“When we try to assess [John] Ashbery’s place in contemporary poetry, therefore, we must look beyond the immediate family, the ‘tribe of John’ from John Ash to John Yau, and follow some other leads,” critic Marjorie Perloff muses in her 2021 study of poetics Infrathin. She suggests that language poets like Rae Armantrout and Charles Bernstein are Ashbery’s truest, most innovative heirs.
I like Armantrout and Bernstein. But it’s hard not to notice that the poets Perloff singles out as carrying on the avant-garde are both white. Yau’s virtually the only non-white poet who makes an appearance in Perloff’s very conventionally canonical volume. Perloff underlines Yau’s identity herself, writing in a footnote that “Yau is now recognized as a leading Asian-American poet, but in the 1970s and 1980s was part of Ashbery’s cenacle”—as if somehow one can be an Asian-American poet or a true apostle of Ashbery, but not both. Pound’s identity as a fascist doesn’t, for Perloff, trouble his status, but Yau’s Chinese heritage defines him and justifies her focus on other, whiter poets.
Yau is a critic himself, and he’s had some productive and respectful exchanges with Perloff. But he’s also written about the way that non-white artists are banished to the outskirts of the canon in the title essay of his 2023 collection Please Wait By the Cloakroom.
The cloakroom here is located in the Museum of Modern Art, and the person waiting thereby is Wilfredo Lam, whose seminal cubist/surrealist work, The Jungle (1943) was hung on the wall of a hallway leading to the coat check. Lam (1902-1982) was a radical Cuban painter with a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother. The high-powered Met curator William S. Rubin treats Lam as a minor Picasso offshoot—much as Perloff reduces Yau to his Ashbery-ness. “Picasso was one of the earliest and continuous influences on Lam,” Rubin says, “and many of his forests reflect the shallow space and hybrid iconography of Les Demoiselles.”
Yau argues that this is a serious (and implicitly racist) misreading. The Jungle does reference Picasso’s famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. It does so, though, not as homage, but as critique.
Picasso’s painting, set in a brothel, uses the iconography of African masks to frame female sex workers as other, exotic, dangerous—and consumable, since they’re displaying themselves for the appreciation/delectation of the viewer.
Lam’s painting, Yau argues, uses cubist figures that recall Picasso, but they’re not displaying themselves. Instead, they’re intertwined and intermingled with a forest, such that legs, faces, limbs, and foliage are difficult to separate one from the other. Background and foreground are tangled, so the viewer sees pieces of identity, but can’t put them together or grab ahold of them. This is in part because Lam doesn’t see African iconography as other; his godmother was a Yoruba priestess, and like his friend Aimé Césaire, he identifies with the colonized rather than with the colonizers.
As Yau writes:
The setting [of The Jungle] is derived from nature, but its composition is not a naturalistic description: it is a made-up world. The confrontation is psychic. Neither friendly nor antagonistic, but rather simply alien or other, his female figures exist in another world. Whereas Picasso overcomes Christianity, Lam does not feel compelled to consider it. His rendering of the Senufo figures is not due to a lack of inventiveness: it is an act of faith and faithfulness to these gods.
Rubin, Yau argues, treats Lam as a minor white cubist, failing to acknowledge his marginalized identity, and therefore failing to think about the way that the canonical cult of formal innovation functions as its own kind of stifling conformity. Lam shows that the multiple perspectives of Picasso’s cubism are in fact one, familiar perspective. But Rubin, with blinders carefully affixed, cannot see it.
Is Perloff similarly blinkered in her dismissal of Yau? The core New York School poets weren’t as iconically invested in appropriating African art as Picasso was. They were, though, overwhelmingly white, and there are at least a few cases where that whiteness works as whiteness.
Ashbery’s famous (and uncharacteristically accessible) early poem “The Instruction Manual” is about a (white) composer of instruction manuals drifting off at his desk into daydreams of Guadalajara the “City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!” The poem is a self-consciously fictional exoticization of a community and a people that the poet explicitly knows nothing about. It functions as a kind of fanciful mental tourism which cheerfully aestheticizes and romanticizes people who are romantic precisely because they are different, strange, not the poet—and, crucially, not white.
There are arguably parallel dynamics in the even more famous “The Day Lady Died,” one of Frank O’Hara’s delightfully casual do this/do that poems where he narrates his day—getting a hamburger, buying an anthology “to see what the poets/in Ghana are doing these days,” contemplating buying “Les Negres” by Genet. Finally he sees a notice in the New York Post that Billie Holiday has died. This makes him remember seeing her perform at the 5 Spot, “while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”
The poem is a tribute to Holiday and her artistry. It’s also, though, O’Hara’s tribute to himself and his eclectic tastes and interests, which encompass the work of poets from Ghana, Genet’s antiracist play, and Holiday’s music. The eclectic cosmopolitanism is summed up in the final line, where O’Hara, and everyone else, are suspended in appreciation—a suspension that lifts the listeners above racial differences, gender differences, or differences in sexuality (the poem does not mention that both O’Hara and Holiday are queer).
