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The short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver said get black on white. John Yamrus lives that adage. He doesn’t think about doing it, he does it. An original, reluctant to call himself a poet, his poems have the intuitiveness of Emily Dickinson, the grit of Todd Moore, the street-smarts of Charles Bukowski, the minimalism of Gerald Locklin, and the directness of Jeff Weddle.

Like his friend, the poet Jeff Weddle, John Yamrus doesn’t mince words; he gets right down to it. Like Weddle, he doesn’t shy from directly engaging his readers. Knowing that the one way—the only way—to learn to write is to read, he often alludes to reading, readers, poetry readings, and audiences where, even if only one person pays attention, that person is the most important one in the room. That’s what it feels like, what a reader gets from the page of a writer who says you either get it or you don’t.

His main topic people—human nature—transience pervades his poems. As with Dickinson, there is no one truth in life but many. Yamrus’s gift lies in his ability to bring them to light.

No other writer lives the truth that reading and writing go hand-in-hand better than John Yamrus. He’s a great reader of Proust, and has a poem titled “Reading Proust,” another about the joys of discovering Dickens late in life, and yet another about Norman Mailer, alluding to the best of Mailer, which Yamrus knows because he has read them in depth. He cited passages in Proust that are pure poetry.

It’s a safe bet to say many contemporary poets do not know Todd Moore’s The Dillinger Poems. John Yamrus does. He knows the best of Charles Bukowski’s poems and the best of Gerald Locklin—and that the only way to learn to write is to read. The reciprocal relationship between reader and writer is exemplified in a passage from the article Blind Genius and Wild Luck: The Poetry of John Yamrus” by Todd Moore. Here is Yamrus’s poem, followed by Moore’s commentary.

Bukowski’s property

this poem
isn’t mine these
thoughts aren’t
mine these
sentences aren’t
mine these
cadences
aren’t
mine these
lines aren’t
mine.
nothing
i do
or think
or write
is mine.
it’s all filtered down
through you
Mr. Bukowski…
and i wish
you’d
come here
and
take it back.

“Bukowski’s property…somehow transcends the whole idea of being enslaved to Bukowski’s language. In fact, what Yamrus does in this one simple poem that could almost be spoken in a kind of shaking whisper is that somehow he invented a stripped-bare language that is all his own. At the end of Bukowski’s property, Yamrus writes, “it’s all filtered down/ through you/ Mr. Bukowski… / and i wish/ you’d/ come here/ and/ take it back.” By denying his own language, by asking Bukowski to appear and take it all back, Yamrus gambles with an all-or-nothing gesture to make the poem and the language all his own.”

Note what the poem would be missing had Yamrus not included the word “here.” That word lends an emphatic tone to Bukowski’s property. The poem would be lesser indeed without it.

Just as Yamrus’s reading is important, so are his readers. Very important. What comes to mind is the familiar saying “without you there would be no me.” Yamrus writes to be read.

if

the
books

don’t
get sold,

the
poems

don’t
get read.

“if” connotes the importance of publishers. Yamrus realizes his obligation to the people who spend money to publish his books, the people who make him available to his readers. Yamrus said his poems don’t have titles. Often the title serves as a poem’s first line.

pass

the
lightning,

please

While pass is intuitive, like Dickinson, and minimal, like Locklin, the poem’s most significant word, its understood subject, “you,” directly engages the reader, and “please” evokes a table for the poet and the reader to be together. His inclusion of the reader at the end of a pretty good poem suggests the prominent role readers play in all his poems.

a pretty good poem

popped
into my head.

i
was
out back
in the hot tub.

it was
near midnight

and
i just
poured a
glass of wine.

i
wasn’t
about to get out,

so i
repeated it
over and over
in my head, until

i
had it
memorized.

and
i hope

you
like it.

Yamrus said they won’t come to you, you have to go to them—the readers, also the audiences at readings. While it’s great to have a big turnout, quality over quantity is emphasized in the following poem:

her mouth

was a
ruined white flower.

she
had to
be 80 or more,

but
she stood there,
in the back of the room,

while i
read my poems
to a couple of dozen students

who only
looked tired and bored.

i wasn’t into it
and neither were they,
and all i could see was this mop

of
stringy
grey hair

and
a face that
kept urging me on.

