Burt Kimmelman
An Introduction to the Essays on Basil King
There is a pathos in Basil King’s paintings and drawings that pulls the viewer into them. There is a sympathy. The depth of feeling is there just as much in his writings, somewhat ethereally, perhaps, but palpable nevertheless. When viewing his searching visual art, or when carried along by his uniquely digressive and thoughtful poems he began writing once he had arrived at a mature artistic vision, we cannot avoid that pathos. The turns of thought or attention seem, rightly so, while of obvious intelligence, to have been hard won. A number of the critical appreciations collected in this issue of Talisman contain the unspoken assumption that there is something intrinsic in how all of King’s work draws from a deep well.
It seems to me that his early life has played a part in his creative work throughout his years, now into his eighties. No childhood escapes some sense of confusion and pain—that there are children who avoid repression accounts, in part, for the great artistic productions of adulthood. King’s childhood was, in some respects, not an easy one. His early years were marked by dislocation, loss, probably confusion, and alienation, as well as sheer terror. He still relives the German bombings of World War Two London and the sinking of the ship he with his indomitable mother were on—in her insistence that they return to the homeland from the safety of the United States, at the start of the war—the time in a lifeboat. He also remembers being sent to the English countryside while his mother was ill, at some point in the war, and the sadistic regime of the administration in the boarding school there. Later he would return to the States with both his parents.
King was always an artist, starting from age four or five when he drew daily, and this too would contribute to what I would call a kind of mute anguish I detect in some of his portraits or self-portraits. As an adolescent in Detroit, who was coming upon a visual language for himself, he could not find corroboration of his far-seeing work from his teachers. This disjuncture led him to truancy and other misbehavior. He was asked to leave the special high school he was attending and return to a neighborhood school. Instead, he wrote to an experimental college in North Carolina, where, after a three-day visit, he was invited to enroll. King was the youngest person to attend Black Mountain College, at sixteen. We might wonder if, more than anyone else, he was so open, at that age, to experience that he absorbed more of what the college had to offer its students than anyone else.
It was because of Black Mountain that he met Martha Davis (now the writer Martha King), who enrolled there one summer. Following the close of the college, they separately made their way to San Francisco where they met at a poetry reading that involved several other ex-Black Mountain people. The two married in San Francisco in 1958. During their West Coast period they became friendly with Allen Ginsberg, David Meltzer, Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, George Stanley and others who were part of the now famous “San Francisco Renaissance.”
Not too long after that, they made their way to New York City and put down roots, first in downtown Manhattan during the sparkling days of postwar art and literature. They were integral in those two avant-garde communities, wherein there was so much intimacy between the two that it becomes nearly misleading to talk about one or the other—as Basil King’s visual art and, later, his poetry demonstrate.
So, pathos, yes. But there is also his originality. That there is a brilliance in what he does is not the point, however. It is, rather, how he has gone his own way, throughout his life. And while once again his personal history, his early years, provide an explanation, an accounting, for his achievement that makes sense, what is obvious to anyone who has spent time with King’s creative work is that it is marked by a profundity of concept and that searching quality I mentioned—and otherwise, the probing is a key to King’s interrogation of classical beauty. Again, his biography helps us to appreciate all this, such as the story of the Kings’ years in Manhattan.
He was an habitué of the Cedar Bar and thus had opportunities to talk with many artists who were part of the Abstract Expressionist movement, among them Jackson Pollock, the DeKoonings, Mark Rothko, Franz Klein, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan. King also worked as a studio assistant to Adolf Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and others. And, while he had not yet, in these years, begun to write seriously, he became close with poets LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, Paul Blackburn, Frank O’Hara, Hettie Cohen Jones, Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby, Jr., Robert Kelly, and George Economou. The Kings’ friends included, as well, Bob Thompson, Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Jim Rosenquist, art critic Gene Swenson, and other New Yorkers whose art or poetry was completely “new” in the sense of Ezra Pound’s dictum.
