If as a young man a gallery or galleries had been interested in showing my paintings, I would have had no time to think about writing. I would have painted and been involved with maintaining my reputation. Alas, there were many promises to show my paintings, but they all came to naught.
I was fifty years old when in desperation I began to write. I had been painting since I was fourteen. At Black Mountain College I took classes with Olson, Duncan and Creeley. But if I hadn’t been painting all these years, I would never have known that I put disparate things together.
[Pause]
I was in a carpenter’s shop and the floor was strewn with shavings. The shavings were the remains of paintings and drawings from the past. In the dream I picked up handfuls of shavings with works from the cave to the present. They were unfinished. I held them in my hands and slowly while working I began to know what to do to put disparate things together.
[Pause]
Dreams channel history and history has the power to turn things upside down. I have been haunted by two experiences one I had at the age of six and one at seven that to this day inform how I feel I am supposed to be in the world.
[Pause]
Memory recalls the traumas. Memory recalls and I pause and digest. Memory says there is no great distance between right and wrong, good or bad, only a thin line separates the two. I am obliged to repeat I love to paint, and I love to write poetry.
[Pause]
We live in a house on 4th Street in Brooklyn. I have been working on a new series of drawing and painting I call 4th Street. I painted a large portrait of ” A Snow Man on 4th Street.” It has a very disturbing presence. I wasn’t sure of were it came from. What was it telling me? I wasn’t able to paint for weeks. A few days ago, I was scribbling in my sketchpad and a drawing told me.
[Pause]
The Green Man Comes to 4th Street
Emily’s sidewalk
Danny’s garden
My forte
My steps
My ladder
Leads to
A description of Green
Paled by Yellow
Eyes
Housed
In a cavity
I am an oar
To Emily’s sidewalk
To Danny’s garden
My forte
My steps
My ladder
Leads to
A house
Runs
Like water
Runs
One floor
At a time
To Emily’s sidewalk
To Danny’s garden
My forte
My steps
My ladder
Leads to
[Pause]
Why learn to cross the street? Why remember the first tree I climbed? Why remember my mother and father’s faces, the first girl I had a crush on, the Second World War, school.
What marks the self from being selfless? Ego, erudition, something you must have, a cup, a knife and fork, knowledge, status. There are days when the sun appears and on other days the clouds bring rain a wet reminder that memory stays and accumulates.
What is history?
[Pause]
My MRI tells that I might have had a stroke when I was still in the womb. I was a Caesarian birth and I was pulled out incorrectly. The loss of oxygen caused damage to the nerves on the right side of my body. It is a mild case of cerebral palsy. To this day blood goes too slowly to my brain.
[Pause]
A very learned lady once told me. “If I wanted to I could learn to play the violin by turning the violin around and using my damaged right hand to bow.” It’s a wonderful compliment.
[Pause]
I am not a selfie who takes refuge in behavior that contradicts humility. What is the norm? I question the legitimacy of the norm. It is a behavior that questions nothing and is the enemy of poetry. Hear the undertow: brevity takes its toll.
[Pause]
The past is as present as I want the future to be. It is on behalf of this that I contribute my painting and my poetry.
Basil King, born in London, England, attended Black Mountain College as a teenager in the 1950s, and completed his 
apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist painter in San Francisco and New York. Since that time his art has taken a different turn, reaching through abstraction back to surrealism and forward into a new approach to the figure. Although he did not begin to write regularly until 1985, an involvement with poetry has always been part of his life, first in doing art to accompany poems in books and magazines, later as a book artist, and now as a poet/painter. Some of his art can be seen on his website, www.basilking-marthaking.com. His books include Split Peas, Miniatures, Identity, The Poet, Warp Spasm, Mirage, 77 Beasts;Basil King’s Bestiary, The Spoken Word/The Painted Hand, and History Now. He lives and works in Brooklyn with his partner Martha King.