Fig. 1: "John," portrait of John Yau by John Mitchell
Oil on Linen, 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Photo Credit: Cary Whittier
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2John Yau is an American poet, art critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. Born in 1950 to immigrant parents, Yau grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spent his weekends visiting the Museum of Fine Arts. He studied at Boston University and received his B.A. from Bard College. His first poetry collection, Crossing Canal Street, was published in 1976 by Bellevue Press (Binghamton, New York). Since then, he has written more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. His most recent work translated in French, Une autre façon d’écrire sur le sable, was published in 2024 by joca seria, in a translation by Marc Chénetier.
3John Yau has received numerous distinctions, including awards, grants and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2006 to 2011, he served as arts editor for The Brooklyn Rail; he is now a regular contributor to the online arts magazine Hyperallergic. He currently resides in Beacon, New York.
4In 1999, John Yau founded Black Square Editions, a nonprofit press dedicated to innovative and experimental writing. Since its inception, the press has published more than seventy-five works of experimental prose, poetry, essays, and fiction by authors such as Brian Evenson, Andrew Joron, Eugene Lim, Rosalyn Drexler, Patrick Pritchett, and Garielle Lutz. It has also brought to English-speaking audiences translations of French writers including Jean Frémon, Marcel Cohen, Pierre Reverdy, Michèle Métail, and Pascalle Monnier, rendered by translators such as Brian Evenson, Ron Padgett, John Ashbery, Marcella Durand, and Cole Swensen.
5As the head of Black Square Editions, John Yau has curated a catalogue of innovative poetry and fiction shaped by his own aesthetic sensibility and long engagement with poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Having come of age as a poet at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and under the influence of figures such as Robert Kelly and John Ashbery, and having honed his editorial practice through decades of writing and art criticism, John Yau shares his views on experimental poetry, the journey of running a small independent press, and the need to decenter and diversify the landscape of contemporary publishing.
Maud Bougerol: Can you tell me how Black Square Editions started? It was in 1999 I believe.
John Yau: It started with four people: Brian Lucas, Andrew Joron, Garrett Caples and myself. We talked about it when I was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. They wanted to start a press to publish Garrett Caples’s first book, which we published in 1999 [The Garrett Caples Reader]. The press had two names then [Angle Press/Black Square Editions]. I decided to continue after that first publication, completely without knowing anything about how to run a press. I had to really learn it from scratch but, somehow, I managed to keep it going.
M.B.: Was the driving force behind the press the idea of publishing works that could not be published elsewhere?
J.Y.: Yes, I realized that I knew all these writers who didn’t send their work out, and that I could start a press for works that other people wouldn't publish. I also wanted to publish books by people who had never been published; I had talented students and friends who were writers. I wanted to publish translations that people didn’t know about. I wanted to publish what other people weren't even thinking about or looking at, and that's been my driving force ever since.
M.B.: Did you encourage these people to send you their works and publish with you?
J.Y.: Yes, I did encourage them. I would write notes to friends of mine to offer to publish them, that’s how the press began. For example, I heard about John Olson’s poetry through a friend of mine, Joseph Donahue, who told me about this wonderful poet from Seattle. I asked Joe for John’s manuscript, and it resulted in me publishing his first two books. Things happened mostly through word of mouth, especially because I didn’t advertise for the press at all. I did very little for my authors, apart from getting their books published. Then, I needed a designer and a proofreader. A very nice woman named Sharon was in charge of designing the books in the beginning, she was a letterpress teacher at the University of Iowa; Jeff Clark worked for us for a while; and then Shanna Compton came on board. She’s the designer I've worked with the longest. Ronna Lebo also worked as managing editor for a long time. Basically, all I did was choosing the books, and that was on purpose, I wanted to make it so I didn’t really have to do anything outside of that. Sometimes, I would even tell someone I’d take their book without even reading it, and I did. And then slowly, people just started sending me work. Which made me feel overwhelmed pretty quickly. The other issue is storage. I hadn’t realized I had accumulated so many books, and rent became impossible. Ronna Lebo stored the books in her garage. When she moved, Margaret [Galey] stepped in. I had met her in Louisville and asked her to join the press, which she accepted. It's been bumping along ever since. We still haven't taken out any ads. I want to leave it that way and see what happens. I think people sell their own books, and that books sell themselves. One of my favorite presses, Dalkey Archive, did advertise but they seem more underground than, say, Graywolf or Coffee House. And I like that model, it's the model I knew as a younger writer: I would just go to a bookstore and look for books from Totem/Corinth and those presses.
M.B.: That's actually how I found the first Black Square Editions book I ever bought: I was in Mast Books in New York City and happened upon Anselm Berrigan’s Pregrets. Now, talking about poetry, just how much does your experience as a writer influence the way you run the press?
J.Y.: I think actually it's really about what I like to read. I loved Anselm Berrigan’s work, so I asked him for a book. It was the same with Albert Mobilio and Joseph Donahue. Brian Evenson already was a published author, but I asked him if he had something for me that wasn’t published. He told me about the circumstances of Dark Property, and I told him I wanted to publish it. When it comes to translations, I would ask Brian [Evenson] to translate a text from Marcel Cohen. I have a list of other titles I want to publish like that. I also asked Andrew Joran to translate a German poet I met in Berlin, Richard Anders. It’s really kind of like a cult.
M.B.: I was going to say, it's like creating your dream bookshelf.
