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To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor
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 ballplayers, comic book and folk heroes, boxers, and especially 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.
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 ballplayers, comic book and folk heroes, boxers, and especially 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.
366 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
100 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Young
86 books373 followersKevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; Blues Poems; Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems.
His Black Cat Blues, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award.
After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; Blues Poems; Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems.
His Black Cat Blues, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award.
After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 11, 2015
Kevin Young's meditation on the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as complex and many-layered as the artist's legacy demands. The clichés and images of pop culture mingle with music, sports, art, and literature in both men. Basquiat's work contains a lot of text, and these words are incorporated into Young's verse as well.
Young calls his book "an extended riff", an improvisation that plays off the original work, much as a jazz musician will reference, play with, and enlarge on a well-known song. Although the poems are perfectly able to stand on their own, I kept wishing they had been paired in the book with the Basquiats that gave birth to them. Young does note that 9 poems toured with Basquiat drawings, and I supposed the complications of copyright would keep a complete matching from ever being realized.
But it would be wonderful.
"To Repel Ghosts" contains both regret and celebration, a fitting tribute to an amazing creative fire still burning bright.
Young calls his book "an extended riff", an improvisation that plays off the original work, much as a jazz musician will reference, play with, and enlarge on a well-known song. Although the poems are perfectly able to stand on their own, I kept wishing they had been paired in the book with the Basquiats that gave birth to them. Young does note that 9 poems toured with Basquiat drawings, and I supposed the complications of copyright would keep a complete matching from ever being realized.
But it would be wonderful.
"To Repel Ghosts" contains both regret and celebration, a fitting tribute to an amazing creative fire still burning bright.
November 23, 2016
I wanted to like this, and it seemed like just the sort of thing I'd enjoy... but, really, I just didn't. From beginning to end, it felt overly complicated and self-involved, while being so minimalist as to come across as more academic and convoluted than enjoyable. I never did feel connected to any of the poems, and it's hard for me to imagine revisiting this collection for any reason. I've really enjoyed some of Young's other pieces, but this just felt more like an academic playing with words & ideas, and calling the results poems, as opposed to what I'd read and enjoy as poetry.
Obviously, I have to say that it's not something I'd recommend.
Obviously, I have to say that it's not something I'd recommend.
January 8, 2016
This book booms Basquiat long after the artist/concept has been laid to rest. This book haunts and laughs like a mad scientist in a bygone horror film. It also trembles with anticipation with three word stanzas rapidly and repeatedly hitting you upside your head. I hate books about artists. I hate poetry about art. Thankfully this book is neither and both. A masterpiece.
December 7, 2007
based largely on the art of Jean Michel Basquiat, as well as other icons, this is a collection of poetry that you feel as music, an absolute must read
March 13, 2008
Jean-M + Kevin Young are an incredible pair.
July 7, 2008
Crazy gorgeous take on Basquiat.
May 27, 2014
Kevin Young in a really good Basquiat mask.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews