When the definitive history of the downtown poetry scene of New York City is finally written, the name of Bob Holman will be central to the carnivalesque narrative of this most fluid of avant-gardes. In 1978 Holman took over directorship of the famed Poetry Project at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, the flagship reading series and clubhouse of the so-called New York School; a decade later he helped usher in the era of slam, the raucous, performance-based cousin of formal verse, at the notorious Nuyorican Café on the Lower East Side. Never content standing still, in 2002 Holman opened the Bowery Poetry Club, an East Village drinking establishment, gallery, and performance space that represents one of the last vestiges of gritty, street-level bohemia in a rapidly gentrifying downtown. Holman has, in other words, been a tireless advocate for contemporary poetry as impresario, teacher, editor, activist, and collaborator, roles in which he has contributed immeasurably to the cultural health of the New York City underground, but that have perhaps understandably overshadowed his reputation as a poet in his own right. It is thus a pleasure to encounter Picasso in Barcelona, a sleek and tidy volume containing an explosion of brief lyrics that vividly re-imagine the early life and career of the foundational modernist painter.

It is no surprise that Holman’s own poetry should display the qualities he has most promoted and valued in his own long career: concision, whimsy, humor, sexuality, and ekphrasis, or celebration of the interplay between language and visual art. The Picasso whose voice Holman inhabits in these sketches is brash, cocky, certain of his future greatness: “At fourteen I could paint better / Than Leonardo da Vinci” he crows in one; “Every morning I wake up / Give myself a big kiss / And paint a masterpiece,” announces another. He regards the whole history of European painting as a chain of potential rivals to be surpassed, as with Manet (“My park benches are better / Than your park benches”) or admired, as with Greco (“El Greco Was Cool…”). The exception is Diego Velázquez, whose Las Meninas (1656)—often considered the greatest painting in the history of Western art, and the inspiration for a series of paintings Picasso did in 1957—was both inspiration and taunting obsession for Picasso; the one painter with whom he could only claim a draw.

It is worth noting that Holman’s portrayal of Picasso in this book is actually a skillful amalgamation: some of the poems focus, in biographical fashion, on Picasso’s youth in Barcelona, where he lived until moving to Paris in 1904, while others are based on paintings that he made elsewhere but that are on view at the Museu Picasso, which is in Barcelona. The double meaning of the title represents the deft conflation of these two aspects into a panoramic stereopticon vision of the artist’s life—Holman captures the bumptious swagger of Picasso’s essence better than some biographies—that is part of the book's artlessly artful aesthetic strategy. The husband of the late American painter Elizabeth Murray, Holman has an instinctive understanding of painting that surpasses that of most poet-critics: one meditation condenses a famous painting down to its essence: “Dog white shape / Beneath light black / Going out door,” and it is these incisive formulations that give authority to the book, which at times otherwise verges on the slight.

The ekphrastic reflections are counterbalanced by the authors' celebration of Picasso’s famously exuberant sexuality, which he captures with a winning mixture of sass and humor. “With my other eye / I am looking at you,” cracks one; in others the artist is brought to orgasm by tyranny, by death, by the thought of fame, while “glasses… fog from the heat / Generated by her vagina’s reaction / To my kiss.” For Picasso, art-making and sex were fundamentally facets of the same feverish drive, a turbulent melding that is given an oddly vivid expression in “Hold this Brush”:

My love
Will you
Hold this
Brush in
Your mouth
While I
Thrust the
Canvas up
And down

This dizzying reversal, where the female model assumes control of the (phallic) brush while remaining passive to the artist's exertion, adds another twist to the sexual gamesmanship that Holman's Picasso celebrates so enthusiastically.

What ends up staying with the reader through this paint- and wine- and semen-spattered sprint of a book, however, is not the keenly conjured sense of Picasso as brawler, carouser, and womanizer, as bully and egotist, nor necessarily the reflections on the nature of visual art, but rather the brief moments of almost purely poetic transcendence. What peeks through the seams of these exuberant riffs are glimpses of koan-like metaphysical wonder. “No More! No. More.” cries one, doubling back on itself in a tiny pretzel of perfect verbal illogic; “I hope I will not hope,” intones another. “No one but no one / Must ever see me dream,” the painter vows, and ends up, in his old age, locked in a frozen tango with Death. The cliché of the macho artist whose antics conceal hidden vulnerability is surely worn to a nub by now; but something of the original force of this ancient trope, in Holman’s hands, shows through the rodomontade.

Which, in the end, is what makes Picasso in Barcelona an achievement—a sly, offhand, too-cool-for-school kind of achievement—but one nonetheless. As a kind of B-side-like bonus track, the second half of the book combines all of the poems into a cumulative “dance mix,” which suggests that the verse does indeed benefit from a rapid-fire performance delivery of its author. It also includes, delightfully, a parallel-text Spanish translation by Sol Gaitan; this reviewer, sadly, lacks the necessary linguistic apparatus to provide an evaluation thereof, but Holman assures us, in his note, that it “will come in handy when you are asking for directions in Barcelona.”

from ZOLAND POETRY REVIEW, Spring 2011 ( )