King designed an enormous number of book and magazine covers for these people and others, starting then—as Mitch Highfill’s marvelous essay in this Talisman collection details—not least of all, famously, Mulch, the magazine King founded along with Harry Lewis and David Glotzer. To say that the Kings were part of experimental poetry’s fabric, largely that they did not merely partake of but helped to invent the avant-garde after World War Two, is a given for anyone who knows the history, whether on the scene personally or not.
Seeing the chance to buy a dilapidated row house in what was then decidedly not the tony Park Slope of today, the intrepid Kings left Manhattan in 1969 with their two daughters, and set up their lives in an outer borough they helped to make the destination it is today. Their home, which eventually included his studio, became a landmark and Mecca for both their contemporaries and younger cutting-edge writers and artists.
King began to write seriously in 1985 and has now published seventeen collections of prose poetry often accompanied by his art. As a visual artist, never flagging, he has produced an enormous and singularly brilliant body of artwork. In 2012, a day-long symposium on his work was held at the Anthology Film Archives. Along with analytical appreciations delivered by fellow artists, writers and critics (which have given rise to the collection of writings on King in this issue), two films on King were screened that day: Basil King: Mirage, a 22-minute film featuring art and text by King, directed, shot and edited by Nicole Peyrafitte and Miles Joris-Peyrafitte; and art is not natural: a speaking portrait of Basil King by George Quasha, a video interview done originally for Quasha's monumental art project, Art Is.
King’s writings have enjoyed a wealth of critical commentary prior to the present Talisman collection. His work as a visual artist, which has drawn the attention of archivists and some critics, has been exhibited in various venues over the years. Most recently, King had a solo show at the John Molloy Gallery on East 78th Street, some steps away from the Met Museum in New York; and his art has been the subject of symposia and solo exhibitions at Saint Andrews University and the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, both in North Carolina. In 2009 there was a solo show at Poets House, in New York City. Earlier solo exhibitions were mounted at the Bowery Poetry Club, Gotham Book Mart Gallery, Granary Books Gallery, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the Fifth Street Gallery, and the Judson Memorial Church, all also in New York City; as well at the Kirkland Art Gallery in Clinton, New York, the University of Kansas Museum of Art in Kansas, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan. Notable group shows in which King has been represented have been held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House Gallery and the Center for Book Arts, both in New York City, and at the Ashville Museum in North Carolina, the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, in Chicago, the RIT Innovation Center in Rochester, New York, the Hickory Museum of Art in North Carolina, the Bridgett Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia in Madrid, the Arts Center of Henderson County in North Carolina, and Gallery 53 in Cooperstown, New York.
King’s most recent book is History Now (2017) which is part of a huge series called Learning to Draw. It is a deeply personal and knowledgeable, incisive and lyrical, meditation on art, artists, aesthetics, relationships with others, and obliquely on the self. The series is also prosodically unique in literature, made of up prose statements with interludes, all coalescing into a lyrical tapestry. Other notable titles in this project include The Spoken Word / the Painted Hand (2014), Learning to Draw / A History (2011), 77 Beasts: Basil King’s Bestiary (2007), and Mirage: A Poem in 22 Sections (2003), among other volumes.
The critical appreciations collected in this issue of Talisman touch upon some of the history I have presented here, but for the greatest part they are deep forays into the nature of King’s work proper. I mentioned an essay on King’s book covers, by Mitch Highfill, “Basil King and the Small Press Revolution.“ This essay, too, succeeds in not merely contextualizing his work; Highfill teases out the implications of King's activities in this regard, and from them shares a number of insights into King’s art. Other appreciations do much the same, although in a number of rhetorical modes.
