April 13, 2010
 
Continuing an April tradition, Huntington News Network is celebrating April -- National Poetry Month -- With a Poem a Day from Knopf
 

 
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
 
Today's selection is drawn from Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts, a work he calls a "discography" of the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat. This cycle of poems tells the quintessentially 1980s tale of Basquiat's rise from graffiti artist, know by the tag SAMO, to the hot painter ("blue-chip Basquiat/ playing the bull/ market") who was overwhelmed by his reputation, addicted to heroine, and dead of an overdose in his late twenties. Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved and collected on vinyl, and on the black folk heroes (Grace Jones, Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis) who inspired him, and who provide a foil to his own bout with fame, during what emerges as a tragically brief but exhilarating period of artistic creation. For a special audio bonus from one of Kevin Young's own heroes, keep clicking below.
 
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EYES + EGGS [1983]
Eats. Hot
cakes. Griddle
cakes. Silver
dollars. Head
cook, pepper-dark.
Dumb
waiter. Lazy
Susan. 24 service
24 service
24—
footprints
across a canvas
apron. Rice
in the salt
like luck, over
a shoulder. Marry
the ketchup.
Today Special—
grits, links,
sweetbreads.
This is your brain.
This your brain
on drugs, scrambled
with a side
of bacon, smiling.
Mouthless.
Black joe.
A warmer?
Order up—
Adam & Eve
on a raft, tuna
on whiskey—
were happy
to serve you.
Wanted Help.
We’re in the weeds—
come on back
now hear?
to insure
promptness 15%.
Two bits. End
of shift, punching
out. The whites
like an eye
—eighty-sixed—
sunny, pow-
dered, poached—

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Keep Clicking:
 
Go to the Poem-A-Day website to comment on this poem, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and much more.
 
One of Kevin Young's poetic mentors was Lucille Clifton, who died in February of this year—Click to listen to Clifton's conversation from Poetry in Person on being an extraordinary ordinary woman, and hear her read her poem "the thirty eighth year."
 
Learn more about To Repel Ghosts
 
Other titles by Kevin Young
 

 
Buy the Book
 
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Excerpt from To Repel Ghosts. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by Kevin Young. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
We welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts or questions to aaknopf@randomhouse.com.