In-person poetry workshop with John Yau

After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with a moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.

These responses to the work of John Yau come from different times and places, and come with different ambitions, and take up different modes of expression. Some are works of criticism, some are lyrical, some are works of art themselves. There are two interviews, a book review, a poem, even an introduction by Robert Kelly from Yau’s first book, Crossing Canal Street (1976). Each contribution furthers the talk of Yau. Each offers a three-count pour initiation into the imaginative expansiveness, the liberatory desires, the pained beauties, of one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. —Joseph Donahue

Poetry acts like a wrench in business-as-usual, and we can either embrace it or tune it out, doing either at our own peril.

One reason I have admired Yau as a critic is that like most poets, he is not a writer of polemics. When I read one of his reviews or artist profiles, I know I’m getting a viewpoint that gives the work a fair shake. That viewpoint may be strong and well-honed but is not programmatic. It is an invitation to experience a work that I might not get to see or, if upon reading will want to seek out for myself. That openness is on view at the Schneider Museum, deftly hung from the original show in Kentucky by SMA director Scott Malbaurn.

On View: October 17 – December 14, 2024

Schneider Museum of Art
555 Indiana Street
Ashland, OR 97520

Now shipping!