SOURCE: Morris, Daniel. “‘Death and Disaster’: John Yau's Painterly Poems.” In Remarkable Modernisms, pp. 41-60. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Morris analyzes the relationship of Yau's art criticism and his poems “Electric Drills” and “The Telephone Call.”

John Yau's art writings illustrate the new modernism in that he revises the narrative history of painting in the United States since about 1940. Like Creeley and Frank O'Hara before him, Yau is also able to write ground-breaking poems because he is what Marjorie Perloff called “a poet among the painters,” an author who adapts nonliterary means into his writing. Yau's poetry extends from art, even as he does not react to art by trying to describe it in any direct way. A form of establishing the self through a relationship to a visual manifestation of the not-self, Yau's poetry illustrates Kristeva's notion of an uncanny identity that...