Even knowing that John Yau is a prolific and adventurous poet, one can’t begin to anticipate the work in Genghis Chan on Drums. Whitman wrote, “I contain multitudes” and Genghis is an embodiment of this claim in nine sections. Put another way, it would be irresponsible for a critic to dip into this collection, find one or two poems to quote-in-part and give the reader a clue that would help to explain the potpourri of themes and forms that Yau develops.
Reviewing this collection would be less daunting if there was an over-arching theme, but if there is one, it is as fleeting as a rainbow that hints at hidden treasure or a group of scattered thundershowers that may devastate the east side of town while leaving the west side unscathed. Perhaps it would be legitimate for the critic to take on one section at a time but, if I attempt this approach, be warned that there will be homework assignments!
Let’s start with the title. It suggests that Yau intends to blend Chinese or Mongol themes with modern attitudes and cultures – including rock music. In fact the heavy metal band Iron Maiden released an album entitled “Genghis Khan.” Reader, your first assignment is to suggest why Yau used the spelling “Chan” instead of “Khan.” It doesn’t get easier from here, though Yau’s comedic streak offers us a clue.
The prologue has five parts and, in Part I, suggests that the poems were inspired by tales Yau’s mother or grandmother told him:
“When I was a child, every story you told began with the same line: One wants to become a squirrel capable of surviving winter.”
Even though the stanzas that follow seem to suggest tales of a bygone past, they don’t converge into a coherent history:
“All across the countryside beribboned heirloom bundles of arts and letters began to be stored in broom closets, while the brooms were put to better use.”
Is the Prologue meant to reimagine Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Yau was born in the United States – his parents were immigrants. In part 5 of the Prologue, Yau suggests that he may have just “made up these stories.” I prefer not to believe him.
Part I of Genghis Chan begins with two poems. The first is easy reading since it’s entitled “On Being Told that I Don’t Look and Act Chinese,” and it comprises a page-long group of sentences, all of which begin with “I” as in “I am so glad that you think that.” The lines jump forward and back in attitude, so it’s not possible to determine the “authentic attitude” of the poet to this misguided compliment on ethnicity.
The second poem, “After I Turn Sixty-Eight,” is the first of three versions of the same title. Again, the poem is a series of sentences, each one starting with “I” and varying from the mundane (“I shrug my shoulder and pretend that I don’t know what you are saying”) to the surreal (“I tell the taxi driver that I was lucky to have escaped from the morgue”).
Eighteen “O Pin Yin Sonnet(s)” close out Section I. Pin Yin is a system for Romanizing Chinese ideograms. Reader, I would like to know how the O Pin Yin titles inform the poems. My guess is that it is a symbol for the appropriation and distortion of Chinese culture by Western attitudes. Number 16 ends:
Americans invented plastic surgery, tight pants and rock ‘n’ roll.
What have the Chinese done besides give us cookies crammed with lies?
We really know how to live, while the Chinese don’t even know how to die.
Reader: Is the “speaker” in these poems a racist American or a bitter, sarcastic Chinese person? Does it matter?
Section III consists of political poems, including seven messages that could have been written by the President. “The President on Playback” reads:
My thoughts are no longer with you
They might never have been with you
I will never now, nor should I know
if my thoughts were with you at any time
or if you never thought of me
before you stopped thinking for good
This poem is the last of a series of entitled “The Presidents [1-3] Telegram.” These poems are all dated. Pop quiz. Reader, what are the poems about? Hint: One begins: “There are no words to express / the horrible hour that happened.”
Section VI includes eight poems each entitled “The Philosopher [1-8].” They are also made up of single sentences, each beginning with “He” or “I.” No philosopher would find anything praising this science. Yau makes every statement cut: “He knows that his words will outlast him, helping to further diminish his reputation//He compared himself, not unfavorably, to a frying pan crammed with hissing matter.” Reader: Are these poems more than revenge-seeking word-missiles?
Section VI is entitled “A Painter’s Thoughts” and each poem is dedicated to a particular modern painter. In these poems, Yau, an accomplished art critic, attempts to probe beneath descriptive criticism and imagine what the painters thought of their own work. Of William Bailey he closes:
I place the pale eggs on a dark unadorned tabletop and let them roll into place
I want to paint in a way that the ‘I’ disappear into the sky and trees
The dusky red wall is not meant to symbolize anything but itself
Variations on a theme are of no interest. A bowl and cup are not ideas.
