John Yau

Related Articles • The Rothko, A New Poetic Form • Dante & the Response Poem • Mathemetrics

John Yau is a poet and art critic. His Jackson Pollock poem starts with Pollock’s address as title, then the famous quote of the great action painter, the artist who took the idea of drip drab toss fling and ran with it all the way out of sight, leaving brilliant consciousness tracks all over the canvas. The 1999 show at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting I saw people dance with each other getting from one end of his huge canvases to the other, I saw people huddle over a one-inch square of drippings as if it were the universal sand grain.

Yau’s poem is both example and homage, a sonnet comprised only of the thirteen words and three punctuation marks in Pollock’s quote. When we sink into Pollock’s paintings, colors begin to speak, first binarily (the violet crosses the silver, the olive comes after the violet, so why does the olive cross the silver?), and ultimately crescendoing to the aforementioned “dance.”

Words are a different medium. From a step away they all look the same: segmented, liner worms. Diving in, the meanings explode. It’s as if each of the words is a color: they reappear in the poetic field the way Pollock’s drips appear in his paintings. Yau steps in and out like Pollock approaching the canvas. Sometimes improvisation seems to overwhelm consciousness (“When what, what when, what of, when in, I’m not painting my I”); just as often, consciousness lashes back through the same words (“Not aware, not in, not of, not doing, I’m in my I”). The poem veers line-by-line from philosophy to romance, from abstraction to political jaw-setting. Finally the whole overwhelms, and Yau pulls off the impossible: the verb painting the noun painting; Pollock doer and doee.

So, the Pollock takes its place beside our previous feature the Rothko as a new poetic form inspired by a painter:

A Pollock is a sonnet whose first line is a quotation. The remaining lines are comprised solely of words and punctuation found in the first line.

Remember to be standing in front of a Pollock when you write a Pollock. Also, break the rules when you write your own Pollock.

Bob Holman

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Compare prices  to buy the books • Fetish • Forbidden Entries

John Yau is the editor of Fetish: an anthology of erotic short stories (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998). His most recent book of poems is Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow Press, 1997).

[Ed. note: I heard Yau read his poem at Wanda Phipps’ Friday night reading series at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. He was participating in a reading curated by the German conceptualist, Schuldt, who performed his collaboration with Robert Kelly, Unquell the Dawn Now (McPherson & Company, 1998, 914-331-5807), a homeophonic poem cycle based on Holderlin’s “Am Quell der Donau.” A HOOT! --Bob Holman]

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