Borrowed Love Poems
John Yau
publisher: Penguin Books, 2001
isbn: 0-14-200051-5
price: $17
Hans Violin enters the tunnel and emerges as Hank Harmonica, bit player and familiar television talk show guest. Meanwhile, after waking up in another section of the numbered quadrant, Gus "The Big" Viola discovers he has been reduced to a small-boned, foreign-born dry cleaner. Time briefly accelerates its production of images. Realizing that, while he will always remain foreign to those who seek the indelible signature of his services, he has unwittingly let himself succumb to a flurry of mispronunciations.
[44]
Landing somewhere between the surreal-noir aesthetics of Mulholland Drive, a kinder, gentler version of J.K. Huysmann's Paris decadence and the aggregated syllables of an Oulipian who courts masochistic restraint only to cry foul and take a nap, Yau's new poems churn along with the bright inventiveness that have characterized his work since his first major collection, Radiant Silouette (Black Sparrow, 1990).
Borrowed continues several of the series and modes inaugurated in that volume -- the "Genghis Chan: Private Eye" poems, the addresses and briefs to poets and painters -- and fans will revel in the weird, ghostly wisdom of his lines, spoken as if by a twisted mister behind a 3-way mirror and punctuated by the poet's trademark "le mot injuste" verbal choices (reminiscent of his friend Clark Coolidge) that reveal startling, if impossible, imagery:
But the sum
is not all
The circles float
in their perfect mouths of ink
Where else am I
to store them
The windows have their own tasks
The sky brings its own table
[15]
he writes in "Bowery Studio," and later:
Why do we go on singing this song
when we know
all its words are nails
all our tongues are pieces of wood
meant to build a house
for liars
[21]
The phrase "I am" or variations thereof appear more than any other in this book -- "I am called Gobi Snow," "I was not born in Dulwich or Brighton, but in Camberwell, south London," "I wasn't always a fevered lepidopterist" are some random examples. In fact, "I Was A Poet In The House of Frankenstein" is a 9-page litany of such statements, a form of self-portraiture that suggests the sport of trying to see your reflection in a melting box of crayons.
This evisceration of the myth of self-revelation can get wearying once the trick is learned, and Yau's musical sense is not as varied and sophisticated as would be needed to sustain long, aggregative poems like the "Vowel Sonatas," where he seems outpaced by the speedy short-lines that seem, at least partly, inspired by Tom Raworth's "Ace."
yesterday's fiery
fairy gargoyle
gyrating devilry
argyle ferry
skyward journey
windy electricity
robbery fly
style by
tyrannical tapestry
cloudy hallucinatory
laundry already
buttery yak [...]
[121]
But Yau always manages to startle with a charming, provocative coinage just when the race appears lost, and there is a pathos to his distinctively dispassionate accounts as a "nude drummer boy, all pomade and fancy" of that moment when time "accelerated its production of images" through the chance meeting of unacquainted words that refuse -- after a giddy, shotgun marriage in pharmacist's puce cabana -- to separate.
|