The acknowledgements section of Genghis lists 20 monographs that Yau has published on modern artists, including Warhol, Sam Francis and Jasper Johns. I was an art history minor in college, but I have never heard of any of the other artists Yau selected for this section. Reader: Perhaps be prepared to Google these artists’ names.
The 33 pages of Sections V and VI comprise at once a potpourri of forms and styles and the heart of Genghis. These sections barely contain the multitudes of ideas Yau offers and, since some themes repeat, these poems begin to resemble a giant Jeopardy board game. The reader is left to answer questions, some of which have easy answers and some of which are caught up in the “perfect wave” of long prose poems, or an aphorism that comprises one sentence.
There are two poems that are pantoums. (A pantoum is a poetic form with four-line stanzas wherein line endings are identical at 2/4 and at 1/3). The lines of “The ABCs of ‘Of,’” perhaps a found poem, form lists — A of [a noun], B of [a noun] and C of [a noun], e.g., “Aberrations of meanness.” This also has the Oulipian vibe of a game anyone can play. So does “Poem” which has five lines beginning “Poem” and five lines beginning “Like.” Another poem, “The the,” evoking Stevens, consists of six lines, each beginning with “The” (“The meticulous observation of formless dread.”) Many of these poems could function like “prompts” to students in a creative writing class.
Section V also comprises the first of three attempts to write “After I Turn Sixty-Nine.” All the lines begin with “I” — and this list of thoughts on aging is fun to read:
I shudder nearly every time I read the phase “lifetime Guarantee or Your Money Back”
I no longer find it necessary to stop and look at what’s going on at a construction site
I decide I won’t tell people to stop sending me books even if I know I will never read them
Here’s a one-line poem, “When it Came to Reading My Future”: “You gazed at my palms and said they were lying about what lay ahead.” Right on! Reader: I will let you figure out the story Yau intends to tell us about “Piero di Cosimo’s Sister.” Piero was a well-regarded 16th-century portraitist with the reputation of a libertine. Yau suggests that Sis added erotic touches to his work.
Section VII begins with Yau’s second attempt to write “After I Turn Sixty-Nine.” This version isn’t funny; it is melancholic.
I still have long talks with you even though I am the only person sitting in the room
I think that I may not be the author of what I am writing or what you are reading
In fact, the unifying theme of this section is mortality and, in “In Memory of My Parents,” the found poem is a list of “Shanghai” movies, a city they may well have left but still missed. On the other hand, this may just be a sarcastic vision focused on Hollywood’s attempts to reproduce “the Orient.” Reader: Which is more likley?
Section VIII includes the title poem. The poet addresses the Mongol Emperor through surreal imagery that captures both the past and present. It ends: “Once you were pockmarked with bullet holes / astonished that anyone would look at you and not vomit / but that was before the future arrived, an unexpected guest.”
Reader: I recently realized that I have been exploring Yau’s themes without addressing the poet’s determination to let his writing gather the considerable momentum that the opening lines ignite. I’ve been quoting lines that are clear statements of identity or purpose or location, and avoiding the more difficult-to-explicate lines that Yau is setting up like pins in an imagistic bowling alley where he releases the first ball and we readers are left to pick up the spares. Here is part 1 of “Genghis Chan on Drums”:
Once you were a crescendo, a sarabande
Hacked haiku coughing up blood and spitting on moon
With no dance to cry over spilled sludge.
Once your name was John Chinaman
You lived in a cricket ding-dong on outskirts of mills and malls
in granted state of Marshmallow Falls.
You said, call me Johnny Jodhpurs or Lenny Systemic
Suave Stymie or Hamburger Harmonica
You said, listen to my thunderstorm and fire worm
While you perambulate squeal and stamp indissoluble
You said, I am a picket fence, a rumor, a superlative immigrant, a turboprop laxative
You said, pickax, influenza, rum and tuxedo twang
This is the placard above my rickshaw chariot moon chaser swoop
These are not like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry which insists that the reader to do virtually all of the work needed to generate meaning. They are also not closely akin to the literary knots that John Asbury wants the reader to untangle. Yau begins to explain his technique in “Firefly Promises,” a poem from an earlier collection, Bijoux in the Dark:
“I am copying down what I am being told to write. It is not a voice I hear, yours, mine, or anyone else’s, but the space between the words that seems to fill with other words, other indications, hints or hums — a kind of music that words cannot accompany, falling away from their small handles on the world, like leaves on the windy day.