Tender at the beginning, poignant at the end, and not a word out of place, this poem resonates with Keats’ “truth is beauty.” To add more would obscure the truth. “Endure” is a word that figures into this poem about a different reading.

it was

over
50 years ago,
and i was doing an open mic

with the local literary group,

and
they were all
very artsy and serious

and their poems
were precious and hammered at

and careful

as were
their clothes and
the way they walked and talked,

and as
far as i can tell
it was the same sad crowd,

week
after week,
reading the same sad poems

over and over again,

when
in walks me
with my long-hair’d,
beautiful future wife and a guitar player.

it felt like
everyone turned around
to see who this new guy was,

and the guy
up on the stage
stopped what he was doing,

and with a
pretty good ad lib,
he looked at us and looked
at his partisan crowd and said:

look who
just walked in…
Peter, Paul and Mary!

that
was funny…

but,
it stung
and it stuck
and it taught me
something that i learned
right then and there and never forgot.

that was
more than 50 years ago,

and
as far
as i can tell,
i’m still the only
one still on the scene,

still doing the deed.

and to
quote Terry Malloy
in ON THE WATERFRONT,

all
they ever got was
“a one way ticket to Palookaville.”

This anecdotal, effusive poem holds back nothing. Consider what it would be if the line “it felt like” were not in it. Its humanity evokes momentary embarrassment, and lasting distain for a sort of poetic window dressing a person encounters at readings and in journals: poems that in their preciousness circle around the truth of the poet’s feelings and life itself.

Life is happy, life is sad, life is serous, and life is funny. There’s no lack of humor in the poems of John Yamrus. He can be and is very funny. There is the writer, the reader, the publisher, and the editor. Yamrus’s repetition, in response to an editor in whose journal those precious poems likely appear, is witty, and, especially to readers familiar with writer-and-editor correspondence, hilariously funny.

“Dear John Yamrus;

I’m
sending you this
to say that
i read your
latest poem,
and I’ve got to say
that even poems
about Death
are vital —
but, surely
not this!

Did you
just take
a flash fiction paragraph
& vivisect it?

Please!
Tell me
this is not poetry!”

“dear sir;
this
is
not
poetry.”

John Yamrus’s poems about people are epiphanies. He discovers as he writes. What Yamrus writes and how he writes gets readers to know and thus care about his people, people alone and with others. As in life, anything can happen.

“write a poem about THAT,”

she
said,

sitting
on the edge
of the
bed,

smiling.

As in pass, the understood you in this poem constitutes a couple. “smiling” resonates with “THAT.” “she” might as well have said to write a poem about life, not as you want it to be, but as it is, and people as they are. Here’s a more effusive “that” poem about a couple:

that was when she went

absolutely
bat-shit crazy on him,

throwing things,
kicking the walls,
sometimes even
setting his clothes
on fire.

she didn’t do it
very often,
but,

when
she did,

it
sure was
something.

for seventeen years
he kept his
mouth
shut,

and
put up
with it.

if you
asked him
he’d say
he always will.

besides,
it could have been worse

she could have
married

someone
else.

The ironic twist that constitutes the wit in the poet’s commentary begins with the fact that “she,” not he, “could have/ married/ someone/ else.” That comment connotes imperfect love. It evokes a slice of life sans the poetic window dressing. Here’s a poem told in a matter-of-fact voice that resonates with empathy and compassion for the sufferings of others. Less being more, the poem is powerful not only for what it says and shows but also for what it holds back.

my friend Bill

played guitar.
this was back in ’72.

or,
maybe ’73.

or,
maybe
before that,
because i don’t really
remember and it doesn’t really matter.

my
friend Bill
was maybe 23,
with long straight hair.

he
was skinny
and had spent time in Vietnam.

when
i first met him
he just got back from New York.

he
thought
he was a folk singer,
but, wasn’t very good and
all he played were Dylan songs
and when he laughed, he kinda cackled.

Bill
would sit
in my kitchen
playing his beat up
old guitar and every now
and then he’d go out to his car

and
smoke
a joint because
my mother was in the
house and he didn’t want her to know.

Bill sang thru his nose and
slammed the guitar so
hard he was always
breaking strings.

he was a good guy.

i knew him for
a year or two and then

we
lost touch.

somebody said
he spent time in the psych ward
at the VA hospital, and when he got out
he went straight to his car,
drove out to the woods
and hung himself.

Bill never
made it
big.

they found his guitar
propped against
the tree…

damn,
if it didn’t
have a broken string.

The guitar with its “broken string” is a metonymy for the broken life. And the speaker’s saying, early in the poem, “it doesn’t really matter” is verbal irony to the hilt. Just as Bill matters, so does every syllable in this tour-de-force poem about a musician who “never/ made it/ big.”

Life is change. The people in Yamrus’s poems act, sometimes impulsively, other times deliberately. In keeping with the poet’s minimalism, they are often rendered in pronouns. Therefore, when a name appears, it’s for a reason. The person in this poem changes both her life and her name.

she cut her hair,

bought
all new clothes

and
changed her
name to Tawny O’Dell.

the way
she looked at it,
it was a good first step
away from Whitaker…that son of a bitch.

he
never
in a million years
should have done what he did.

