Diary of Small Discontents: New and Selected Poems 1974-2024, John Yau
Omnidawn, 2025
I have been a reader of John Yau’s work since the early 1980s when his first ‘new and selected,’ Corpse and Mirror was published, but I’ve only published one essay about him, and that one not on his poetry, but his prose book My Symptoms (1998), so the publication of Dairy of Small Discontents: New and Selected Poems 1974-2024 (Omnidawn, 2025) is a great opportunity to revisit what Anselm Berrigan calls Yau’s “half century-long picture-wild adventure.” Because the range and scope of this work is so encompassing, I have decided to focus more closely on the work written since the publication of his book of poems, Bijoux in the Dark (2018)---the 71 pages of work included in section 6 and 7 of this new 250 page collection.
Section 6 (2021-2023) begins with a 24-line (4 six- line stanzas) piece called “Hearsay Song.” The title certainly complicates what at first may seem the earnest declaration of a heightened sense of mortality and old age that begins each stanza of the poem: “They are dying out and I want to reach them….” Although each stanza begins with this statement, each takes it in different directions. In the second stanza, the attention turns to the first-person singular pronoun: “They are dying out and I want to reach them before they are gone/ just as I want to reach myself before I too am gone.” (179). Given that this poem is followed by five poems that are spoken by an “I,” one of which is called “Confessions of a Recycled Shopping Bag,” (183), a fragmented dramatic monologue which, depending on how it’s read, could raise many ontological questions, one may wonder about Yau’s use of pronouns, and whether speaking as an “I” is always a form of hearsay (if not exactly heresy). Certainly the “I” in the catalogue poem, “On Being Told I Don’t Look and Act Chinese” (180) is as conversant with dissembling as the younger Chinese-American poet Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences, a book which Yau writes approvingly about elsewhere.
Among the first-person dramatic monologues of spurious authenticity here, we also see “The Congressman’s Explanation” and the ‘royal we’ that speaks “The President’s Second Telegram.” Immediately after these pieces comes five pantoums, a form Yau has been adept at for a long time, from the sequence “A Painter’s Thoughts.” These poems, which seem to be made up of lines spoken by an eclectic array of painters whose work Yau, also an art critic, admires, may also serve to comment on the use of the “I” in the preceding poems. For instance, in the first pantoum, we encounter the impersonal ideal of the late artist William Bailey: “I want to paint in a way that the ‘I’ disappears into the sky and trees.” (188)
The “I” can also disappear into fantasies about dead actresses from Hollywood movies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s from Elsa Lancaster to Constance Dowling. In “Hotel Jane Alice Peters,” a piece lined as prose structured around sentences beginning with “I like,” the speaker (not necessarily Yau) imagines meeting Carole Lombard, the third wife of Clark Gable. As the piece develops, the “I like” sentences, which started very simply, become weirder: “I like [hotel designers’] efforts to harness the barely controllable desire we have to step away from the time we inhabit into a hologram sector that has not been overrun by apocalyptic data.” (193) The piece ends with a further twist: “I like knowing that [Carole Lombard] took life as it came, even if I am not of that ilk and do not want to go down that tortuous path.” (194) Similarly, in “A View of the Tropics Covered in Ash,” Yau treats us to such mordant and sardonic sentences as, “There are plenty of tonics guaranteed to cure baldness, but impotency is something to be proud of, since it means your contributions to civilization’s convulsions are dwindling at an accelerated rate.” (195) Knowing that the biographical Yau had had a child, again one must consider this “I” a persona.
Though the word “diary” in the book’s titles implies a singular speaker, Perhaps the speakers in these pieces, or even in individual lines, are all “Small discontents.” In “After I Turned 71 (for Laura Mullen),” the initial feeling of self-loathing yields to something beyond (“I decide making sense is no longer an acceptable form of lying” (203). In the rhyming couplets of “Chinatown Blues” (204) from the collection Tell It Slant (2023), Yau writes “stop reminding me I have to watch what I say,” which, like many of his lines, has a deeper resonance in challenging the self-consciousness that can stifle improvisation.
Among the
lyric pieces and fragments in this book’s final section, consisting of poems
from 2024, is “Cento for David Shapiro, “which show some of the ways in which
Yau, though often referred to as a second-generation New York School poet, as
Shapiro is, is not like Shapiro. Take, for instance, these excerpts in
which Yau takes on some literary “sacred cows” in a tone very different from
characteristic Shapiro:
33) Rilke’s
letters are often disgusting
34) Isn’t it
wonderful Shakespeare shut up.
35) Keats’s
are the best letters—he wants to know how Shakespeare sat—aren’t we
lucky not to know.
36) Yes,
Valéry is an abyss of thought wrecking itself (231)
Although these lines apparently are all quotes from other writers, they remain unattributed here (are they from Shapiro himself?). The “cento” form, however, allows Yau to also include more characteristic Shapiro-like passages such as #60: “Lightly you touch me/ paper on which I write/ Problems have turned into snow at night/ like a little car abandoned in the midst of vague terror.” (233). Since Shapiro died not long before this cento was written/compiled, some lines become especially poignant, such as #82: “Could it be you know I am still living, leashed to the hateful sky.” (235)
I must pause over the word “hate” here. I’ve always been attracted to Yau’s work for the way he doesn’t censor the so-called “negative” dark emotions for the sake of an exemplary transcendent poetic ethos, much less the ostensibly more authentic speaker located in a nuclear family, by contrast Yau gives us:
90) I too hated aspects of my family, that novel, but I used poetry to place that hate in a secret strong place (237).
Another poem that highlights Peter Gizzi’s claim that “Yau is a supreme formalist” is “A Be Sky,” a complex reworking of an abecedarian. There are also poems that put classical (Tang Dynasty ) Chinese poets in dialogue with Yau’s modern/post-modern New York milieu, such as “Li Shangyin Enters Manhattan” (205) and the pantoum “For Brice Marden (1938-2023) via Han Shan” (238).
But, perhaps most of all, I return to Yau for a treasure trove of statements and perceptions that stir wonder by being slightly askew, such as “Suppose talking about the movie reminds you kissing is like rolling little migraine pillows around on the floor when no one is looking, and that being in love is like trying to understand a silent movie that no one has ever described accurately.” (240) or this from the title piece, “as information highway becomes increasingly crowded with squatters, the odds of shopping malls squeezed between prison complexes and gated communities multiply like fungi after rain.” (244). A master of both the line and the sentence, Yau, in his recent work, may be as much at the peak of his powers as he was in the 80s, 90s and 00s. I have to agree with Norma Cole who writes “Yu’s speculative koans operate to puzzle conceptual thought. His irresistible Diary of Small Discontents is the enduring conversation that we seek.”
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Chris Stroffolino has published
9 collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (2025, Blaze Vox);
in addition to releasing 4 albums of song, he’s also published a collaboration
of music-themed poems with Steve Carll, Dreaming to a Click (2026,
Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays (primarily on 21st century
poetry) is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, periodicities
published his short essays on Virginia Konchan, Rae Armantrout, Johua Beckman
and Juliana Spahr. A conversation with Sunnylyn Thibodeaux was recently
published by Boog City, one with Adeena Karasick appeared in BlazeVox;
and one with Maxine Chernoff is forthcoming. Poems are forthcoming in Hanging
Loose and New American Writing. He lives in Oakland, CA. where he
taught freshman composition and Creative Writing at Laney College from 2008
until February 2025, when he suffered a stroke.