Learning to Draw / A History

4.5/5 ( ratings)

Learning to Draw / A History is an evolving and transformative narrative sketch, alternately prose and poetry, that serves to document a personal and yet collective history with a roving artist's eye. Previously serialised in a number of small journals and zines, the work has met with some acclaim and this is the first complete version in a new architectural alignment. Although from post-war Britain, Basil King's literary lineage harkens back to the projective verse style of Pound and Williams, sweetened through his working associations with the likes of Blackburn, Ginsberg and Baraka. The weaving of subjects in this work is not unlike the purposeful mixing of colours on an artist's palette.

"The poems, rather than acting as an extended narrative interlace, so that the structure is like an evolving web. What is at stake here is a history, but history being a fluid thing, is never going to appear the same no matter how often the survivors tell their tales. With each new piece of information the whole is altered: not just by addition, but by complication." - Laurie Duggan

“Essential symmetry of experience which has gone against both the metronome and arrhythmia and beyond the ornamentation of inessentials in so much present writing. It helps to have had one’s hands covered with paint. Someone, after a long life, is standing at the door of some facet of wisdom.” – Nathaniel Tarn

“The book reminds me of the kind of brilliant and wacky conversations as arguments we used to have back in the day before the day at the not yet legendary Cedar Tavern. Did I call him bourgeois then...probably!” - Amiri Baraka

"The writing is deeply charged and musical; and fun and often funny! [He] draws with all the pure delight of a great soloist improvising and shaping and presenting the familiar in a new and charged moment." - Harry Lewis

“Basil King is the agent of poetry in Art Land, and a splendid reporter of his adventures in the practice of both. Learning to Draw is a memoir, a manual, and a philosophical essay that brings out the meaning of “draw” like water from a well. It’s a hair-raising page-turner and, at the same time, a sweet and reassuring journey through the working of a mind fully engaged by the mystery of the eye, the hand, and the measure of words." - Andrei Codrescu