To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor [Paperback]

Kevin Young (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 10, 2002

ART-WORLD PHENOMENON Jean-Michel Basquiat was prolific in his short lifetime, creating an exhilarating new art inspired by music, language, and black American cultural icons. To Repel Ghosts synchronizes the harmony and discord of Basquiat’s canvases, adapting them as a bass line to improvise and play upon. Young renders ambitious, celebratory poetry of the everyday and the exalted — a double-album in verse, a jazz symphony, a hip-hop opera — taking Basquiat’s funkified history and making it sing.

Structured on two “discs,” To Repel Ghosts shows five “sides” of the artist, exploring the rise and demise of a painter who helped break through the art world’s color line, first as SAMO© and then as a downtown art-scene wunderkind.

Here are riffs on — and extended rhapsodies for — a pantheon of black genius: ballplayers, comic book and folk heroes, boxers, and especially musicians: Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson, and Grace Jones. This kaleidoscope of lives emerges in To Repel Ghosts to provide a unique foil to Basquiat’s own bout with fame.

As an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred and Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, To Repel Ghosts poignantly charts Basquiat’s era, its popular, social, and racial energies and excesses. An album of our times, it is a powerful statement on a now-gone genius, and our recently completed century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this thick volume of 117 lean-lined poems, Young reanimates Jean-Michel Basquiat, the much-documented painter, graffiti artist and art world martyr who overdosed in 1988 at age 27. Unlike the salacious biographies, however, this epic is impressively faithful to its subject's obliquely political style and preoccupations: "Basquiat scrawls/ & scribbles, clots/ paint across/ the back/ wall of Keith Haring's/ Cable Building studio / two cops, keystoned,/ pounding a beat,/ pummel/ a black face scape/ goat, sarcophagus / uniform blue." By and large, the poems are ekphrastic, addressing particular Basquiat works and often incorporating Basquiat's painted texts into the poems (with the former often out-performing the latter), disturbing the neat division between homage and appropriation: "Andy's already bit/ the dust/ & Basquiat's just/ about to DEBT (SIC)/ PISS PASSPORT/ FREE KIT LIGHT RED/ PAYING DUES." Divided into five record-like "ablums," with the poems of each "side" functioning as songs (a frequent Basquiat inspiration), the project's size can work against it, devolving into repetitive riffs. And some of the poems are overloaded with expositional details about Basquiat's life or recastings of well-worn truisms about the painter's role in the "decadent" 1980s. When on, though, Young creates a midway point between his own and Basquiat's vernaculars, an inspired bricolage of shiny borrowings, canny enjambments and angry popist elegy: "Upstairs/ Superfly loops on,/ watching the room / nobody home. I'm your mamma/ I'm your daddy / Basquiat's 57 Jones/ Street pad stands empty/ like a tomb/ pirated. Tell ole/ Pharaoh, let my people go." (June 1) Forecast: Basquiat's reputation is slowly moving from '80s art star to major 20th-century artist, Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic notwithstanding. Young is the author of the National Poetry Series pick Most Way Home and editor of Giant Steps, a anthology of younger African-American writers. His homage will appeal to art cognoscenti and readers of cultural studies, as well as to Young's already solid poetry base.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Poets have long been inspired by works of art--think of Keats, Auden, and Frank O'Hara--but Young breaks the mold, going all-out in a book-length homage to the African American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who flared brilliantly but all too briefly in the flush, coked-up 1980s. Young riffs masterfully on the bold images and political themes of Basquiat's groundbreaking work and ponders the artist's roller-coaster life and tragic death at age 28. In quickly scanned but resonant poems built out of short lines and sharply struck notes, Young revels in how Basquiat brought the street to the canvas in his use of graffitilike drawings and painted words, in his to-the-bone dissections of racial stereotypes, and in his shrewd tributes to black heroes. But he also rails against the forces that brought the artist down. Spiked with documentary detail and flirting with hagiography, Young's magnum opus scats, talks, shouts, and sings a story that encompasses not only one man's tragedy but that of a nation: the persistence and virulence of racism. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 366 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books (December 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158195204X
• ISBN-13: 978-1581952049
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,324,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Dear Darkness, named one of the Best Books of 2008 by National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award in poetry. His book Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and the Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems. The curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Young lives in Boston and Atlanta.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent, December 24, 2003

By 

Joe Omalley (san francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: To Repel Ghosts (Hardcover)

This book is a powerful rumination on Basquiat's life and themes. The poetry is consistantly alive and amazingly free of flab for a book of over 300 pages.

Young takes the difficult task of responding to visual art in words and succeeds admirably. The selection of Basquiat as the subject is a suprisingly good one that allows Young to draw on the words and themes important to Basquiat. Young's use of Basquiat's painted slogans ties the experience of reading the book to the experience of viewing the paintings in an unmediated way. Basquiat's esoteric painted slogans work well in Young's clear accessible poems.

Basquiat's touchstones of boxing and jazz allow for detours that hint back to Basquiat's life and art. The long poem on the boxer Jack Johnson is particularly good.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars rich and rewarding, May 1, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: To Repel Ghosts (Hardcover)

I'm mystified by some of these negative comments, which all seem to be either about some meta-conversation about the book (was Basquiat exploited? sure, but not by Kevin Young!) or its author (how the hell does anyone here know how poor or rich he was growing up?). Those who have actually read the book know how thoughtful, gorgous and rich it is; those who have not yet ought to, especially before writing barely-literate rants against it.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To repel stupid reviews, June 25, 2001

By 

Amy Sweiz (Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: To Repel Ghosts (Hardcover)

Do Not Believe The Previous Reviewer. Of course this book is words, it's a book! Young, whose first book Most Way Home was impressive if uneven, has taken quite a leap forward in his poetic life. Basquiat morphs into something other than his paintings, he becomes Young's poems, he becomes a monster and a genius, he becomes something close to mythic.

This is not a picture book, you can't read poetry expecting to see images of the dead man's paintings, if you only want to read a description go and get a gallery catalogue!

Instead, here, immerse yourself in Kevin Young, a poet who imagines America through the prism of a single, talented young man. A masterful work (that I was lucky enough to see just before its publication, lucky me!). Cheers.