John Yau is a poet and art critic and the inventor of a new poetic form inspired by a painter: Jackson Pollock. The Pollock takes its place here beside my own invention, the Rothko, and I offer this definition:
A Pollock is a sonnet whose first line is a quotation. The remaining lines are comprised solely of words and punctuation found in the first line.Yau’s Pollock poem starts with Jackson Pollock’s address as title—“830 Fireplace Road”—then takes as its first line the famous quote from the great action painter—“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” Pollock was the artist who took the idea of drip drab toss fling and ran with it all the way out of sight, leaving brilliant consciousness tracks all over the canvas. His 1999 show at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting I saw people dance with each other getting from one end of his huge canvases to the other... I saw people huddle over a one-inch square of drippings as if it were the universal sand grain.
Yau’s Pollock poem is both example and homage, a sonnet comprised only of the thirteen words and three punctuation marks in Pollock’s quote. When we sink into Pollock’s paintings, colors begin to speak, first binarily (the violet crosses the silver, the olive comes after the violet, so why does the olive cross the silver?), and ultimately crescendoing to the aforementioned “dance.”
Words are a different medium. From a step away they all look the same: segmented, linear worms. Diving in, the meanings explode. It’s as if each of the words is a color: they reappear in the poetic field the way Pollock’s drips appear in his paintings. Yau steps in and out like Pollock approaching the canvas. Sometimes improvisation seems to overwhelm consciousness (“When what, what when, what of, when in, I’m not painting my I”); just as often, consciousness lashes back through the same words (“Not aware, not in, not of, not doing, I’m in my I”). The poem veers line-by-line from philosophy to romance, from abstraction to political jaw-setting. Finally the whole overwhelms, and Yau pulls off the impossible: the verb painting the noun painting; Pollock doer and doee.
Visit John Yau’s Pollock, then choose a single line quote and write one of your own. Remember to be standing in front of a Pollock when you write a Pollock. Also, never forget: break the rules when you write your own Pollock.
