Bob Holman and Marcos de la Fuente interviewed by Annalisa Marí Pegrum.
This interview features Bob Holman (a New York–based poet, performer, and cultural activist, a key figure in spoken word, and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café) and Marcos de la Fuente (a Galician poet and cultural facilitator, organizer of the Kerouac Festival in Vigo, New York and Mexico, whose work connects oral poetry and poetic experimentation through both individual and collective projects such as Se Buscan and Bowery Beats).
Bob Holman and Marcos de la Fuente will be performing in Ibiza (Spain) this summer, invited by the ‘Poetiuses’ festival, which will celebrate its second edition between July 30 and August 2 2026 at venues such as the JazzTa Bé club, the Sant Joan Market, and the Mondrian Hotel, among others.
Bob Holman and Marcos de la Fuente performing “The other thought” with shirts painted by Vanesa Álvarez — at the Bowery Poetry Club (New York), 2026.
Marcos, Bob, you have both stated that the Beat Generation has been a big influence for you both. Which Beat authors or texts marked your poetic awakening? Was there a poem or book that made you think: “this is something else”?
(BOB HOLMAN): What had the greatest impact on me was not so much individual texts as live performance. Howl was certainly the defining work of the Beat Generation, although I encountered it later; what mattered more was hearing it read aloud. Listening to Amiri Baraka perform with David Murray, or hearing Jane Cortez with her band, the Firespitters, was transformative. Those experiences pushed me forward in a way I can’t imagine anything else could have.
I come as much from a background in theatre as in poetry, and for a long time I assumed I would make my living in the theatre rather than as a poet. That didn’t turn out to be the case, much to my surprise. Bringing orality into poetry, however, felt entirely natural to me, and I simply followed that impulse.
On a deeper level, that impulse is rooted in my family background. My mother was an Appalachian woman, steeped in bluegrass music and oral storytelling, while my stepfather, the only Jew in Harlem, Kentucky, carried with him the legacy of Eastern European and Russian futurism through his Ukrainian Jewish roots. Although no one in my family was an artist, I feel grounded in those two traditions, and that lineage has been a fundamental source of energy and direction in my work.
(MARCOS DE LA FUENTE):In my case, I was already reciting poetry on stage before I discovered the Beats. Learning about them gave me a context and a sense of purpose for developing as an oral poet and performer. For me, poetry is music, it is song. A physical vibration that connects bodies and shakes them. Ink and paper come later.
As for the authors, Kerouac and Ginsberg, without a doubt. The transformative power of Kerouac’s bebop writing and Ginsberg’s messianic, uninhibited recitations were a great influence, especially in reinforcing my vision of the poetic word and how one could impact society through language.
If we’re talking about books and poems, I would say the book On the Road and the poem “Howl.” The first two lines of “Howl” are a mantra that has transcended time. Its devilish rhythm, full of images, hooks you and shakes you in equal measure. As for On the Road, it’s a novel that continues to change lives. It was a response to the exacerbated capitalism that the Beats already sensed in the mid-1950s. In a consumerist society that sells its soul to the highest bidder, being an outsider is presented as the only possible path.
Marcos, Bob, you have both organized countless events, festivals and performances in which oral poetry has prevailed. What was your first contact with oral poetry?
(BOB HOLMAN): My first contact with oral poetry was watching the Ernie Kovacs show on TV. Kovacs came out of a vaudeville tradition and had characters in his show. It was, it was, he was like American Dada on his television show. And one of his characters was Percy Dove Tonsils. Percy Dove Tonsils was really, there were a, a, a, a smoking jacket, and his little black mustache, and big bottle glasses, and a long cigarette holder, and he would read your turn, which were often rock lyrics that he would read, oh, you know, who is that mule kicking in your stall? You know, oh, baby, hold my hand, won’t you hold my hand? You know, it was, it was right. It was making fun of poetry. But still, to me, it was like, wow, look what they’re getting away with.”
(MARCOS DE LA FUENTE):For me, it all started doing radio during my university years. I made my own programs where recitations were mixed with music. The radio studio became a school for my voice—a resonance chamber through which I could reach many people. I would say that Jim Morrison was the first person I saw reciting on stage. His poetry, mystical and transgressive at the same time, showed me a new way of hurling the word, far removed from the classical canons we had studied in school. Poetry as attitude, as a way of being in the world, as the path to enlightenment. Poetry can be transgressive and change people’s lives. Poetry is a truth that has been hidden and that the poet must tell everyone. An awakening. And that is the Beats, who turn the street into a pulpit and poetry into the last refuge of those disinherited by the system.
