Just before he wrote the words on the classroom board, Dr. Tom Byers, our professor of contemporary poetry at the University of Louisville, said, “this is the shortest poem I know.”

—It
It—

by Robert Creeley

The poem appeared on the board as if in performance, or as an object of ephemerality. It is part of the poem ‘“Time’ is some sort of hindsight,” from Creeley’s book Pieces.  To what degree Professor Byers explained the idea of a poem within a poem, it standing on its own outside of the poem in which it was written, or how it showed moving from passivity to action, I can only paraphrase in a reimagining. I write phrases of the professor’s action “as if in performance” and “or as an object of ephemerality” out of my current vocabulary. They were not in my verbal toolbox back then. What he was laying on us that chilly autumn day was too much for me, some distance beyond where I was artistically or intellectually. The accumulation of artistic scope in the contemporary poetry he taught that semester would take time to sink in. But the class changed me, stretched my imagination, inspired new ways of thinking, and set me on a road I had no idea I’d be traveling. One of the roads the Creeley discussion sent me down came in the form of a consideration planted in the deeper recesses of my mind: would I ever find a one word poem?

Creeley used one word twice. My interest was about one word, used so effectively, poetically and with all of Mark Twain’s lightning, that it rose into the being of a poem, to the “level” of a poem. Did everything a poem could do and was supposed to do.

I do not want to say I found the one word poem, for it could have found me. I will say I encountered it and read it and leave it there. When I did read —it, it— froze me in my tracks. Here it is in the best that typeface font can do:

¿DEFAC/MENT©?

by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Detail. Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). 1983

The visual field on which the poem is written, the painting in which it resides and titles, Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), contains a forest storm of wind.

“One of the measures of art is the amount of wilderness it contains.”
                                                                                                        – Stanley Kunitz

The windbreath of ¿DEFAC/MENT©? stretches the expanse Kunitz described.  In character with much of contemporary poetry, post-modernist or otherwise, ¿DEFAC/MENT©? functions as both title and text. The poem presents word as symbol and symbol in marriage with meaning. It challenges meaning and gives birth to contemplation. It asks about language old and new. It demands accountability of language usage and its power in our consciousness. 

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In the early morning hours of September 15, 1983, the artist Michael Stewart was detained by New York City transit police for allegedly tagging a subway tile in the Brooklyn bound L station at 14^th Street and First Avenue. Approximately 30 minutes later the police dumped Michael Stewart, comatose from a brutal beating and hog-tied in chains, at Bellevue Hospital. Doctors sawed him out of the chains and revived him.  He never regained consciousness and on September 28, 1983, Michael Stewart died. He was 25 years old.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was said by many who knew him to be traumatized and continually disturbed by the brutal death of Michael Stewart. Basquiat repeated, now famously, whenever the topic of Michael Stewart came up, “it could have been me.” Sometime between September 29 and October 5, 1983, Basquiat painted Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) on the wall in Keith Haring’s downtown studio.  Basquiat was 22 years old at the time.

Basquiat’s poem carries the weight and primacy of what poets ask and proclaim of language poetry. The word, the poem, exist as objects in and of themselves, above and beyond any meanings conveyed or created.  It presents each viewer-reader the opportunity to create a meaning and internalize it. In those poetic senses alone Basquiat elevates ¿DEFAC/MENT©? exponentially. It is an object in its most organic form – a physical painting, while operating as its own object – a poem. It raises the aesthetics and value of the individual components – the letters and symbols – and elicits action with a cross-genre communication of symbolism.

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In the 1980s the power structures of the city referred to graffiti art as “defacement.” In both uses of the word as poem-title and as a visual element integral to the painting, Basquiat requires the viewer to answer who or what is the recipient of defacement? The body of a young African-American artist, or a subway tile. The requirement is a question posed from word usage in its most basic form, even before Basquiat makes his artistic intervention and works his magic.

Poems create meaning, birth emotion, slow down time, offer a meditation, tell a story, communicate a truth, reveal a psyche, or focus a subject in ways other forms of expression might not. Poems exist as song, prayer, enchantment, tale, riddle, lesson, or in the simple flowering of their own being.  ¿DEFAC/MENT©? allows an entryway into any of those poetic possibilities.

Basquiat’s poem stands firm in all contextualization to pose the question it must. But he uses question marks anyway, to deliver less apparent initial effects, but ultimately for dramatic and poetic outcomes. The inverted Spanish-style question mark lifts the poem out of the primacy of English, which the regime of the city had as much usage capability and control over as anyone else. Once Basquiat set the word free of English he then cut it in half with a slash. By replacing the middle E with a stroke of coloring, he enacted a change to the physicality of the word, its meaning and symbolism, all the while using black in the same extraordinary way he did in the rest of the painting. By inserting the copyright symbol at the end and allowing it room to appear as a stand-in for the letter o, in effect breaking old meanings and conjuring a new word, Basquiat deployed one of his frequent motifs to extract the regime’s power of usage in labeling graffiti as defacement, thereby making it impotent in the regime’s arsenal.