Does this aspirational universalism honor Holiday? Or, like Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual” or Picasso’s use of African masks, is the appreciation/appropriation of difference a way for white artists to universalize themselves as the ultimate arbiter and audience?
Yau was friends with Ashbery, and I don’t think he writes to critique him or other New York school poets in the way that Lam was (in Yau’s reading) very intentionally responding to and challenging Picasso. Still, I think you can read some of Yau’s work as a kind of rebuke to a poetic milieu in which supposedly exotic identities serve to validate white poets and displace or erase others. Here’s one example, from his 2021 collection Genghis Chan on Drums.
On Being Told That I Don’t Look and Act Chinese
I am deeply grateful for your good opinion
I am honestly indignant
I am, I confess, a little discouraged
I am inclined to agree with you
I am incredulous
I am in a chastened mood
I am far more grieved than I can tell you
I am naturally overjoyed
I am not going to let you pay me idle compliments
I am not in the least surprised
I am not sure I can manage it
I am persuaded by your candor
I am quite discomfited
I am so glad you think that
I am sorry to disillusion you
I can assure you it is most painful to me to hear you say it like that
I can easily understand your astonishment
I can only tell you the bare facts
I detest exaggeration
I don’t know quite why you would say that
I hadn’t thought of it in that light
I have never heard it put so well
I see it from a different angle
I stand corrected
The poem’s dry list of conventional phrases is a recognizable New York school mode, evacuating and decontextualizing language to turn it into a series of tropes on a bland surface. In that sense, the poem is an example of Yau failing to (or refusing to?) “look and act Chinese,” since he’s eschewing the register of confessional identity poetry for avant-garde tropes (like cubism or pop art) associated most closely with white artists.
But Yau (like Lam) is deploying this supposedly white form in a way which questions its whiteness, or makes that whiteness visible. The marketing speak, deliberately anonymous responses here are very much not anonymous when the “I am” statements are all forcefully contextualized as referencing Chinese, and non-Chinese, identity.
“I can only tell you the bare facts,” for example, can be read as a statement that Yau is in fact Chinese, whatever he does—though it could also be read as Yau acknowledging his own biracial identity (his father was half English). “I can easily understand your astonishment” could be a smug disavowal of Chinese identity, or a sardonic acknowledgement of the prevalence of white racism. “I see it from a different angle” is perhaps disagreement with the idea that there’s one single way that Chinese people look and act, and also an assertion that as a biracial Chinese man, Yau has a different perspective on identity and whiteness. “I stand corrected” could mean that Yau is forswearing whatever behavior led his interlocutor to see him as white, or it could mean that said interlocutor, in measuring Yau by whiteness, is policing or correcting him, writing him into or out of community or canon, a la Rubin and Perloff.
Rubin and critics like him, Yau argues, “value formal innovation over style and style over iconography. Consequently they believe that subject matter… is of little importance since the aesthetic tradition of Western art can only be renewed when an individual makes a formal breakthrough.” Yau, in contrast, points out that formal innovations in the avant-garde are often inspired by or lifted from other people and other cultures—as in Picasso’s appropriation of African masks, or the way in which O’Hara (and Ashbery too?) adapt the virtuoso improvisations and interpolations of jazz, or in the way that Ashbery builds a poem out of exoticized representations of Mexican people.
Those other cultures are often denied recognition except insofar as they add to the reputation and allure of white genius. Artists like Yau and Lam who critique these dynamics by making whiteness visible are often confronted with a double bind: they’re either dismissed as niche identity artists (“a leading Asian-American poet”) or their identities are erased and they’re treated as marginal offshoots in genres or idioms established by great white geniuses.
In this context, when Yau says, “I am sorry to disillusion you” he’s not just asserting his own Chinese identity. Nor is he simply pointing out that there’s no one way in which Chinese people (like him) or white people (like his ancestors) act. Rather, he’s attempting to break the illusion whereby white people, and white art, are a standard whereby all people, and all art, is judged. The avant-garde doesn’t have to be simply a chronicle of decontextualized formal innovations by white creators who’ve seen African masks or listened to jazz or read about Guadalajara. Instead, as Yau writes in an essay about Kerry James Marshall, “It is possible to move painting forward by opening it up to the history it ignored.”