A Poem by John Yau from Borrowed Love Poems (2002)

It's hard to keep up with the poetry tsunami that is John Yau, but one book which you should definitely add to your library if it's not already present is his Borrowed Love Poems. It includes much great poetry, besides one bona fide masterpiece, "I Was A Poet in the House of Frankenstein," which is the ultimate shiv in the heart of any "identity poetics" which wants to simplify what life is, what life's struggle really is...this is the ultimate shape-shifter, fox spirit poem...the poet's vocation is also obliquely described here in this hilariously heartbreaking poem.

I wanted to share the opening poem, because it shows the subtlety with which Yau uses images; quite often, he crafts weird modern kennings (quite unlike those in Old English) which rather resemble some of Rauschenberg's more oneiric assemblages...one can rarely forget images like "a lean stalk of sharkskin/on a high frequency appetite surge" (from "Radiant Silhouette I", a poem suite from the late eighties).

Borrowed Love Poems opens with a quote by that exile much more unfortunate even than Ovid, Osip Mandelstam: "What I am saying at this moment is not being said by me." This is the sort of quote that lends itself to oversimplification if interpreted facilely. One must notice the present tense in that disavowal, and work from the doubling and distance which that occasions. It's rather similar to the Cretan paradox: how can this speaking figure use the first person even as it's disavowing it?

Is Yau pointing to this quote to underscore the mystery of self-annihilation at the heart of all great poetry? Isn't what is happening in that quote precisely the transcendence poetry is trying to achieve?

The opening poem is the first in a suite of poems...or is it a multipartite poem? One could argue endlessly on that, but with no resolution. I don't imagine the poet could answer that either.

This is a poem of few words, but many aftershocks.

     Russian Letter

It is said, the past
sticks to the present

like glue,
that we are flies

struggling to pull free
It is said, someone

cannot change
the clothes

in which
their soul

was born.
I, however,

would not
go so far.

Nor am I Rembrandt,
master of the black

and green darkness,
the hawk's plumes

as it shrieks
down from the sky


Some might find it hard to believe that a poet who writes such stiletto lyric poems might also engage in poetic vaudeville, but that modality is commonplace in this rangy thick collection. One of my favorite quotes appears at the end of "Retired Wrestler": "My name is Tonsil Trash / the Delirious Assyrian." If that doesn't draw a perfect portrait of many of our militant heads of state, capture about every government news briefing on the war in Iraq, I'll eat your, my, anyone's chapeau.

John Yau is to poetry what David Lynch is to cinema: both often get looked at askance, but once you're under the spell of the material, you shut up and your jaw drops. Then...several scenes or pages later...did that girl really just pull stringy bits of her brain out of her own hair??....did he really just say he was "elected junior secretary of the Boiled Hamster Club??... you swallow.

This is a book you really should look for, if you don't own it. I really haven't begun to describe the range of the modalities he runs through in here...it's rather a poet's handbook on form without any lectures at all, just pure demonstration.

Snag it! But don't snake it!