John Yau, Tell It Slant

 

Chinatown Blues

Don’t keep saying poetry makes nothing happen
I am not trying to be your surrogate chaplain

I am going to grow up and be a hatchet man
Doing the sharp and shiny thing—being the best I can

Don’t tell me the wood is far too green or yellow
Or that Mr. Frost—protector of fences—is a jolly good fellow

I am still going to grow up and tell it slant
Don’t even try and tell me I can’t

Stop reminding me I have to watch what I say
Be polite or I will have to pay and pay

I am still going to grow and be a hatchet man
Doing the sharp and shiny thing—being the very best I can

I’m enjoying American poet and editor John Yau’s latest collection, Tell It Slant (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2023), only the second I’ve encountered of his wide array of myriad titles, following Genghis Chan on Drums (Omnidawn, 2021) [see my review of such here]. There is such a smart and playful way that Yau twists and twirls expectation and perception, plucking Emily Dickinson’s infamous line to turn, as the back cover offers, “a racist slur (slanted eyes) into the sign by which we recognize the trustworthy phenomenologist.” Recently I was discussing part of an essay by Canadian poet Don McKay that suggested that stand-up comedy and lyric poetry (which only applies to a particular kind of stand-up against a particular kind of lyric poem, naturally) are deeply related: how the familiar is offered as set-up, with the alternate, unexpected and fresh perspective at the end, which becomes the “a-ha” moment of the lyric, and where the joke originates (of course I can’t recall where this sits in McKay’s books). “One day I will wake up and my hair turned white / and I am no longer Chinese,” Yau writes, to open the poem “Memories of Charles Street, Boston,” “I want to ask my mother about this change in my appearance / but she has been dead longer than I have been alive [.]”

John Yau cearly delights in reworking perception against the familiar, even while examining more serious subject matter. Yau writes through Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Philip K. Dick, old films, paintings and Wang Wei across an examination of lyric form and prose structures that shift enormously, from clipped lyric narratives and point-form stretches, carved diamond shapes, sonnet sequences and extended essays, all with a level of serious play, invention and flourish. “To make every devourer wish life could be written in reverse,” he writes, to close the first poem in the sequence “Li Shangyin Enters Manhattan,” “Do you know whose glossolalia you will be speaking in today [.]” In certain ways, Yau is the master of the long thread—how to get there from here—holding an idea slightly turned and seeing it through as far as might be possible. His perspectives are turned, ever so slight, but beyond what others might be able to see, or connect, without the benefit of Yau’s unique sight. Or, as he offers, as part of the opening of the second poem in the same sequence: “The greatest poet in Chinese history / Is a mulberry tree on which poems / Are sprinkled in ash, ink, or snow [.]”