Vyt Bakaitis’s critical meditation on King’s History Now, placed within the context of the Learning to Draw series, is in turn contextualized by thinking about specifically the nature of history, when evaluating what acutely involves King here ─”its weight on the psyche.” Laurie Duggan's essay, “Basil King and the Green Man,” discusses the Green Man figure in the British Isles throughout its long history, but ultimately as a way to consider King's art and poetry as one work that displays two aspects of his creativity. Joshua Gardner's essay, “Between the Physical and the Cultural: Basil King and Charles Olson’s ‘Herodotean Exploration,’” lays out the role Charles Olson, his thinking and teachings, played in King's development when young. Vincent Katz’s “Some Thoughts on the Paintings and Poetics of Basil King” delves into the concept of figuration when considering someone like King who is both a visual artist and writer. My own thoughts for the occasion, “Painting, Poetry, Basil King,” are a meditation on the question of figuration and space, and then how they together manifest, in both his art and poetry.
Martha King, in her essay and history, “‘Narcissus’, Basil King’s Work in the Late 1960s,” tells the story of the development and display of King’s mural Aldgate Narcissus with its historical, aesthetic, and exhibition significance. Andrew Levy in “TALKING PAUSE ─ Reflections on Basil” situates King’s poetics, visual aesthetics and techniques within a social and political context, in a lyrical voice that pays homage to King’s own lyricism. Kim Lyons’ study, “Basil King’s Works on Paper: Singularity, Dyads, Families and Mass,” adroitly analyzes King’s visual artistry, tying it to his frame of mind, in particular his works on paper, which are in themselves an activity and medium unique within the King oeuvre.
George Quasha’s “Everything Is Language” notes how King’s work, while possessing a singular “fluency,” including a historical dimension, uniquely escapes the bracketing of historiography as well as reductionist criticism. In a poetic homage to King, Barry Schwabsky’s “Playing Cards and Cigarettes” employs the conditional tense to both interrogate and reveal an essence in King’s work that is remarkably conditional in its own right, and revealing of King’s achievement as such. And Daniel Staniforth, whose Skylight Press published Learning to Draw in 2010, focuses his essay on that book (i.e., Basil King’s Learning to Draw / A History) to illuminate King’s larger artistic agenda.
These critical appreciations attest to the enduring brilliance of King’s accomplishments, and prove that our desire to engage them deeply is inevitable. The incisive contributions by such knowing and illustrious writers constitute, as collected here, a special occasion, one long awaited, now to be celebrated.
There is a pathos in Basil King’s paintings and drawings that pulls the viewer into them. There is a sympathy. The depth of feeling is there just as much in his writings, somewhat ethereally, perhaps, but palpable nevertheless. When viewing his searching visual art, or when carried along by his uniquely digressive and thoughtful poems he began writing once he had arrived at a mature artistic vision, we cannot avoid that pathos. The turns of thought or attention seem, rightly so, while of obvious intelligence, to have been hard won. A number of the critical appreciations collected in this issue of Talisman contain the unspoken assumption that there is something intrinsic in how all of King’s work draws from a deep well.
It seems to me that his early life has played a part in his creative work throughout his years, now into his eighties. No childhood escapes some sense of confusion and pain—that there are children who avoid repression accounts, in part, for the great artistic productions of adulthood. King’s childhood was, in some respects, not an easy one. His early years were marked by dislocation, loss, probably confusion, and alienation, as well as sheer terror. He still relives the German bombings of World War Two London and the sinking of the ship he with his indomitable mother were on—in her insistence that they return to the homeland from the safety of the United States, at the start of the war—the time in a lifeboat. He also remembers being sent to the English countryside while his mother was ill, at some point in the war, and the sadistic regime of the administration in the boarding school there. Later he would return to the States with both his parents.
King was always an artist, starting from age four or five when he drew daily, and this too would contribute to what I would call a kind of mute anguish I detect in some of his portraits or self-portraits. As an adolescent in Detroit, who was coming upon a visual language for himself, he could not find corroboration of his far-seeing work from his teachers. This disjuncture led him to truancy and other misbehavior. He was asked to leave the special high school he was attending and return to a neighborhood school. Instead, he wrote to an experimental college in North Carolina, where, after a three-day visit, he was invited to enroll. King was the youngest person to attend Black Mountain College, at sixteen. We might wonder if, more than anyone else, he was so open, at that age, to experience that he absorbed more of what the college had to offer its students than anyone else.
