“What the ghost wants”: Kevin Young’s Ekphrasis
In the poem "Replicas," from To Repel Ghosts, Kevin Young writes, "What the ghost wants // is not always / obvious" (lines 27-29). Among the several ghosts who haunt this book, the most visible is Jean-Michel Basquiat. He shows up in these poems as his pre-overdose self, already appearing spectral, having been all but forgotten by the art world that briefly adored him. He appears as his post-mortem self, reemerging through the layers of his own drawn and painted imagery like a pentimento, a term Young uses as the title of one of the sections in To Repel Ghosts. In spite of his many recurrences in these poems, what Basquiat wants from their readers remains inscrutable, and what Young wants with him--why instead of repelling he draws this ghost in for a closer examination--raises questions too. Considering the role of visual art and artists in To Repel Ghosts can help us to see why Basquiat and the circle of artists around him provide an appealing subject for Young. It can also illuminate why contemporary poets turn so frequently to ekphrasis—that is, what exphrasis does to and for the lyric poem as a form. Ekphrasis, I will argue, undermines common features of the lyric, creating a productive tension within a lyric poem.
Much of the criticism on ekphrastic poetry, or poetry that takes visual art as its subject, focuses on a putative rivalry between the visual and the verbal arts. W.J.T. Mitchell provides a helpful summary of this long argument by surveying the responses of different historical periods to the relationship between these "sister arts." He describes an ongoing pendulum swing between ekphrastic fear and ekphrastic hope, with ekphrastic indifference falling in between (162). Some writers, he suggests, have responded to the otherness of the visual arts with an anxious call that the borders of the two media be patrolled and that each set of artists stick to what they do best, refraining from imitation or cross-pollination. Others, he claims, have imagined writing and visual art that challenge their distinctiveness from other forms with the goal of achieving an undivided aesthetic utopia.
Young's choice of Basquiat as a central subject might simply mark this as a work, perhaps one characteristic of a larger period, of ekphrastic hope. As an artist working in mixed media, Basquiat rarely holds language separate from visual imagery—his early graffiti and his later paintings have elements of both. Thus, Basquiat routinely blurs the line between writing and drawing. Nor does Young, who plays with typography throughout his book and conceives the collection's structure by analogy with a remixed record, uphold a strict division among the arts. A primary characteristic of Young's ekphrasis is the incorporation into the poems of text that appears on Basquiat's canvases. To Repel Ghosts is by no means a book that insists on division.
To see To Repel Ghosts as hopeful about aesthetic union does not move us far beyond assertions about our increasingly visual culture or calls for poetry to borrow some of that popularity. On the other hand, to consider how Young's ekphrasis works against a central convention of the lyric, what Mutlu Blasing calls "virtual common subjectivity," is a better way of getting at the ghost, that presence that seems both necessary and irritating to the poems (51). This requires looking at ekphrasis not, as Mitchell does, as a minor genre, but instead considering it as a technique employed by poets within the lyric tradition. As Blasing has argued, lyric depends more than other genres on creating the feeling of a speaker's intention. Readers need to feel that there is a subjective consciousness at work and play in the poem in order to go along as lyric pushes language closer to nonsense (29). In its reliance on the speaking subject, the lyric poem creates a feeling that the reader is eavesdropping, even as it frustrates that feeling of closeness to the speaker. The intimacy of this situation, with the reader witnessing the movements of the self as it reflects upon itself, leads to the reader's identification with the speaker. Blasing's "virtual common subjectivity" identifies as a central feature of the lyric the collapsing of boundaries between the self that articulates and the one that perceives, making them at least temporarily one subject.