I was struck by the fact that when I asked you about the first texts that drew you to the Beat Generation, almost all of your answers referred not to books but to readings, recordings, and performances. It seemed that the oral dimension of poetry was central from the very beginning. Following on from that, which aspects of Beat poetics—such as orality, improvisation, rhythm, travel, marginality, or spirituality—have been most decisive in your own work?
(BOB HOLMAN): In a way, all of them, of course. But it’s important to be precise. Improvisation, for instance, didn’t really come from the Beats. There was actually very little improvisation in their work. Allen Ginsberg, for example, insisted on a very strict rhythmic structure in his readings. That was quite different from poets like Amiri Baraka, who worked closely with jazz musicians, or Jane Cortez, who performed with her band.
What the Beats gave me was something else: freedom. I was a hippie. There were drugs, there was pot, there was sexual and personal liberation, and there was a strong anti–Vietnam War stance. Politics were inseparable from poetry. Anti-establishment thinking was central, because at that time the establishment felt utterly suffocating. This was the 1960s—everything was charged with that energy.
I arrived in New York in 1966, just one month after Frank O’Hara died. I would have given anything to have met him. I haven’t read him as much as I probably should, but he is constantly mentioned by poets I admire.
What’s important is that places like the St. Mark’s Poetry Project brought together two major strands of American poetry: the Beats and the New York School. The New York School—classically defined by Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler—was deeply connected to French Surrealism and to the visual arts. Painters and poets were in constant dialogue in New York at that time.
The Beats, by contrast, didn’t really engage with the art world in the same way. You can see this clearly in the case of Jay DeFeo, whose painting The Rose could be considered a visual equivalent of Beat poetics. Yet she never gained real recognition within that mostly male circle. In fact, women generally couldn’t get traction in that scene at the time—though poets like Anne Waldman would later change that.
(MARCOS):I would say all of them. Spontaneity, travel, being outside the conventional, searching beyond the established order, beyond the real and the physical… When I discovered the Beats, I had already been reciting on stages with music for some time and, truth be told, I felt like a bit of a strange creature, since at that moment there were few oral poets in Spain. Knowing that the Beats, 50 years earlier, were already raising the banner of the spoken word and oral poetry was very liberating. The fact that they could transform an entire generation with poetry seemed unthinkable. I don’t know if we can achieve that now. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Women were largely excluded from the Beat scene. Do you have a theory as to why this happened, and how figures like Diane di Prima managed to gain visibility within such a male-dominated movement? Marcos, do you feel that this is still the same nowadays?
(BOB HOLMAN): The short answer is patriarchy. It’s embedded in history, in power structures, and in the ways cultural authority has long been exercised. The Beat Generation was no exception. This exclusion operated in much the same way as racism has—and still does—by normalizing inequality while claiming progress. We have come a long way, but there is clearly still a long way to go.
In the Beat world, women were not central to how that scene imagined itself. Many of the men were gay, but that did not translate into gender equality. Diane di Prima is often seen as an exception because she forced her way in—she took on that world head-on, on its own terms. Memoirs of a Beatnik could easily have been written by a man, and in some ways it feels shaped for a male gaze. That strategy may have helped her gain access, but it also reveals the cost of that access.
By contrast, poets like Hettie Jones were deeply marginalized and, in her case, mistreated—particularly within her relationship with Amiri Baraka. These dynamics extended to family and community, and they had lasting consequences. The gossip, the personal conflicts, the silences—all of that is part of the story. What also gets lost is how Baraka’s move into the Black Arts Movement left behind other avant-garde Black poets, such as the Umbra poets, who were trying to sustain a different kind of experimental space. Gender, race, power, and exclusion were all deeply intertwined, and the Beat Generation reflects those tensions as much as it resisted them.
(MARCOS): My sense is that things have changed a lot, although there is still a long way to go. I would say that one of the things that defines the current poetry scene is its diversity—especially in the U.S. Now there is great interest in women’s voices and the voices of minorities, and now it is their own voices that sustain and denounce—not through the voice of the white patriarchal and colonial man, as in the past. In this sense, little by little justice is being done, and the female voice has become absolutely fundamental to understanding the poetic discourse of our time.
