Process has a new goal. We’re going to try to build a new history of outsider poetics. There’s something happening that isn’t academic, quadriplegic or kitschy.

To do this we’re going to have to start with Basquiat. Who wrote on buildings with paint. Get out your spray cans!

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SAMO©|||4
THE SO–
CALLED
AVANT-GARDE

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SAMO©|||AS A CONGLOMERATE
OF DORMANT-GENIOUS

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“I cross out words so you will see them more - the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”

—Jean-Michel Basquiat

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SAMO©|||4– THE SEDATE|||

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SAMO© AS AN
END 2 THE
NEON FANTASY
CALLED “LIFE”|||

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SAMO©? DO I
HAVE 2 SPELL IT OUT!!

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“Every single line means something.”

—Jean-Michel Basquiat

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SAMO© ||| @* !?@!

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MICROWAVE & VIDEO X-SISTANCE
“BIG-MAC” CERTIFICATE”
FOR X-MAS |||
SAMO©|||

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SAMO© AS AN
END TO THE
9-TO-5, ‘WENT 2 COLLEGE
, NOT 2-NITE HONEY BLUES|||
SAMO©|||
4-U|||

SAMO© wrote his name, but he didn’t just write his name. He used corporate symbols, barcodes and precise statements to bake his bread. You can look at it like this: each SAMO© graffiti is a stanza in the best poem about New York.

It’s a beat poet’s form using repetition of the opening lines. Really it’s as old as Walt Whitman, the first Real American Poet. It’s as old as the bible. SAMO© is the new Beatitudes. Statements straight from the top, a set of cures for our ailments. Gag me for the cliche, but capitalism is our big religion, and SAMO© is the big cure for what we already know.

Can you really consider the SAMO© work as poetry? It’s context dependent, quick and hell, it’s graffiti. At the same time it’s not nearly as visually arresting as Basquiat’s paintings and is completely dependent on language. We needed to know what this was. And the Village Voice said:

Jean-Michel Basquiat first made his name as the graffiti artist-poet Samo, whose observations about the state of the world have amused and provoked New Yorkers, at least downtown ones, for the last few years.

That hyphenation marks a cross pollination. Poetry that is context aware, art that speaks in words. In Basquiat’s paintings, coming through the Lyrical Abstractions, we get an actual lyric that manages reclamation and direct speech without sacrificing what’s sensuous. The SAMO© graffiti substitutes context for horrorscapes on canvas and achieves the same validity with just words and location. Location, Location.