. Ted Berrigan there, Alice Notley. And in that Chicago exodus to New York with Bob Rosenthal, Shelley Kraut, Barb Barg, Rose Lesniak, Steve Levine. I fell in love with the idea of slam in 1989; and went there to meet Marc Smith, and there I heard Patricia Smith, the Queen of Poetry. Luis J. Rodriguez. I brought the slam back to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. And the Cafe itself is currently closed for ‘Nuyoreconstruction.’ So that slam now has moved to Bowery Poetry Club. And I’m still with Scotty and the Rib Tips: ‘The blue the critics don’t allow / Is the sadness of America / My friends in Ukraine join hands / Touching you is touching them.’”
—Bob Holman
Bob Holman was born in Tennessee to Sally Ruth Lewis, the daughter of a coal miner, and Benjamin Franklin Geller, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Both of his parents were from Harlan, Kentucky. Holman attended Columbia University, where he was a student of Kenneth Koch. In the early 1970s, he attended Alice Notley’s workshop at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.