What did he do? asks the reader, who imagines something horrible. This poem is a fine example of the poet’s holding back and letting the reader come in. A different kind of minimalism is at work in the only thing. Again, the title functions as a first line.

the only thing

a
writer
really has

is
a usable past

and
the time
to put it to use.

Note how the poem would be changed, diminished, if the emphatic word “really” were not in it. The repetition with variation of “use” resonates with this writer’s utilitarian work ethic. It is not going to happen by wishful thinking. The writer either makes it happen or ends up staring at a blank page. The past is well used in Gedda’s was, a nostalgic poem about family and community.

Gedda’s was

this little
shot and beer joint
our parents used to take us to

when
we were kids,
me and my sister.

i was
maybe 5 and
we’d sit with them
at the end of the bar and
Mrs. G would give us nickels

that we’d
put in the machine
to get those red pistachios

and
my father
showed us how
to tip the machine
and turn the crank real slow

to get the most out of it

and
they’d sit
and talk and drink

and
i know

it had to be
the afternoon
because i remember
the light coming in from the street

and
it was red
because of the glass

and
so were
our hands
from the nuts

and
they were
probably drunk

when
we left,
because it was 1956
and that was what you did

when
you had a
couple of bucks

and
a day off

and
no one there
to watch the kids.

This poem of the working class exemplifies Yamrus’s use of repetition with variation. His use of the word “and” as an introduction allows his images to breathe, gives each image room on the page, so the effect is like a series of haiku poems unfolding on a scroll.

This repetition also makes the poem flow. It’s all one memory here in the poet’s present, regardless of how many times he and his family were in this bar, which likely had sawdust on the floor, a detail suggested but not included in the poet’s pictorial memory. He tells and shows all that his readers need to hear and see, to be there.

In regard to “and,” note where it appears not at the beginning of a stanza but at the end. “me and my sister,” “and turn the crack real slow” “and talk and drink,” and lastly in the line “and that is what you did.” These lines, respectively, reference children, time, parents, and the reader. “you” is a pun on all the people in the bar, and all the readers in the poem.

The poet holds the door open for his readers to come into his childhood, his past, and it’s a gesture nothing short of brilliant. His manipulation of “and” acts as a figurative key unlocking a figurative door.

Getta’s was conveys a tough tenderness, and in a room, a tenderness that is effusive. While the latter is similar to yet very different from the former, in both poems less is more.

in a room

full of
other people

we
receive
from the woman we love

the answer.

This poem is at once personal and impersonal, subjective and objective, and undeniably intimate. The poet captures a moment, like a cube of truth he holds to light, for anyone who happens to be with him (here on the page) to see.

John Yamrus has a proclivity to irony. It’s part of his nature, part of who he is as a writer. In Yamrus, readers expect the unexpected.

Ricky Lee

was
fast…

so fast
he sometimes
didn’t even leave

a
shadow.

not
that it
mattered much,

because
the things
Ricky Lee could

run from

were
never on his tail.
they were waiting for him…

right there…

patient.

at
the end
of Ricky Lee’s

race.

Of course, the suggestion is he couldn’t run away from himself, but the way irony plays out in this poem conjures a sort of nocturnal street scene, without mentioning the streets. The turn in the poem is “not/ that it/ mattered much.” But it does matter, it all matters, a lot.

Cosmic irony plays out in original Yamrus fashion this poem:

talking about God

wasn’t
one of the
things on Ernie’s list.

i mean,
i want to believe,
i really do, but what’s the point, right?

and
he’d stand there,
on the beach, arms crossed,

looking at us,

waiting
for someone
to come along,
take his picture and
declare that everything
everywhere was all right,
and was never gonna change
for now and for ever and ever, amen.

All he needs is that one word, “beach” to complete the scene, take the poem into a new dimension, as the reader pictures a body of water that was, is, and will be for a long, long time to come, a sort of infinity of the possible.

Irony entertains in that it gives readers the opposite of what they expect. In the follow poem, with humorous results:

in dog obedience class…

for once,
my little Abby
did everything right.

for
once,
she didn’t
bite, jump or pull.

this time
she paid attention

and sat
and stayed

and came
and listened…

just like all the other dogs.

i can’t tell you how much
i hated
that.

An irony of tone, a reversal of expectations, makes for a happy ending in this very recent poem:

most days,

all
it took
was 2 cigarettes,
and a couple glasses of
Two Buck Chuck, and Karl
was ready to face the world, but

today
was different.

today he was gonna
meet the mistake
that was supposed to be his kid,

and
nothing
he could ever do

would,
get him ready
for a thing like that.

i mean,
what if she was nice?

what
if that skank
of a bitch mother of hers

was right

and
he ended up
loving the kid?

nothing
he could think or do or say

would ever
get him ready
for a hell of a thing
as god damn good as that.

