The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry

The quarterly review
MELUS
said of John Yau,
[his] poetic and critical writings…present an intriguing site of investigation into questions of racial authenticity,
while
Publishers Weekly
has described Yau’s poetry as
[l]anding somewhere between the surreal-noir aesthetics of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive; a kinder, gentler version of J.K. Huysman’s Paris decadence; and the aggregated syllables of Jackson Mac Low’s overheard New York…
In
The Passionate Spectator , Yau turns his attention to some of our most renowned poets and artists, such as John Ashbery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Creeley, and Frank O'Hara. The eleven essays herein include:
Passionate Spectator: On Frank O'Hara’s Art Criticism ;
At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara ;
The Poet as Art Critic (On John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara) ;
Feelings Are Not Quiet (On Robert Creeley) ;
Robert Creeley and George Baselitz’s Signs ;
Philip Lamantia ;
Archie Rand’s ‘The Letter Paintings’
;
Street Song: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Poetry of Kevin Young ;
The Poetry of Jessica Stockholder’s Titles ;
The Poet Painters: Francesco Clemente and Nicola De Maria ; and
Open Books: (On
Emblems for Robert Duncan
by Jess).