However, ekphrasis disrupts identification in several ways. While lyric fashions a subjective speaker and reflects on her qualities, ekphrasis extends outward from the self (as the Greek prefix ek- suggests) to the painting on the wall or the half-factual, half-imagined person who made it. While lyric can be understood as overheard soliloquy, ekphrasis often employs apostrophe, asking questions directly of the work of art, questions that will never receive any answers. While lyric is most concerned with the enlarged moment, ekphrasis makes the passing of time an issue by commenting on the frozen stillness of the image in the midst of a dynamic world. The feeling of the writer being pulled inward by lyric while simultaneously pulled outward by the presence of the work of art is not only characteristic of To Repel Ghosts, but reveals something larger about the role of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry, its useful resistance to lyric subjectivity. Looking at ekphrasis in this way can help us to see it as another in a series of projects to undermine or complicate the centrality of self in the lyric. Other contemporary poets might achieve these ends by challenging the coherence of an "I" or by exposing it as a linguistic construct. Ekphrastic poems undermine the "I" by knocking it out of its central position, where it might otherwise seem confidently poised at the center of its own universe. This is one of the reasons that ekphrastic poems are often suffused with doubt about how they see and what they know.
Young's book provides a fruitful example of this phenomenon because of its varied uses of ekphrasis. To Repel Ghosts was first published in its entirely by Zoland Books in 2001. An abbreviated Remix version, which Young prepared while trying to find a publisher for the original volume, was released by Knopf in 2005. In both versions, the book is formidable, running into the hundreds of pages and covering figures from Jack Johnson to Grace Jones to the 1920-1945 rosters for the Kansas City Monarchs. The poems about Basquiat generally provide what John Hollander, in The Gazer's Spirit, calls actual ekphrases, references to paintings that actually exist. Yet Young is relatively sparing with description, which is often a central task for ekphrastic writing. Sometimes the poems provide a general idea of what one of Basquiat's paintings looks like, but just as often they do not. Sometimes Young provides titles, sometimes he leaves us to do the research ourselves, and sometimes the works of art aren't by Basquiat at all, but by artists who influenced him, especially his one-time mentor Andy Warhol. By producing readings of the paintings, as well as by sampling them through both direct quotation and description, Young seems to deepen his thinking about issues that connect his experience with Basquiat's, particularly the place of African American men in history. Young's poems chart a course between cynicism about the commodification of art, which is complicated here by the further commodification of race, and a hopeful feeling about the self-determination that art offers. For Young, as for Basquiat, self-determination becomes wrapped up in one's ability to remain outside of limiting definitions of art and to critique the dubious status that those definitions can confer. By looking at the paintings Young achieves some contact with Basquiat, but the distance between the two men remains. This distance frustrates attempts to know Basquiat, but also allows Young to see him with a clear eye. In the course of the book, Young shows how Basquiat falls into some of the very same traps of American culture that his art exposes.
The title page for the first section of To Repel Ghosts reveals at the outset of the book how Young revisits and revises Basquiat's themes. This section, "Side B," is subtitled with a phrase lifted from Basquiat's painting Charles the First: "MOST YOUNG KINGS GET THEIR HEADS CUT OFF." It also introduces a crucial motif: the crown. On this page, Young reproduces the simply drawn three-pointed crown that appears both throughout Basquiat's work and, by means of verbal reference and visual reproduction, throughout Young's book. Basquiat used the symbol to refer to mythological sources of power, like Thor, and also to twentieth-century heroes like Charlie Parker and Jack Johnson. In To Repel Ghosts, Young reveals that the crown especially marks African American figures who have the potential for greatness but who are metaphorically decapitated or diminished by racism.