This change in Karl, his voice, his attitude, his way of being, and seeing the world, is most welcoming. As Karl goes from feeling bad to good, this poem that starts nasty ends up nice.

Transience is the fact that nothing happens exactly the same way twice, that what happens never happens again. John Yamrus is very aware of it, aware that the clock is ticking, that it ticks for all.

even

before
the hour sounds

we
are already

sitting
with the dead.

He has been there, is there still. Though he’s never morbid, and never dwells on the fact of transience, he is always aware of it, because he lives in the real world. And not alone.

walking hand in hand

thru New Hope,
we went into nearly every shop.
you bought a ring (the
guy who made it
said that
elephants were good luck)
and i bought a book of poetry,
a couple of cd’s
and several bars
of handmade soap.

we watched the people
walking up and down the street.

we’re no longer the
young ones.

the young ones
are Goths,
bikers,
kids with bright orange hair.

we held hands all day.

after all these years
we still
hold hands.

more importantly,
more enduringly,

you and i
still
hold each other
by the heart.

a firmer grasp
there never was.

That grasp is one way of not going “gentle into that good night,” to quote Dylan Thomas; one answer—the only answer—to the fact that one day one of us won’t be here. Sure, there is loss, but there is also life, and we are here, says the poet who is reluctant to call himself a poet.

i was just now

out in the yard,
cleaning up

and
i found
one of Abby’s balls.

i picked it up.

and
as soon as
i threw it, i knew,

watching that ball
come to a stop
nearly broke
my heart.

Yamrus says the only mystery is there isn’t any. No argument there, but this poem that captures a moment, evokes the mystery of life.

Transience encompasses love and loss. People live in an imperfect, impermanent world. Another answer to the fact of mortality is honesty. To thine own self, etcetera.

when i was a kid

this dog showed up
on our porch.

my parents weren’t
dog people,

so my father
chased it.

it was lost,
and cold,
and wet,

and my father
chased it
away.
it kept coming back
and would sit
there,

looking up at
the door,
waiting.

my sister and i
wanted to
pet it,

but my father said
“no, let it
go.”

finally,
it left,

and we
looked out the
window, watching it
go down the street
and out of
our lives
forever.

that
was my memory.

it was raining
then.

it’s raining
now.

“it’s raining / now.” Honesty. That’s not to say Yamrus never lies in his poems. But he knows the least important thing is a fact, and the most important thing is the truth.

what

makes it
so special, he said,
is knowing it’s all gotta end.

everything.

you, me…

he
wore
a tee shirt
printed with a
picture of Bukowski on it,

and
under it
were the words:

“write on.”

the shirt had a hole at the belly.

for once,
he felt
he

had nothing more to say.

Bukowski is the poet Charles Bukowski. The final answer to mortality is art: literature, painting, music, creations that will be here long after those who admire them are gone, the permanence of art countering the impermanence of the lives of human beings.

The power of beauty is evoked in this poem:

did you ever

hear
of Son House?

who?

Son House…
he played the blues, man!

the
blues?
what sort of
weak-ass shit is that?

Son House
played guitar
like he had ten hands

and
when he sang,
the walls would shake.

weak-ass.

maybe,
but did you
ever hear of Son House?

For art to be, there must be a perceiver.

after

the
rain,

reading Kerouac,

listening
to Cole Porter
playing quiet in the room,

there’s
even birds
singing outside the window.

the
only thing
missing here

is
you.

Lastly, there is this poem in which less is more, a lot more:

like a bible,

he
kept
a copy of
Truman Capote’s
IN COLD BLOOD
on the table next to his bed.

he
hadn’t
read it in years.

that
story of
the senseless murder

of 4 people on a hot Kansas night

on
nights
when he
thought of it,
he’d touch the cover
with his fingers, and think.

In those last two lines, Yamrus literally makes the connection between life and art. “with his fingers” is just the right touch.

He has said you either get it or you don’t. Good writing necessitates close reading. Through years of getting black on white, John Yamrus has developed a style: the lower case, all caps for emphasis, the emphatic tone, the one-word line are four traits of a style that is nuanced, intuitive, and intimate.

His subjects are the working class; poetry readings, poets, and poetry editors; the writing life, dogs, marriage, family, music, literature, mystery, the seemingly mundane, beauty, being here, success and failure; loyalty, and endurance. Write a poem about THAT! THAT is his subject, Life with a capital L.

he was

drawn
to this bit
of graffiti he saw
written in white paint
on the side of a building.

it was
in an alley,

and it read:

“fuck the world —
and fuck you if you don’t love it.”

later that week,
looking to get the words just right,

he
went back,

and
when he
got there, it was gone —

not
just the words

and
the wall,

but
the whole
damn building.

torn down.

gone.

and, fuck you if you don’t love that.