Tell It Slant
John Yau
Omnidawn
978-1-63243-125-7
When someone asks, “What are you reading these days?” I often want to respond, “That’s none of your business!” Impertinence catches me off guard, piercing my privacy with a prurient demand for a disclosure I did not solicit. But rarely do I nip such well-meaning inquiries in the bud. Instead I hem and haw. Guffaw. Maybe even reel off a title or two I don’t even care much about but happen to have on my desk. Haven’t we all been there, done that? “Perhaps you are so not ready to hear what I have to say!” is also something I refrain from saying. Why meet curiosity with unkindness? And yet, the jouissance of reading is mostly a private affair as Barthes well knew. Archives and libraries stuffed with kinks. Lines rifted with perverse ore.
For much of my reading and writing life, I’ve regarded John Yau as a role model, not in the sense of a model minority but as a bad-ass bad boy to emulate. His author photo on the back of Sometimes, for example, left an indelible impression on this nascent ex-Mormon gay Asian-American poet fresh out of BYU. Books like Corpse and Mirror and Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work (1974-1988). From reading Yau, I learned that identity is less monolithic politics and more polymorphous perverse. It’s Gun Ho Chop Suey—clandestine etymologies straight out of the horse’s mouth from the Wild West of a bygone century. Less 20th Century Mandarin and more 19th Century Cantonese, that is, if you had the eyes to see through the Chinatowns of Gold Mountain, San Francisco and New York City the new and true Far West and Far East respective of our homegrown poesis. I myself grew up in the Bay Area just south of San Fran in the mid-Sixties in a suburb of San Jose fifteen years after John Yau’s arrival on Earth. I had no idea what the New York School was, and wouldn’t, until I moved out East in the early Nineties. Until then, John Yau was a mere spondee to my own Tim Liu, both of our surnames ending with U.
Reading John Yau taught me that humor is heartbreak, the unwritten pantoum of my own past lives demanding that I incorporate the end rhymes of Brigham Young with Egg Foo Young. I had yet to encounter the likes of Ashbery or O’Hara in my undergrad years but shortly would thereafter as I made my exodus out of the canyons of Provo (Zion!) on my Eastward Trek to the Wild Far East of Manhattan the way Hart Crane would wend his way to the birthplace of Uncle Walt, the Brooklyn Bridge itself (rather than the Golden Gate) as his Bifröst into Valhalla. Dial back to the mid-eighties for a moment when the landscape of Asian-American poetry was a mere desert awaiting settlement (think Brigham Young’s un-factchecked proclamation, “This is the place!” when he arrived at the Great Salt Lake) compared to the lush oasis we have since become today. Back then, personal early outposts included works like Garret Hongo’s Yellow Light, Cathy Song’s Picture Bride, Li-Young Lee’s Rose, and Marilyn Chin’s Dwarf Bamboo. If American Poetry were Port Authority, a dirty hub for vehicles of transport, then I took all the rides I could get on but wasn’t sure I wanted to keep on going to where such intrepid company went, or if I really wanted to put down stakes and move their permanently, native Left Coaster as I was.
The truth must dazzle gradually or . . .
There’s a certain slant of light that oppresses . . .
In the spells cast by Emily, one feels the confines of a New England far removed from the likes of a Tor House overlooking Carmel-by-the-Sea in a century far far away. Did I mention I found my hardcover of John Yau’s Sometimes at the Strand Bookstore soon after my immigration to the Big Apple, how that seems to have made all the difference? I mean reading John Yau in a hole-in-the-wall dive on Pell St where you can still get the best roasted pork buns and a pot of tea, no English spoken there, no thanks, with a B-rating slapped on the front door by the New York Health Department.
I distrust superlatives, but now let me say that John Yau’s latest opus, Tell It Slant, may well be his own best pork bun yet, or certainly among his very best. Hands down, Yau writes the best pantoums in America today. Check out his series of “A Painter’s Thoughts” where he collages snippets from the likes of Peter Saul, Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold and hubby Robert—never have their recombinant quips been made more wise or whacky. Yau’s penchant to split his pantoum’s quatrains into two couplets both hides and accentuates this repetitive and tidy form at the same time, always coming full circle in the poem’s final four lines. “Third Language Lesson” and “View from the Balcony” in the book’s penultimate section arrive like consummate encores.
Yau is a Sage in that way that only septuagenarians can be if they were only already wise in their twenties. Intimations of mortality suffuse these pages. Remember how the Tang Dynasty Immortals Tu Fu and Li Po only made it to their fifties, Wang Wei barely into his sixties. And Li Shangyin, only to his mid-forties, though Yau is able to channel him centuries later in his quasi crown of sonnets, “Li Shangyin Enters Manhattan”:
“poets always / Need to be foreign, even in their own country” (section 1)
“Are poets still underpaid to operate levers of / A dead language machine” (section 3)
“heaven / is no longer a glass ceiling to throw yellow lumps against” (section 4)
“Tomes piled in a parking lot, where your customized chassis / Fled rising palaver, what say you now slant-eyed cow” (section 4)
“My name is Captain Manatee, Oboe Steam House, Elgin Relic, / I sing and fly in the opera known as the Lost United Fates” (section 6)
“I inherited yellow shack and shabby body no one wanted to move into” (section 7)
“Do I have to respect the whites of your lies” (section 8)
“The life of a Chinese cowboy / Isn’t all chopped duck and pinto schemes” (section 11)
“To finish masturbating, that’s when I unscrew my skull / Place it on table, turn off my beady yellow eyes” (section 13)
To borrow from Ashbery, Yau’s word play “gets very intense.” Is it possible for an Asian-American poet to do Tang Dynasty yellow face? In a sequence where “lies” can stand in for “eyes,” we apprehend a new way of writing the truth slant in his rhyming bait and switcheroo. In section 11, Yau elegizes fellow maker Martin Wong (1946-1999) as he does in section 7 of his opening sequence “Too Far To Write Down” to Matthew Wong (1984-2019), both artists cut down in their prime.
What Yau has taught me over and over again is that it doesn’t matter what you look like but what you look at and how deep your looking goes. Like O’Hara and Ashbery, Yau has written some of the best art criticism on his contemporaries, looking forward by looking back at the same time, lingering there long enough till something burns through. Talk about how the truth must dazzle gradually. Yau’s seminal striptease, In the Realm of Appearances, completely altered my way of looking at Warhol. Go and see for yourself. Then Oops!, he did it again in The United States of Jasper Johns. The dazzle and exquisite seeing of Yau’s prose made me start to forget who I was, I mean the categories by which I saw by, saw through, so much so that things started to blur. Identities even. Freud said somewhere (perhaps in Civilization and Its Discontents) that the crowning achievement of civilization is our tolerance for ambivalence.
Even decades ago, I already suspected that being an Asian-American poet meant so much more than writing directly about egg foo young or poo-poo platters or catsup or ketchup. That poetry was so much more than the disaster tourism of my parent’s immigration narratives. Nothing wrong about tackling them, but who was it who said what I could and should and should not write about in a poem or in a review? Back in the day when the Robin Byrd Show was still airing on cable in the wee hours, you would be bombarded with 1-900 sex commercials where scantily-clad Asian geishas would say in broken-English, “You don’t have to be Asian to call!” To read John Yau is to be led into entire worlds, and yes, “You don’t have to be Asian” (or American) to be entirely arrested by his idiosyncratic amalgamations: Li Shangyin wandering the streets of modern-day Manhattan; lyrical prose on forgotten film-noir stars (Constance Dowling, anyone?) posing as a coda to a book of unforgettable poems.