I am copying down what I am being told to write, but I keep thinking these are my words, not someone else’s, that I am thinking and saying and sending to you. And yet it’s not you that I am writing to, is it? It is my idea of you, my dream, illusion or glimpse. A string of silhouettes.
Since Yau can know only a fraction of his audience, he is left to fill in the open spaces he creates in his poems and, not surprisingly, he takes the approach of the painters who employ motion to complete their works. I think of Jackson Pollack putting down the first lines of paint on a canvas, and then covering them with other lines, squiggles and drips. I think this is what Yau means when he describes his voice as filling in the spaces in his poems with words. His poems may guide the reader part of the way into the woods but, most of the time, the reader is left to go it alone.
“Genghis Clan” begins with a burst of energy that is appropriate for a man whose kingdom stretched from China to Poland, but the second and third lines barely connect to this declaration. Even if “coughing up blood” is meant to be literal, “spitting on moon / with no dance to cry over spilled sludge” seems like imagery that blew into the poem from somewhere in Yau’s prolific imagination.
The next stanza uses the same form. It opens, “Once your name was John Chinaman.” This was a disparaging knick-name from the 19th-century. But what’s a “cricket ding-dong” and where is the “granted state of Marshmallow Falls”? Stanza three finds Genghis being called four nonsense names that don’t seem to be specific slurs. “Lenny Systematic” may relate to Lenny Charles and the metal band Systematic. Perhaps these are the thinner lines or drips that fill in the space left by “John Chinaman.” Stanza four recounts Genghis saying, “listen to my thunderstorm and fire worm / while you perambulate squeal and stamp indissoluble.” The second line does seem to connect to the first, while we contemplate the significance or appropriateness of “perambulate” and “indissoluble.”
The remaining three stanzas recall that Genghis says he is a number of nouns, a few of which implicitly carry the theme of the Chinese immigrant who is “superlative” — but what is a “turboprop laxative” doing in the lists, or “tuxedo twang”? The last line reads, “This the placard above my rickshaw chariot moon chaser swoop.” While I can envision a placard advertising rickshaw rides, and “chariot” might remind us of the once mighty Genghis’ wheels, this line feels like Yau just couldn’t stop the music until “moon chaser swoop” had its chance to swing.
This section also includes Yau’s third attempt to write “After I Turn Sixty-Nine.” This version is at least whimsical:
I will never be shot out of a canon for the amusement of others
I will never join a woodpecker in an intermittent percussive search for protein
The facing poem, “For the Spirit of Jean Vigo,” is similar in tone (ie., virtually toneless), but Yau is polishing his surrealist chops – it is more serious, and more engaging:
I loot because you proudly put it on display and act like I am not supposed to take it.
I do not wish to be exonerated by you or anyone else.
Reader: If you wish, please demonstrate how Yau’s images connect to the work of this French director who has been credited with being the father of New Wave cinema.
Section IX consists of ten poems, each entitled “Catullus Sails to China.” Catullus died in A.D. 87 and never traveled to China, but was a fairly competent Roman general and a respected poet who, no surprise to my Reader by now, wrote Hellenistic erotic poetry. These poems are addressed to Catullus at imagined points of his career. There are some bloody images, but Yau keeps a steady hand on his subject and the rhythms are relaxed.
The Epilog contains two “Nursery Songs” that were written as the pandemic hit, but cover a lot more cultural ground. Most of the lines are requests for various aspects of Western life to fuck themselves — and there is no sense that he’s just kidding. These are not so much poems as good-bye notes to a world Yau knows he will be leaving:
Don’t say ‘pandemic lockdown’
Say fuck the rich/their private island getaways
Say fuck their Aspen lodges/stocked with climate-controlled volcanos
and children named after weather stations and rare cheeses
Reader, I leave it to you to ponder whether Genghis is an intentionally constructed work made up of bricks of primarily surrealistic poems in many forms — or if it is more like a collection of whimsical, provisional pieces that Yau collected precisely because they don’t fit together cozily. This poet-scholar who has gifted us with a lot to ponder.
[Published by Omidawn on October 6, 2021, 152 pages, $17.95]