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Blind Genius and Wild Luck: The Poetry of John Yamrus

By Todd Moore 

A few years ago a guy who worked off and on at prospecting came to one of my readings and at the end asked me, how come you write poetry when you know there’s no money in it? I gave him my best fuck you smile and said, how come you dig for gold in a mountain when you know that no gold is there. The guy said point taken and retreated toward the wine and cheese table where the wine was cheap ripple and the cheese had gone bad. The trick is you’re not in it for the gold in the mountain. You’re in it for the gold in the poem and there is plenty of gold in a John Yamrus poem.

According to one of Yamrus’ bios, he’s been working the line since 1970 and that is just about the same time that I got my start in the poetry game. When I look at a Yamrus poem, I know that I am reading a poem that appears to be almost too simple. And, I am sure that there are twenty something wannabes who glance at his work and say I can do that. Only the thing is most 
poets can’t do that, young or old. And, the cost for doing that is beyond estimate. Only death can tell you the true cost of a poem. 

Yamrus would be the first to admit he has learned from the best. In an earlier essay, I pointed out that Charles Bukowski was almost certainly an influence. And, Gerald Locklin’s poetry has also worked its magic on the Yamrus line. Locklin’s poetry is riddled with a strange lacerating restraint, a feeling of laconic self effacement. In a sense, it operates almost like a lament except for the jazz poems where the idea of jazz momentarily liberates Locklin, takes him to another place, frees him for the existential moment of the intoxicating riff. The important thing to keep in mind is that Yamrus knows he can never be Charles Bukowski. Nobody can. Bukowski came up from underneath the floorboards of America at a time when most poets wouldn’t even admit that those floorboards were there or that there were denizens who lived down under. Bukowski fought his way out and changed the way that we see things. The impact of Bukowski’s poetry is particularly evident in this Yamrus poem.

 Bukowski’s property

this poem
isn’t mine these
thoughts aren’t
mine these sentences
aren’t
mine these
cadences
aren’t
mine these
lines
aren’t
mine.
nothing
i do
or think
or write
is mine.
it’s
all filtered down
through you
Mr. Bukowski…
and i wish
you’d
come
here
and
take it back.

I need to make a sidebar observation right here. I wish I’d written this poem. Not that I have been directly influenced by Mr. Bukowski because I know I haven’t. I’d like to think that I was his major competition but it’s the kind of thought I’d get after my third highball and my cheeks would get a little warm and my expectations for everything went right through the roof. In my prime drinking days, I knew I could out-write any poet alive and I also knew at the same time that the odds were I was terminally fucked. 

Other poems I’d wished I’d written are Waiting For The Barbarians by Cavafy, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet, The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara, The Bells Of Cherokee Ponies by d. a. levy, The Gunfighter by Kell Robertson, The Play and Theory Of The Duende by Federico Garcia Lorca which isn’t a poem except that it really is a poem, Mayakovsky’s A Cloud In Pants, and Tony Moffeit’s Luminous Animal.

There are also many others, too numerous to mention. The miracle is that we make do with what we have and by making do, by being honest about Bukowski’s influence on his work, John Yamrus suddenly and with a certain amount of blind genius and wild luck wrote Bukowski’s property which somehow transcends the whole idea of being enslaved to Bukowski’s language. In fact, what Yamrus does in this one simple poem which could almost be spoken in a kind of shaking whisper is that he somehow invented a stripped bare language which is all his own. 

At the end of Bukowski’s property, Yamrus writes, “it’s all filtered down/ through you/ Mr. Bukowski…/ and i wish/ you’d/ come here/ and/ take it back.” By denying his own language, by asking Bukowski to appear and take it all back, Yamrus gambles with an all or nothing gesture to make the poem and the language his own. Which is why I love this poem so much. It dances right at the edge where all great poetry dances.

That’s why this poem belongs in the ranks of poems by Hikmet, O’Hara, Lorca, Mayakovsky, d. a. levy, Tony Moffeit, and Kell Robertson. Great poetry takes great risks, sometimes at the top of the voice as in the case of Mayakovsky, sometimes quietly as in the case of a Cavafy or a John Yamrus. The poetry of John Yamrus demands more attention. There is real blood in this man’s work.
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"Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, stop. Read Five Dogs. Our souls are made from, and of, this love."
Mark Statman
Emeritus Professor, Literary Studies
Eugene Lang College, The New School 
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“John Yamrus is a reader’s writer whose poems are built from one honest line after another.”
—Matthew J. Hall
“Terse profundity would be the phrase I would use were someone to pin me down and force me to describe the work of John Yamrus.  This is poetry of short lines and simple wisdom, there is a touch of the Far East about the structure and minimalist philosophy that underpins them; there is no surreal baroque parade of language, these are sticks arranged subtly against a white wall.”
​—Zack Wilson
“John Yamrus remains one of my favorite authors.  I can sit down and read one of his books start to finish—and along the way, laugh at his jokes, marvel at his wit, and every now and then a golden brick of enlightenment drops on my head.”
—Wolfgang Carstens
“John Yamrus, as a poet, is like an expert skeet shooter that hits the clay pigeon no matter what the speed, angle or trajectory; in poem after poem, his sharp mind nails its target every time.”
—Rob Plath
“John Yamrus seamlessly surfs the boundary between humour and despair.”
​—George Anderson
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Art by Mish
“Two major qualities prevail in Yamrus’ recent work: economy and punch.”
​—Gerald Locklin
“The poetry of John Yamrus demands more attention. There is real blood in this man’s work.”
​​—Todd Moore
“John Yamrus writes the kind of poetry that punches right through to the core of his reader’s hearts.
​He is a poet who needs no validation from the literary or academic establishment.”
​—Devin McGuire
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