John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism.
Poetry
I want to begin by stating this is not a review of a Model City, a book of poems that I recently read. The author is Donna Stonecipher, an American poet and translator who has lived in Berlin for some years.
Art
Isn’t it time we begin putting things in perspective?
Art
New York’s art world institutions still haven’t recognized how good an artist Al Taylor was. They overlooked his work while he was alive, and seem hellbent on continuing that willful blindness now that he is dead.
Art
There used to be a time when curators could slap a label on a group of artists, claiming the work to be central, progressive, and an important part of their narrative of art history.
Art
As I have written previously, there is a lot of very good painting going on these days. It is just that you are not likely to see much of it at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at least in recent memory.
Art
Despite the hue and cry about zombie formalism, there is a lot of very good painting going on these days.
Art
Recently, and rather unexpectedly, the term “negative capability,” which was coined by the poet John Keats, came to mind. Was this an outlandish association to make while looking at Martin Puryear’s debut exhibition at Matthew Marks?
Poetry
Twenty-five years ago, Anthony Rudolf said it best in his “Preface” to the second edition of Nicholas Moore’s Spleen (1990): “The neglect of Nicholas Moore, a complex, many-sided, mysterious and disturbing poet is, well, a complex, many-sided, mysterious and disturbing phenomenon.”
Books
I am going to start with a “Note for poems” that Anselm Berrigan wrote about his most recent book, Pregrets.
Art
When it comes to the artistic community of New York City, especially from the late-1930s to the end of the 20th century, I can think of many writers, photographers, and artists who readily qualify as flâneur, but there is only who matched Charles Baudelaire’s description of the “passionate spectator
Art
A drawing/collage that Cy Twombly made on May 27, 1970, includes three disparate objects: a reproduction of his large, multi-panel painting, “Treatise on the Veil” (1968); a sheet of paper whose dimensions echoed the reproduction, with vertical creases made by folding; and another sheet containing h
Art
In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, Pat Steir, at the Boston University Art Gallery, John Stromberg opens his essay, “Michael Mazur: A Delicate Balance” with this sentence: “Michael Mazur’s path to his recent paintings based on Chinese art has bee