When did you begin reading your own poetry publicly, and how did that lead to your later role as an organizer of poetry events and communities?
(BOB HOLMAN): I started writing poetry very early—I wrote my first poem when I was nine—and I never stopped. I always read my work aloud, and the response was encouraging, which made continuing feel natural. While living in Ohio, I came across the Dust Directory, a small chapbook listing independent presses and poetry scenes across the country. That thin volume made me realize there was a whole poetic world beyond the canonical figures like Ginsberg or the Beats.
When I arrived in New York, I began attending readings and eventually signed up to read myself—sometimes discovering that I was the only one who showed up. That was my real beginning: reading out loud, consistently, wherever there was space. Soon after, in the mid-1970s, I found the Nuyorican Poets Café, which revealed a living, multiracial, community-based poetry scene. At the time, I was the only white poet there, but I was welcomed, and that experience reshaped my understanding of poetry as performance and community.
A decisive moment came when I encountered early hip-hop. Hearing those rhythms made it clear that poetry could be performed with music, could rhyme, and could move bodies. I remember dancing and realizing I was dancing to poetry—something I had always dreamed of. That realization pushed me to write my first hip-hop–influenced poem and to memorize my work, since performance demanded it. From that point on, creating spaces for poets to gather, perform, and build community became inseparable from my own poetic practice.
(MARCOS): The first time I went on stage was in a theater in Salamanca, the university city where I studied. That first time made it clear to me that I was made for this. It was to open an indie pop music festival, and I recited poetry over electronic music: quite a discovery for the time. After that, I went to live in Ibiza, and there my vocation for scenic poetry accompanied and mixed with music was unleashed. A few years later, when I returned to Vigo, my city, I missed a poetry scene more focused on orality, and that’s why I started organizing open mics—as a call to other poets to generate a collective movement that didn’t exist. I think there are clichés about poets that don’t match reality. The poet is not a tormented being who likes to be alone on rainy nights. The poet is an empathetic person who enjoys the company of other poets and artists and who, at times, generates community through stage events or readings. Poetry may arise in solitude, but it needs the social to develop.
In the current political climate, which many experience as increasingly hostile and fear-driven, do you think poetry can still function as a space of resistance and community in the 21st century?
(BOB HOLMAN): I do. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and for me poetry and political activism were never separate. I was arrested during the protests at Columbia University in 1968, and at the same time I was writing poems. Politics, protest, and poetry were completely intertwined.
That connection continued when I began working through federally funded programs like CETA, which—much like the WPA during the Great Depression—paid artists to work in communities. That experience taught me that community organizations need poets, even if they can’t afford them. It also led me to understand my role not only as a protester, but as an organizer and arts administrator, first at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and later at the Nuyorican Poets Café.
Spaces like the Nuyorican, poetry slam, and later the Bowery Poetry Club became deeply political simply by restoring poetry to voice, body, and presence. Slam challenged academic hierarchies and brought poetry back to energy rather than reputation—it was about the poem you wanted to hear, not the name of the poet. That anti-establishment spirit was clear when figures like Harold Bloom declared slam “the death of art.” For us, that criticism only confirmed its power.
While we may miss a single oppositional voice like Allen Ginsberg’s today, what we have instead is a far broader range of voices—Black poets, poets of color, queer and trans poets—now being heard in ways that were unimaginable thirty years ago. That shift has changed poetry’s communities and its public presence. Moments like Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem demonstrate how poetry can still intervene powerfully in public discourse.
At the same time, movements inevitably become institutionalized. What begins as radically anti-establishment eventually enters museums, organizations, and official histories, losing some of its original urgency. But the voice—the orality—remains vital. Poetry still thrives in live encounters, in shared rooms, in direct address.
Today, that resistance also takes new forms: digital communities, multilingual poetry, and activism around endangered languages. If we can encourage people to write and perform poetry in their mother tongues, we keep those languages alive. For me, that is where poetry’s political power is now most urgent. Where would poets be without language?