For the reader of the poems, observing the painter's trials through Young's lens, the most immediately apparent beheaded king is Basquiat himself. The "MOST YOUNG KINGS" motto reappears in the poem "Vndrz" with Basquiat inhabiting the throne. This poem concerns a reciprocal pair of images: a portrait photograph of Basquiat taken by James Van Der Zee and a painting of Van Der Zee by Basquiat. For the photograph, Van Der Zee places Basquiat on an ornate chair that Young reads as a monarchical throne: "No pick, no make / up, just a shark / skin suit on a throne / that's held half / of Harlem" (10-14). As Young points out, Basquiat's position is paradoxically democratic, as this regal seat in the famous studio appears in many Van Der Zee portraits. Beyond this comment on the throne, Young's description of the photograph focuses our attention on the subject's hair. At first it seems to make Basquiat a kind of conduit, with the spikes of hair functioning as "Antennae, antlers, / rabbit ears / for better reception" (1-3). Then the hair seems to take on an aggressive quality, coiled as if to strike, "a bundle of dread- / locks, coiled, clenched / in two fists / above his head" (5-8). Young's reading of Basquiat's hairstyle as containing violent tension anticipates the language of protest later in the poem, but what seems most striking in these lines is the way Basquiat's hair becomes an emblem of aggression in what might be more readily interpreted as a pensive or even languid pose. In fact, when Basquiat appears in the same pose on a wall mural in "Relics," Young interprets the stance as boredom.
Young contrasts this photo with Basquiat's characteristically sketchy likeness of Van Der Zee, which portrays him as "a staff / of a man, rod / full of lightning" (43-45). Young focuses on the iconic elements of the painting: a lightning bolt in the corner and the subject's "knotted, volted / vaulted name" written across the bottom (47-48). These additions to the picture of Van Der Zee emphasize both his identity and his power as a chronicler of life in Harlem. However, the penultimate stanza also recalls the famous psalm of consolation in the face of death: "Your rod and your staff, they comfort me." In spite of the vitality of Basquiat's portrait, Young senses the shadow of death in it.
Between description of the photographic portrait and Basquiat's rendering of the photographer, Young offers a third view of the encounter between the two men. He pictures Van Der Zee at work:
*****head tucked
beneath a blackhood, the light,
shrouded—days
later agitatesin complete
dark—Basquiat
bobbing upfrom chemicals
to the surface,
face forminglike a ghost—exposed
fixed, washed. (26-38)
In Young's imagination of the scene, Van Der Zee becomes, like a hanged man, hooded or shrouded by his photographic apparatus. At least for the span of this poem, the beheading of the young artist is displaced onto an older king, even as Young connects the two men by using the apparently contradictory adjectives "sharp & wrinkled" to describe both Basquiat's suit and Van Der Zee's ninety-year-old hands (23). Young also calls our attention to the strange ironies of dark room terminology: agitate, expose, fix. The agitation of the developing fluid seems also to suggest calls for social change, but in the picture that results from the process Basquiat appears, at least to this speaker, both vulnerable,"exposed" to the eyes of others, and rigidly "fixed" to his own image (37-38). Young figures Basquiat's face emerging through the chemical process as ghostly, and he implies that the finished picture has a washed out, spectral quality. Some of the language and iconology, and even the abbreviating conventions that reduce the two men's names to a few capital letters, come from Basquiat's painting, and yet Young's reading of the two works of art asserts an idiosyncratic view about what they mean. Young seems to take readers inside of Basquiat's imagery even as we observe it from a critical distance.
Young represents Basquiat's beheading symbolically yet powerfully in the second poem of To Repel Ghosts, "Campbell's Black Bean Soup." While other poems in the series refer to specific Basquiat paintings, in this first ekphrastic poem of the book, Young conjures up a painting that is curiously not by Basquiat. Instead, Young considers Andy Warhol's image of the soup can in light of Warhol's exploitative relationship with Basquiat. Young takes the iconic image from the realm of pop art and puts it back into the hands of the hungry consumer, Basquiat. While Warhol seems to threaten cooptation, Young imagines Basquiat reclaiming the material object from the kitschy painting made in its likeness. As in other poems of the series, tension arises between the artist and the art-consuming world that sets limits for his work. To some extent Warhol, who both took Basquiat as his friend and protégé and used Basquiat to satisfy his desire for continuous publicity, stands in as representative of the broader art scene.
