Introduction:

Yau is an Asian-American New York School artist born in Boston to two Chinese parents. Yau seems like the stereotypical New York School artist, working as an art critic under the online art magazine Hyperallergic, writing avant-garde poetry, and using techniques such as collaging to create poems. Since he is Asian-American, Yau does have trouble fitting in with his white peers. However, unlike most minority poets, John Yau usually does not write about his race and his hardships, claiming that since that is what is expected of him as a biracial poet, and critics will ignore anything else, he refuses to write about his race. When he does write about racial hardships, he tackles both his own struggles with identity and racism, exemplified by “Ing Grish,” and the racism directed towards Chinese people, as shown by the “O Pinyin Sonnets.”

Yau himself notes that he does not have a single style in his poetry. He notes that this is one of the biggest lessons he learned from his art criticism, specifically from Jasper Johns, saying, “That was a big influence from the art world — that I didn’t want to have a style” [1]. In his book on Johns, Yau notes that "the difference between Johns and those he influenced is that they developed styles, while he eschewed them" [2]. Instead of having a single style, like collage for example, Yau likes to add each style to his compilation of methods. He says that “It’s good to have as many methods as possible: it’s your bag of tricks. It’s better to have a big bag with a lot of tricks than one bag with one trick” [1]. Rather than being boxed into one specific way of writing poetry for the rest of his days, Yau is now able to use his many various methods and mix and match them to fit whatever he wants to write about in whatever style he wants to write in. This is not the only thing he has learned from artists, however. After studying art, he learned that words can be treated just like painters treat color, in that they can put any color next to any other color. He notes, “And I thought, in poetry, you should technically be able to put any one word next to any other word. So, looking at painting made me look at language differently” [1].