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Basquiat could have rendered the fatal beating of Michael Stewart in a number of ways. He chose to paint a story of the streets in the language of the streets. He could have opted for specific styles he so often melded in lieu of others. Instead he brought them all to bear, engaging elements of neo-expressionism, surrealism, outsider art, street art, imagism, graffiti, pop and cartoon art. The painting’s refusal to settle on any one style presents Basquiat at his best – an artist in a state of freedom exercising a full range of imagination. His action comes across as all the more compelling considering his heightened emotional state at the time of composition.

The painting offers a simplicity of imagery – a black man confronted by two police officers with raised batons and a single word – to house its complex and horrifying societal narrative. By painting the figures of Michael Stewart and two police officers in a representational way, Basquiat gives proper credence to the story while allowing meaning and narrative to avoid dependence on the historical element. Everything that can be communicated is communicated within the borders of the frame. 

Basquiat locates symbolism throughout the painting as effectively as he does in the textual element of the poem-title. The triangles used for teeth on the feral boar-wolf hybrid figure showing hatred and anger, are mirrored on the uniform of the other officer, imprinting institutional or systematic representation of attitudes toward African-American men.  The three stars are also placed in a triangle. Two are on the hats of the policemen and one rises above the whole scene, as if the star has been liberated and returned to its proper place, not to be used as a symbol of power but to watch over the fallen figure of Michael Stewart.

Color choice and placement are equally conversant with the figures and symbols. Paint patterns across the piece look as if they had been made with a roller. Photographs of the wall in Keith Haring’s studio show the colors were on the wall in the immediate vicinity of where Basquiat created the painting. The viewer’s curiosity can lead to wondering if Basquiat chose the particular position on the wall because the paint already there allowed him to respond in concert with images of the narrative he was grappling with in the immediate aftermath of Michael Stewart’s death. The color pattern of blue and pink hues of the police are dominant and splay the wall plaster, while the largest black region is relegated to the corner. Basquiat’s use of black is the most profound from the palette that composed the painting. The color splashes evoke blood splatters and blackness, the blood and blackness being taken away from Michael Stewart as he is being beaten. The black spot to the right by the floating figure’s head could represent the “graffiti,” the “defacement,” that Michael Stewart was accused of making with a marker on a subway tile. The image of a halo around Michael Stewart’s head reaches up toward the center star.

Basquiat’s gestures with color build the backbone of the piece. Color and gesture prove inseparable throughout, which again shows Basquiat’s cross-genre application in conveying the figures. The face of the toothless police officer is represented with eyes but without any figurative elements to convey emotion. Juxtaposed across from the animal figure, the indifference by the police is shown as being as dangerous and brutal as hatred and anger. The paint gesture composing the figure of Michael Stewart evokes a shroud, or a ghostlike body. It is in that gesture of black paint where the piece achieves its most extraordinary resonance. Basquiat was right, it could have been him at the receiving end of police batons and chokeholds. He actually was a graffiti artist at one point.  Michael Stewart was not. It could have been any African-American man. The figure arrives at a representational significance, but works on an ingraining, more personal level.  The hovering figure of Michael Stewart shown from the back presents a sense of suspension.  Basquiat allows us a meditation, and in that meditation he offers the stillness of Michael Stewart. It is what Aldous Huxley described masterpieces of religious art as having: “…a profound stillness. And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the beholder out of the old world of his everyday experience, far away, toward the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.” In that hallowed stillness Basquiat lifts us away from objects, painting and poem, even from the artist himself, and places us firmly, inescapably, in the story of Michael Stewart. We are left there with him, and him alone.

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Keith Haring cut Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) out of the wall, put a crown around it and hung it above his bed where it remained until he died. The vast amounts of urgency and prophecy in the painting are difficult to quantify. In the past few years, the painting has been viewed more than ever. The more light and air it receives the greater are the chances of it being viewed as one of the most important American paintings in the past 50 years. Important not for what it lays before the eye aesthetically, nor in defense of the styles Basquiat used, but for the power of what it does. 

Robert Creeley was interested in the contemporary art of his time and collaborated with many visual artists. It is unlikely Creeley ever saw Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). It does not seem beyond the realm of possibility to speculate on Creeley’s appreciation of, or interest in, Basquiat’s use of text and the poetics of the young painter. In ¿DEFAC/MENT©? Basquiat activates language in a way to ask us directly – what language is before us? At the same time Basquiat transforms language so completely in thought, sight, speech and usage, we all become more than one thing: we are the viewer-reader, the object of contemplation is painting-poem and poem-title, the composer is painter-poet. All elements – letters and symbols – require we neither utter nor write the language of any regime or power structure. We challenge language, reach for new expression, and finally, locate ourselves in the language of art. Then there we go…into the wilderness.

Remember Michael Stewart (May 9, 1958 – September 28, 1983)