(MARCOS): Absolutely. Poetry is the last space of resistance. When everything else fails, poetry will remain. They cannot defeat it, they don’t understand it, they don’t know how to stop it. It is an irreducible spring; they cannot govern it. The rallying cries and diatribes of any demonstration for freedom and human rights are poetry. Poets must march at the front, poets must sit beside those who pull the strings, poets are the counselors of a new world, of the world we want. There, in the implicit, in the metaphor, in the irony that each person deciphers when reading the poem—that is where the true power of the poetic word resides, because it cannot be pigeonholed, it cannot be labeled, and therefore it cannot be commodified, which allows it to maintain its power for change, to produce that precious click in people’s minds: another life is possible, another reality is possible.
If we’re talking about generating communities, that is precisely what we have been doing at the Bowery Poetry Club with the open mics. It’s a safe space, a place to share, to vomit, to strip naked in front of others who also come to show themselves vulnerable—that’s one side of it. On the other, there’s the rush of applause after reading something you thought wouldn’t matter to anyone. There is a reaffirmation, an acceptance by the group, a feeling of belonging to something after having shown yourself. It’s very powerful. A very rewarding way to build community.
Do you think poetry—especially poetry slam and spoken word—can serve as an effective pedagogical tool for young people? Why?
(BOB HOLMAN): Absolutely. In fact, I think this is one of poetry’s primary functions. Spoken word and poetry slam act as gateway forms, drawing people into poetry through voice, rhythm, and performance. Much like e. e. Cummings did on the page, slam restores orality and makes poetry immediately accessible.
Slam is not an end in itself but an entry point. For poets, it provides a space to find community, test their work publicly, and develop a voice. For audiences, it demonstrates that poetry is not a single form but a wide range of styles, much like music. Many people say they dislike poetry simply because they haven’t yet heard the kind that speaks to them.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of its pedagogical power comes from real-world impact. In contexts such as prisons, poetry has demonstrably transformed lives, offering young people a way to articulate experience, imagine change, and develop agency. Despite its limitations and institutionalization, slam has reconnected poetry with the body, the voice, and the community—and that alone makes it an invaluable educational tool.
(MARCOS): Without a doubt. It’s a dynamic and fun way to immerse oneself in language, in the word—which is the material with which we construct the reality we inhabit. Spoken word and slam transport us from the written to the oral—since we almost always write first and recite afterward. There’s a very interesting process here, almost one of healing or transformation. It’s a very powerful tool, and not just for teaching the young. We are providing them with a vehicle as powerful as it is necessary. I, who have been organizing open mics for more than 15 years, see the effects of poetic orality on people every night, and I have to say it’s spectacular. People don’t realize how attending an open mic or a poetry slam can change you.
Many writers and audiences have tended to associate Beat poetry with a specific historical generation. Do you think “the Beat” can instead be understood more broadly—as a state of mind or a long-standing poetic tradition?
(BOB HOLMAN): I do. Beat is not just a generation; it’s a state of mind and a way of living and writing that has existed for centuries. Long before it was named, it was already there—in oral traditions, in wandering poets, in griots, in Homeric storytelling. Much of this tradition hasn’t been studied simply because it wasn’t written down, even though it carried deep knowledge through voice, memory, and performance.
When my students once told me my reading list was outdated because they were hip-hop poets, I asked what we should study instead. They said, “We just make this stuff up.” But of course they weren’t making it up—they were drawing from a long lineage of Black orality: call and response, gospel, the dozens, and ultimately African griot traditions. That lineage is real, even if it isn’t always acknowledged by academic structures.
So yes, Beat was wonderful—but not because it belonged to one moment. It did what poetry always does when it’s alive: what slam later did in performance. When poets were labeled “the new Beat,” many rejected it. “We’re not the new Beat,” they said. “We’re slam poets. We’re New Yorkers.”
But the truth is simpler and stronger: The new beat. The old beat. The last beat. The new beat. We are the new beat. Marcos and I are the new beat.
(MARCOS): Without a doubt. The Beat has become a way of being in the world, of understanding life—a vital current that each generation discovers, especially in post-adolescence, and which in some cases, like ours, stays with you forever. It’s the lens you use to decipher the world around you and to approach your writing. My current feeling is that we need to recover the Beat spirit, especially at this moment when the geopolitical circumstances have a similar order to the 1940s and social uncertainty has become globalized with the fascist drift of predatory governments like those of Israel and the U.S.
Published June 2026 by Benjamin J. Heal
Photos from the day of the interview taken by Marcos de La Fuente, at Bob Holman’s home in New York, March 2026:
