John Yau gives us two anti-resolutions for the new year: poems made with fungible bits of bureaucracy and personality, where people and institutions continue to be themselves no matter their perversity of mood. The anaphora in both these poems suggests a fixation, an inability to look away and a compulsion to intervene. The expressions are rigid, stereotyped, layered up in ways that don’t make sense yet never fail to work, boxing in the person they address. Recycled but not cyclical, Yau’s poems don’t allow the satisfactions of closure and repetition to quietly lapse. Instead, some linguistic and emotional detritus shuffles around, oversized for its tiny office or thought-lab, certified by authority but not by purpose—the “not completely” type, inclined toward types of contradiction. We know these types, we usually dismiss them, and here they loom large, insistent, ridiculous and maybe dangerous. –The Editors and Poetry Staff
Seven Ways to Begin a Business Letter
I am not completely impervious to your latest string of idle compliments
I am not that grateful for your outbursts of indignity
I am inclined to be incredulous over your recent suggestions
I am capable of unraveling your high-toned prejudices at this time.
I am neither persuaded by, nor in sympathy with, your alarmist candor
I am not naturally overjoyed by the details of your ambition
I take no satisfaction in imagining something more disagreeable than you
The Philosopher
He sacrificed the vulgar prizes of life but his eyes danced with velvet malice
He threw out phrases of ill-tempered humor but tread the path of primrose dalliance
He was often empty of thought but remained entangled in paradox
He gave away his youth by the handful but hurrying thoughts clamored for utterance
He was profoundly skeptical but utterly detached from any sign of obstinacy
He went hot and cold but would fall into the blackest melancholies
He writhed with impotent humiliation but his blank gaze chilled you
He smiled with fatuous superiority but was often stunned and uncomprehending
He made a loathsome object but was afflicted with high levels of mental depletion
He delivered a series of monosyllabic replies but parts of him throbbed dangerously