It was because of Black Mountain that he met Martha Davis (now the writer Martha King), who enrolled there one summer. Following the close of the college, they separately made their way to San Francisco where they met at a poetry reading that involved several other ex-Black Mountain people. The two married in San Francisco in 1958. During their West Coast period they became friendly with Allen Ginsberg, David Meltzer, Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, George Stanley and others who were part of the now famous “San Francisco Renaissance.”
Not too long after that, they made their way to New York City and put down roots, first in downtown Manhattan during the sparkling days of postwar art and literature. They were integral in those two avant-garde communities, wherein there was so much intimacy between the two that it becomes nearly misleading to talk about one or the other—as Basil King’s visual art and, later, his poetry demonstrate.
So, pathos, yes. But there is also his originality. That there is a brilliance in what he does is not the point, however. It is, rather, how he has gone his own way, throughout his life. And while once again his personal history, his early years, provide an explanation, an accounting, for his achievement that makes sense, what is obvious to anyone who has spent time with King’s creative work is that it is marked by a profundity of concept and that searching quality I mentioned—and otherwise, the probing is a key to King’s interrogation of classical beauty. Again, his biography helps us to appreciate all this, such as the story of the Kings’ years in Manhattan.
He was an habitué of the Cedar Bar and thus had opportunities to talk with many artists who were part of the Abstract Expressionist movement, among them Jackson Pollock, the DeKoonings, Mark Rothko, Franz Klein, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan. King also worked as a studio assistant to Adolf Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and others. And, while he had not yet, in these years, begun to write seriously, he became close with poets LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, Paul Blackburn, Frank O’Hara, Hettie Cohen Jones, Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby, Jr., Robert Kelly, and George Economou. The Kings’ friends included, as well, Bob Thompson, Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Jim Rosenquist, art critic Gene Swenson, and other New Yorkers whose art or poetry was completely “new” in the sense of Ezra Pound’s dictum.
King designed an enormous number of book and magazine covers for these people and others, starting then—as Mitch Highfill’s marvelous essay in this Talisman collection details—not least of all, famously, Mulch, the magazine King founded along with Harry Lewis and David Glotzer. To say that the Kings were part of experimental poetry’s fabric, largely that they did not merely partake of but helped to invent the avant-garde after World War Two, is a given for anyone who knows the history, whether on the scene personally or not.
Seeing the chance to buy a dilapidated row house in what was then decidedly not the tony Park Slope of today, the intrepid Kings left Manhattan in 1969 with their two daughters, and set up their lives in an outer borough they helped to make the destination it is today. Their home, which eventually included his studio, became a landmark and Mecca for both their contemporaries and younger cutting-edge writers and artists.
King began to write seriously in 1985 and has now published seventeen collections of prose poetry often accompanied by his art. As a visual artist, never flagging, he has produced an enormous and singularly brilliant body of artwork. In 2012, a day-long symposium on his work was held at the Anthology Film Archives. Along with analytical appreciations delivered by fellow artists, writers and critics (which have given rise to the collection of writings on King in this issue), two films on King were screened that day: Basil King: Mirage, a 22-minute film featuring art and text by King, directed, shot and edited by Nicole Peyrafitte and Miles Joris-Peyrafitte; and art is not natural: a speaking portrait of Basil King by George Quasha, a video interview done originally for Quasha's monumental art project, Art Is.
King’s writings have enjoyed a wealth of critical commentary prior to the present Talisman collection. His work as a visual artist, which has drawn the attention of archivists and some critics, has been exhibited in various venues over the years. Most recently, King had a solo show at the John Molloy Gallery on East 78th Street, some steps away from the Met Museum in New York; and his art has been the subject of symposia and solo exhibitions at Saint Andrews University and the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, both in North Carolina. In 2009 there was a solo show at Poets House, in New York City. Earlier solo exhibitions were mounted at the Bowery Poetry Club, Gotham Book Mart Gallery, Granary Books Gallery, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the Fifth Street Gallery, and the Judson Memorial Church, all also in New York City; as well at the Kirkland Art Gallery in Clinton, New York, the University of Kansas Museum of Art in Kansas, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan. Notable group shows in which King has been represented have been held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House Gallery and the Center for Book Arts, both in New York City, and at the Ashville Museum in North Carolina, the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, in Chicago, the RIT Innovation Center in Rochester, New York, the Hickory Museum of Art in North Carolina, the Bridgett Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia in Madrid, the Arts Center of Henderson County in North Carolina, and Gallery 53 in Cooperstown, New York.
