Words at Play: Luc Sante on the Poet Basquiat

The New York Times Style Magazine has Luc Sante advance the position that Jean-Michel Basquiat--known, of course, as a painter--was equally valuable as a poet. "Basquiat . . . was a writer. As SAMO, he dealt in words, artfully executed with marker or spray can, to be sure, but nevertheless words intended to convey meaning, slantwise — that is to say, poetry." The Brooklyn Museum is showing eight of his composition notebooks next month, in the first major exhibition of this sort. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks "features 160 pages of these rarely seen documents, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings." More from Sante:

The four most crowded with entries date from 1980 to 1981, when Basquiat was working furiously in a wide variety of media: writing and painting on every surface that came to hand, from walls to sweatshirts to refrigerator doors; playing with his band, Gray; appearing on Glenn O’Brien’s public access show “TV Party”; and making the color-Xerox postcards with which he first announced himself to the art world. In those days, it was perhaps not entirely clear to him what direction he would take, but painting was on the ascent. (Three of the other notebooks, speculatively dated 1981-84, 1983 and 1985, only contain a few written pages; the last is thought to be from 1987, a year before his death at 27.)

In an unpublished essay in 1992, the late writer and artist Rene Ricard wrote: “Had he reached artistic maturity at a slightly earlier (or later) time, Jean-Michel Basquiat would have manifested as a poet.” Which slightly misses the point. That Basquiat was already a poet is manifest in these notebooks:

KAYO IN THE LUNA PARK
FREEZE FRAME ON A DRUNK IN THE PIAZZA
THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE FOR PIGEONS
LUMBERING ON ASPHALT FACEDOWN
LEAPSICKNESS THE LAW OF LIQUIDS.

You can hear in those lines an echo of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement, and you can also hear the stabbing rhythm that carries over from his writing on walls to his paintings, which are about language before they are about anything else. As his friend Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy, once said about the words on Basquiat’s paintings, “You can hear Jean-Michel thinking”:

THERE’S A SONG ON THE RADIO
WHERE THEY SAY WAVY HAIR INSTEAD OF BLACK
CONSIDERABLE CLOUDINESS
SO IT WAS SUNG BY SOME WHITEGIRLS
20 YEARS LATER.

Later, Sante notes that "The poetry in the notebooks, fragmentary as it is, constitutes the raw material he would break down further for the paintings, in which phrases are replaced with words: single words, lists, scatterings, agglomerations. These are more efficient, and allow for more ambiguity. He liked to see words at play. . . ." Read it all at The New York Times Style Magazine.