Pok Man John Yau

Drawing by Phong Bui

"Pok Man" John Yau (born 1950) is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

According to Matthew Rohrer's profile on Yau from Poets and Writers Magazine , Yau's parents settled in Boston after emigrating from China in 1949. His father was a bookkeeper. Yau characterizes his father as an outsider - "My father was half English and half Chinese [...] so he never fit in." As a child Yau was friends with the son of the Chinese-born abstract painter John Way. By the late 1960s Yau was exposed to, "a lot of anti-war poetry readings in Boston [and] so I'd heard Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, people like that. I don't know - Robert Kelly (poet) just seemed a different kind of poet. Mysterious, in a way. He was interested in the occult, in gnosticism and abstract art - things that had a particular appeal to me." According to Rohrer, Yau's decision to attend Bard College was motivated by
his admiration of Kelly.



Yau's most recent books are Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2009), and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006). His collections of poetry include Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin, 2006), Ing Grish, with Paintings by Thomas Nozkowski (Saturnalia, 2005),Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002), Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow, 1996), Berlin Diptychon with Photographs by Bill Barrette (Timken, 1995), Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow, 1992),Corpse and Mirror (Holt & Rinehardt, 1983), a National Poetry Series book selected by John Ashbery, and Broken Off by The Music (Burning Deck, 1981). Artists' books include projects with Squeak Carnwath, Richard Tuttle, Norbert Prangenberg, Hanns Schimannsky, Archie Rand, Norman Bluhm, Pat Steir, Suzanne McClelland, Robert Therrien, Leiko Ikemura, and Jürgen Partenheimer (a.o.), his books of art criticism include The United States of Jasper Johns (1996) and In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993). He has also edited Fetish (1998), a fiction anthology.




He has been the Arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail since March 2004. He currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.