King’s most recent book is History Now (2017) which is part of a huge series called Learning to Draw. It is a deeply personal and knowledgeable, incisive and lyrical, meditation on art, artists, aesthetics, relationships with others, and obliquely on the self. The series is also prosodically unique in literature, made of up prose statements with interludes, all coalescing into a lyrical tapestry. Other notable titles in this project include The Spoken Word / the Painted Hand (2014), Learning to Draw / A History (2011), 77 Beasts: Basil King’s Bestiary (2007), and Mirage: A Poem in 22 Sections (2003), among other volumes.
The critical appreciations collected in this issue of Talisman touch upon some of the history I have presented here, but for the greatest part they are deep forays into the nature of King’s work proper. I mentioned an essay on King’s book covers, by Mitch Highfill, “Basil King and the Small Press Revolution.“ This essay, too, succeeds in not merely contextualizing his work; Highfill teases out the implications of King's activities in this regard, and from them shares a number of insights into King’s art. Other appreciations do much the same, although in a number of rhetorical modes.
Vyt Bakaitis’s critical meditation on King’s History Now, placed within the context of the Learning to Draw series, is in turn contextualized by thinking about specifically the nature of history, when evaluating what acutely involves King here ─”its weight on the psyche.” Laurie Duggan's essay, “Basil King and the Green Man,” discusses the Green Man figure in the British Isles throughout its long history, but ultimately as a way to consider King's art and poetry as one work that displays two aspects of his creativity. Joshua Gardner's essay, “Between the Physical and the Cultural: Basil King and Charles Olson’s ‘Herodotean Exploration,’” lays out the role Charles Olson, his thinking and teachings, played in King's development when young. Vincent Katz’s “Some Thoughts on the Paintings and Poetics of Basil King” delves into the concept of figuration when considering someone like King who is both a visual artist and writer. My own thoughts for the occasion, “Painting, Poetry, Basil King,” are a meditation on the question of figuration and space, and then how they together manifest, in both his art and poetry.
Martha King, in her essay and history, “‘Narcissus’, Basil King’s Work in the Late 1960s,” tells the story of the development and display of King’s mural Aldgate Narcissus with its historical, aesthetic, and exhibition significance. Andrew Levy in “TALKING PAUSE ─ Reflections on Basil” situates King’s poetics, visual aesthetics and techniques within a social and political context, in a lyrical voice that pays homage to King’s own lyricism. Kim Lyons’ study, “Basil King’s Works on Paper: Singularity, Dyads, Families and Mass,” adroitly analyzes King’s visual artistry, tying it to his frame of mind, in particular his works on paper, which are in themselves an activity and medium unique within the King oeuvre.
George Quasha’s “Everything Is Language” notes how King’s work, while possessing a singular “fluency,” including a historical dimension, uniquely escapes the bracketing of historiography as well as reductionist criticism. In a poetic homage to King, Barry Schwabsky’s “Playing Cards and Cigarettes” employs the conditional tense to both interrogate and reveal an essence in King’s work that is remarkably conditional in its own right, and revealing of King’s achievement as such. And Daniel Staniforth, whose Skylight Press published Learning to Draw in 2010, focuses his essay on that book (i.e., Basil King’s Learning to Draw / A History) to illuminate King’s larger artistic agenda.
These critical appreciations attest to the enduring brilliance of King’s accomplishments, and prove that our desire to engage them deeply is inevitable. The incisive contributions by such knowing and illustrious writers constitute, as collected here, a special occasion, one long awaited, now to be celebrated.