I was walking along inside the Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power show at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (started at Tate Modern) w/ S-L and I saw a title card and I blanched. Leroi Jones and His Family. Bob Thompson.
Bob Thompson. I had never seen a work of art by Bob Thompson. I had certainly heard of him, through Babylon Revisited, by Amiri Baraka, who was LeRoi Jones, until he wasn’t anymore.
The ’60s.
Babylon Revisited was the first poem I ever memorized, and loved, and could recite at will. It was horrible /bile- full but the words were beautiful. They flowed from a mouth. Impossible to speak them gentle or slow, so many near-rhymes and walls and spits.
Here’s the poem, in its entirety. Written after divorce from Hattie, his ex-wife, pictured above, written after he had written her off and everything he had in the Beat world. Here’s the stanza about the artist, and how the poet believed he had fallen:
This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson
a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced
to a pitiful imitation faggot
full of American holes and a monkey on his back
slapped airplanes
from the empire state building
So as I stood there, dumb, watching an earnest man in a nice suit in early 60s hip NYC painting, knowing how everything would change, I cried. Not because I was sad— why would I be— this was not my drama/ this had nothing to do with me.
I was sad because when we make art we’re making a bet and sometimes we lose. And Thompson would be dead by ’66 and Baraka would denounce him by ’69 and epithets exist all at once, things are folded into paint like time sometimes.