Jefferson Holland waited patiently in a room full of aging poets.

One, unclipping a plastic-sleeved verse from a three-ring binder, shared her dream of butchering inflatable snowmen in a Christmas decoration rampage. A second began a poem memorized as a schoolgirl, only to lose it when a sandwich-munching listener asked her to use the microphone. Please.

Then it was Holland’s turn. He rose in the windowless classroom at Anne Arundel Community College, arms akimbo, long white beard a flag of gravitas, and recited his ballad of a competitive eating champion, “Muskrat Greene.”

There was a legendary waterman from the town of Deale, with a heart of gold and guts of steel.

To eat a lot of oysters was his only dream. He was Muskrat. Muskrat Greene.

Jefferson Holland, "Muskrat Greene"

Holland may prove to be a different sort of poet laureate for Maryland’s state capital.

He’s the third to hold the job, picked by an arts panel and paid $1,000 a year. While the first two were authors of works described as “sacred quiet” and “confessionalism,” Holland writes with humor and rhyme about Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay.

“These people, these places, these boats, these creatures and, of course, history,” he said. “The history of this place is just astonishing.”

To many, Holland is best known as the co-founder of Them Eastport Oyster Boys, a folk group that sings about life in Annapolis and on the bay. He’s long since gone off on his own.

For years, he’s been performing as a Chesapeake Bay troubadour, a successor to the late, much-loved folkie Tom Wisner of “Chesapeake Born” fame. Holland first spotted him a few years after arriving in Annapolis from New York in 1980, in a National Geographic documentary.

“One segment was Tom Wisner sitting at City Dock and playing guitar, and that’s who I wanted to be when I grew up,” he said.

To Holland, the only difference between songs and poetry is that one comes with music and the other does not.

As a little bitty baby, he weighed just 2 pounds, but he grew to be the biggest waterman in town.

At 5 foot 9, he weighed 235, with a belly twice as big as any man his size.

Living off of poetry, or even songwriting, can be hard cheese. So there have been other jobs.

Holland has worked as a museum director, a riverkeeper, a publicist, a researcher and a magazine editor. He writes a column for the daily newspaper in Annapolis on his rambles around Maryland, and he is about to publish 52 of those adventures in a book called “Walk Around Arundel.”

Most of those roles had one thing in common: the Chesapeake.

“You would think that the Chesapeake Bay is so inspirational, then there would be this whole genre of eelgrass music,” he said.

It just isn’t there. There was no great singing tradition about working on the bay boats. The one piece of old sea music Holland ever heard was “The Shanghaied Dredger,” an 1890s song about the Maryland-Virginia oyster wars.

“And it’s based on an old Irish tune,” Holland said.

Wisner, who died in 2010, arguably invented the role of Chesapeake bard in the mid-1960s. Men who worked the water were often deeply religious. Some might have used that tradition if they wanted song aboard.

“The waterman’s tradition, both Black and white watermen, if they were singing anything out on the boat, it’d be from that spiritual hymnal,” Holland said.

Yes, this was a hard-eating, hard-drinking waterman, but his appetite for oysters got a mite out of hand.

In an oyster-eating contest, nobody could beat him. He said, ‘They can’t shuck ’em fast as I can eat ’em.

In 1985, Holland and Janie Meneely picked up where Wisner left off, forming the folk group Crab Alley. A decade later, he and Kevin Brooks created Them Eastport Oyster Boys, making music about important things like “A Good Hat, Good Dog, Good Boat.”

If Wisner channeled folk legends Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger — both serious singer-songwriters who mixed music with politics — then Holland descends from Gilbert and Sullivan through Tom Lehrer, who leaned into laughter and fun.

He’s taken that style from Ocean City to Oregon, recording and performing witty songs with his road-worn uke.

He takes his little notebook, too, jotting down doggerel that might become something more.

Maybe it will be a poem about horrendous presidential appointees, something he won’t recite as laureate, or bizarre letters to the editor that end with “Nuff said.”

He’s been a poet laureate before, in Eastport 20 years ago. It was a one-off role, more to do with establishing the intentionally quirky character of the neighborhood than celebrating the written word.

He won every eating contest on the whole East Coast; he could chug a quart of raw ones like a cocktail toast.

After downing 300 in a minute, five seconds, He said, ‘Well, it’s time for lunch, I reckon.’

Annapolis had something different in mind when it created the role in 2018. The idea was to have a poetic voice for the city.

Temple Cone, the first laureate, teaches English at the Naval Academy. He read solemn odes at memorial services and invocations.

Maggie Benshaw, the second, is an Annapolis High School teacher. She encouraged youth poetry through a series of slams open to anyone with a sense of meter, rhyme or free verse to spare.

Holland wants to launch a series of programs and interviews, perhaps on the Crab Radio project at Maryland Hall. He hopes to start regular poetry challenges for different age groups.

“We could have a special teenage version, special elderly, all kinds of different.”

But performance is likely to be a significant part of whatever he does. When he was sworn in at City Hall, there was, of course, a poem.

He recites it easily — how the shallow depth of the Annapolis harbor let Baltimore surpass it as the state’s main port though it proved perfect for watermen and pleasure boaters — and drifts across the nonexistent line between his poetry and song.

“The harbor is the key to our history. The harbor is the key to our history. Though some facts I may have fudged, I’m willing to be judged that the harbor is the key to our historeeee!”