The poem begins with Warhol's perception of the younger artist:
Candid, Warhol
scoffed, coined it
A nigger's loft—
not The Factory,
Basquiat's studio stood
anything but lofty— (1-6)
The gap between Warhol's famous Factory and Basquiat's obscure workspace is encapsulated in the pun "anything but lofty" (6). The latter's studio neither fits into the idea of what an artist's loft should look like nor establishes a place for Basquiat in the rarefied art world. The Warhol in this poem can only understand Basquiat's workplace, and by extension his work, as modified by the racist slur. Strangely, his denigrating view apparently influences the poem's vision of the loft; its stacks of canvases become slummy "skid rows" and its paint resembles "scabs" (7-9). The vision of Basquiat Young attributes to Warhol in "Campbell's Black Bean Soup" combines the racial and economic differences between the two artists, merging those differences into the same category. In other words, Young depicts Basquiat's poverty as, for Warhol, inseparable from his blackness.
The question of value becomes central to learning what Basquiat's paintings represent, both to the artists within the poem and to the audiences without:
*****Bartering work
for horse, Basquiat churned
out butter, signing each
SAMO©. Sameold. Sambo'ssoup. How to sell out
something bankrupt
already? How to copyrights? (9-16)
Young is sympathetic to what could be read as Basquiat's cynical take on the art world. The latter "churns" out art, as if it were a purely mechanical operation, and produces "butter," refined and smooth (11-12). He recognizes that potential viewers and buyers will stereotype him as "Sambo," but remains aware that their judgments are already valueless, "bankrupt" (12-14). 1 Again Young's critique turns on a pun, spinning the idea of intellectual property and copyright into a question about how Basquiat can recreate for himself the rights granted to Warhol. The legalistic language of this sentence and the copyright symbol after the SAMO tag contrast ironically with the real value of Basquiat's paintings, which are valued not by a gallery system, but in a barter arrangement within an illicit drug trade economy.
At the end of the poem, Young converts Warhol's pop image back into actual matter:
***Basquiat stripped
labels, opened & ate
alphabets, chicken& noodle. Not even brown
broth left beneath, not one
black bean, he smackedthe very bottom, scraping
the uncanny, making
a tin thing sing. (16-24)
Pop art was remarkable for its accurate reproduction of consumer objects, its refining away of any touches of the artist's hand. Young suggests, however, that this pop art approach is ultimately hollow, like the soup can after its contents have been consumed. In Basquiat's hands, the material can becomes something "uncanny," which suggests it is both familiar and estranged. Perhaps the "anything-but-lofty" soup can's entry into high art is what makes it strange. In its final line, Young's poem moves out of the realm of visual art and into music, a move that puts the emphasis back on the individual touch that art like Warhol's virtually erased. Young uses the idea of song, sung by a unique (if inorganic) voice, to point metaphorically to the personal mark lost in Warhol's art. The poem also imagines Basquiat as a kind of artist-in-all-media, which his paint-and-collage, verbally tagged canvases support. In Young's version he consumes an alphabet and returns it as song, emblematically linking Basquiat with poetry as well as with music. The turn away from visual art and toward other forms serves as a rejection of Basquiat's commodification by Warhol, a way to return Basquiat to his position as a producer, rather than a product, of art. The comment on song also serves, through the image of the soup can's mediation, to underscore these poems' layering of what might otherwise be a single singing voice.
Tracing as he does Basquiat's emblem of the beheaded young king (this pun on the poet's own name not lost on a reader attuned to Young's word play), Young takes a tragicomic turn when he includes a poem concerning his own misunderstanding and subsequent revelation about a representation of Basquiat's head. The painting titled Dos Cabezas, and Young's poem of the same title, depict the two faces of Basquiat and Warhol. Young's lines demythologize the two men, portraying Warhol "pensing or perhaps / picking his nose" and Basquiat's nose looking more like a "snout flat / broad brushstrokes" (8-11). The "gap in Basquiat's teeth" calls up the image of the mischievous Mad Magazine cover boy: "What me worry?" (2-4). The casual tone of the portrait suggests one possible interpretation to the viewer, who associates the playful presentation of the figures with a playful character in their relationship, and thus assumes that the title means "Two Friends."
