Poetry Plastique. - book review

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein

Created under very different circumstances, Kevin Young's collection of poetry, To Repel Ghosts is also a testament to the common ground still available to poets and painters. In this case, the artist in question, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was no longer alive when Young sat down to write poems in response to his paintings, but the results are nevertheless intensely collaborative in nature. Taking advantage of the fact that Basquiat's work is densely inscribed with words and names, lists and phrases, trademarks and abbreviations, Young incorporated large quantities of the artist's painted and drawn words into his poems. Indeed, this is as much a meeting of two writers as it is a posthumous encounter between a poet and a painter: Basquiat's use of language was highly distinctive and nuanced, not just in graphic terms but also at the level of structure and sound.

When Young samples words found in Basquiat's works, he always makes the source clear by setting the words in small caps. (Perhaps not since James Merrill's ouija-board-inspired trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover, has an American poet opened his work so bravely to another voice.) As well as giving the poems an additional graphic punch (Young also visually activiates his short lines with frequent dashes and ampersands), Basquiat's words work like cross-cuts in a movie. In one especially cinematic poem, Young quotes lines from a Basquiat painting that happens to appear in a film about Dennis Hopper:

   HEART AS ARENA
   Hopper in a docu-trauma
   discussing Warhol

   After his own comeback,
   Seated before
   his giant Basquiat--

   PROMETHEUS.
   BLACK TEETH.
   Andy's already bit

   the dust
   & Basquiat's just
   about to ...

As Young describes it, Basquiat's life and work served "as a bass line, a rhythm section, a melody from which the poems improvise." While he borrows inspiration from Basquiat's distinctive prosody, Young is a resourceful poet who can make a lyric from something as inauspicious as the name "Langston Hughes" repeated twice somewhere in Basquiat. For all their formal experimentation, the poems also lucidly chronicle Basquiat's rapid rise and fall, from his beginning as a graffiti artist to his apotheosis as the wild man of Neo-Expressionism to his desperate, drug-plagued final years. Although Young never met Basquiat, he sketches a knowledgeable portrait of the now-vanished downtown milieu of the early 1980s. At the same time, he places Basquiat in a broader historical context. Some 20 pages in the middle of the book are devoted to boxer Jack Johnson, and figures from African-American cultural life such as Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Richard Pryor are evoked. One poem focuses on Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee, who made a portrait of Basquiat in 1982. The poem begins with an allusive description of the shot:

   Antennae, antlers,
   rabbit ears
   for better reception--

   Basquiat's hair
   a bundle of dreadlocks,
   coiled, clenched

   in two fists
   above his head.
   A matador's hat.