Join us for a reading by painter and writer Basil King to celebrate the book launch of his new book There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits. The reading is free and open to all.
This reading and book launch will inaugurate Lost & Found: The CUNY Document Initiative's new collaborative partnership with Pinsapo Press presenting our first co-publication There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits, an exciting new book by Basil King, introduced by Ammiel Alcalay, and edited with an afterword by Öykü Tekten. From Ammiel Alcalay's introduction:
"[...] each of the texts included here — taking up figures as disparate as Billy the Kid, poets Samuel Greenberg and Isaac Rosenberg, painters Velazquez, van Dyke, Rubens, Soutine, Modigliani, Chagall, and so many others — seem to have been poured through Olson’s alembic, his “Special View of History,” as Basil punctiliously records and juxtaposes the facts “that matter,” so “fact can be fable again.” Like the vast visual and textural vocabulary of his paintings, Basil King’s latest textual landscapes portray worlds torqued into collision and relation, close to the bone and heart, close to our own felt ways of knowing. Work so condensed to its essential elements is all too rare, and the formal effect of these writings is overwhelming. Basil King’s There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits is a treasure that deserves both our attention and study."
Basil King was born in the UK in 1935, immigrated to the USA at age twelve, King began studies at Black Mountain College in 1951. After college studies and time in San Francisco, New York City, and Montana, where he worked under Peter Voulkos, he ultimately settled in New York City’s Lower East Side–and then Brooklyn. In 1985, following his first return trip to the UK, he began to write seriously and has since published both chapbooks and full length collections of poetry. His early work painting abstract expressionist works grew into a new approach to art employing fluid forms that combine abstraction, surrealism, and figuration. Now in his 8th decade, he lives in Brooklyn and paints and writes daily. Learn more at Basil King's website www.basilking.net
Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
Click here to read about the launch event on the Center for the Humanities website
The cover of There Are No Ghosts, There are Portraits by Basil King