However, we learn that this double portrait was painted before the two men had any chance to become friends. Young traces the creation of Dos Cabezas to Basquiat's first meeting with Warhol and Henry Geldzahler, who was then New York's Commissioner for Cultural Affairs. Basquiat was selling hand-made postcards, and Warhol convinced Geldzahler to buy some. Just after this encounter with Warhol,
B headed
back home to paintthe pair, returning
to Andy's Factory,
the canvas still wetas a kiss. A gift. (14-19)
In spite of this immediate connection, Young points out the generation separating the impoverished, inventive Basquiat and "official Warhol," with his art establishment connection (13). The playful gap in Basquiat's teeth becomes a gap separating him from Warhol's experience, and of course, the decision to court Warhol's attention leads to a jarring break that leaves readers with the line "B headed" (14).
The poem turns on a signal misunderstanding of the painting, a misunderstanding that Young expands beyond his speaker to encompass viewers more generally. The "we" who misreads the title is unclear, but it stands out from the general voice of the sequence, which rarely uses the first person pronoun, singular or plural. Here "we" underscores the interpretation of the painting by a collective audience, not just by a lone writer engaged with Basquiat's work. Certainly that collective group misses what Basquiat knows: that the two figures in the painting are "not two friends" but simply "two—translated— / heads" (29-30). They do not necessarily suggest that the men depicted are friends as the speaker expects, though Basquiat might aspire to befriend the famous Warhol. Primarily Basquiat treats the two figures as forms—two head-shapes to complete a double-portrait rather than two individuals in a relationship. This mistake reveals the way an art object can disrupt the perspective of the lyric, the perspective that can under other circumstances create Blasing's "virtual common subjectivity" (Blasing 51). Here the speaker fails to establish common understanding with his subject, and the only "I" in this poem is the auctioneer, who asks years later for bids on the painting: "Do I hear / a hundred thousand?" (lines 25-26). By including the auctioneer's voice, Young seems to point out the difficulty of merging divergent perspectives into the common "I", shared between speaker and reader, that lyric poems construct.
In the introduction to Giant Steps, an anthology of Generation X African American writers, Young describes his poetic cohort as more wary about both popular culture and political activism than their Baby Boomer parents: "Our generation seeks to understand the ironies of both pop and protest" (Giant Steps 5). It seems fitting, then, that he would find a kind of kinship with Basquiat, who was involved both in the world of pop art and in the illicit art form of graffiti, even as he maintained a critical distance from them. It is also appropriate that Young would choose to write ekphrastic poems, which reveal the doubt and uncertainty that attend our attempts to construct a vision of the world centered in the lyric "I." The encounter with a work of visual art highlights a tension between inside and outside, making ekphrasis an apt technique for the poet seeking to understand political or aesthetic ironies. Judging by the frequency with which it appears in contemporary poetry, ekphrasis has a wide appeal for poets. Its counter-lyrical strains seem especially useful for an era in which lyric has become the overwhelmingly dominant poetic genre. Writing about visual art becomes a way to either deform or reform the genre, to question from within the assumption of seamless identification that has been central to its definition.
Stefanie Wortman is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. Her first collection of poems, Blind King, is under submission to publishers, and she is currently at work on a new collection, Inhuman Spirit.
Works Cited
Mutlu Konuk Blasing. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2007.
John Hollander. The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1995.
W. J. T. Mitchell. "Ekphrasis and the Other." Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1994. 151-181.
Young, Kevin, ed. Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. New York:
Harper Collins, 2000.
--- To Repel Ghosts: The Remix. New York: Knopf, 2005.
- #1 This section of the poem also seems to allude to the children's book Little Black Sambo in which a pair of tigers chasing the protagonist run around and around a tree until they turn into butter. [⤒]