J.Y.: Yes, it is like that. And now a lot of people have sent me works, and I'm sort of stressed as to what to do about it because I can only publish so many a year. Margaret [Galey] won't let me go crazy and take them all because the designer can't do this at the speed I want to do it. She's limiting me to six books a year, which is still a lot. She set up a schedule and I try to adhere to it. I think that's smart on her part, because I don't want someone to wait two years; I think a year is the longest someone should wait. In some cases, I ask people if they can wait a year and a half, and if they can’t I tell them to send it around elsewhere. And if they still don't have it published, I tell them they can come back to me.
M.B.: It seems like a lot of work for just three people.
J.Y.: It is a lot of work. The designer is great because she not only designs the book, but she also gets it proofread three times. She's really special. I like her so much that I hire her to do my own work published at Omnidawn and pay her out of my own pocket.
M.B.: Do you edit the books you publish with Black Square Editions?
J.Y.: Not really. There was one exception: Jack Jung’s first book. There’s a great Korean-American translator I know, Soje. I had been trying to publish a book of translations by her, but she had committed it to another press. One day, I asked her about young experimental Korean-American poets. She told me about Jack Jung so I asked her to send me his work, which I liked. But I did ask him to change his title because I thought it was too long. I also got him to change the sequencing and he listened to me, but I was really reluctant to do it. I did talk to other people about it because I didn't want him to be upset. In the end I told him he didn’t have to listen to me but that I thought it would help, and he was really good about it.
M.B.: As a poet, have editors ever asked you to change things?
J.Y.: No, John Martin would take anything I gave him, that's how I grew up. Omnidawn sometimes ask me to take things out or change things, but not so much. And then I usually send it to my friends and listen to them first.
M.B.: You mentioned experimental poetry, is that something that you want to publish specifically? Experimental works?
J.Y.: No, I'll publish anything if it's good, if I like it. I read a lot of different kinds of work, but I do find that I'm drawn to certain kinds of poetry that I guess you would consider experimental. I'm not interested in narrative. Brian [Evenson]'s book is a narrative, but it's not the typical narrative.
M.B.: What's your take on experimental, innovative writing? What do these qualifiers mean to you?
J.Y.: Anything that doesn't seem to follow convention. There's a story that I think about a lot when I think about writing. Luis Buñuel was in Hollywood and he couldn't get a job. Someone invited him to this private showing of Josef von Sternberg to help him get a job. Luis Buñuel goes, but ten minutes after the movie starts, he makes a hustle and bustle, gets up, and leaves. The man is annoyed. At the end of the movie, he goes to Buñuel’s house, knocks on the door—Buñuel supposedly opens the door in his bathrobe—and the man asks him why he left, that he hadn’t had the chance to see the movie. Buñuel said that he had actually seen the movie and knew everything that was going to happen. When the man told him he couldn’t possibly know, Buñuel went on to list everything that happened in the movie, based on what he had seen in those first ten minutes, and he was right. I don't want to read a book or a poem like that. I'm just not interested. I think that's my standard.
M.B.: Experimental or innovative fiction is often described as risk-taking. What is your take on that?
J.Y.: I published a book called Never Again by Doug Nufer. Harry Matthews told me about him. I knew it would sell very few copies. It’s a novel in which Nufer repeats no word: it’s practically unreadable. I mean, it’s readable, but you don't sit down to read it for fun. But I didn’t care, I just wanted it to exist, even if no one bought it. In that case I probably should have printed fewer copies because there's a lot of them still sitting on a shelf, but I just give the book away to people and challenge them to read it. I recently gave [Brian Evenson’s] Dark Property to the two people who were helping me with my archives, and they both returned it saying they couldn't finish it. It was very upsetting to them.
M.B.: And it's not even like the most unsettling of his books.
J.Y.: I know, there's the one about the detective who cuts his limbs off [Last Days].
M.B.: It’s a great one. He wrote a sequel that just came out in France [Membre fantôme], it's very funny. It’s interesting that you're mentioning this book that could not be read, I wonder if you think about the readers sometimes? What's your relationship with them as a publisher?
J.Y.: I don't think I have one. I don't think about the reader. I'm the reader. If I can read it, I assume other people can read it. What drives me is my interest in the book; maybe it’s arrogant on my part. For example, John Taylor [Philippe Jaccottet’s translator] once brought up all these books, including something by Jaccottet that I didn’t know, although I had read everything Jaccottet published with Seagull. I like his work, I think of him as very religious and kind of spiritual or Catholic. But that book seemed different, and that's the one I published. I really try to look for the book that doesn't fit in even in the author's bibliography.
M.B.: What is the status of Black Square Editions? Is it a non-profit? If so, how do you get the funding?
J.Y.: I have an anonymous donor. He gives me enough each year to publish about three or four books, and then the rest just comes in from sales. I give Margaret [Galey] money because she does so much work.
M.B.: Does this donor have a say or cares about who or what you publish?
J.Y.: I’m sure he cares, but he has never told me not to do something.
M.B.: You say that you solicit people whose work you like. Do you also get submissions? If so, what is the ratio?
J.Y.: Fifty-fifty, I think. Maybe more submissions than solicitations.
M.B.: When you read a manuscript that was submitted to you, what is the thing that makes you want to publish it?
J.Y.: It must be unlike anything I've read before.
M.B.: What would you say is the last book or manuscript that you've read that gave you this impression?
J.Y.: The Gobi of Was by George Kalamaras.
M.B.: Does Black Square Editions have a relationship to literary prizes?
J.Y.: I submit books to prizes if the author wants me to, but I don't have ties with prizes. One of the ways a lot of presses make money is through contests: people submit, they pay a fee, and that fee helps publish the book as well as other books from the press. I refuse to do that, even though I know I could make money for my press, because I think it's just unfair. And if I did do it, I would have to read all the submissions. And I can’t do that because by the time you judge the contest most of them have been read by other people. Who's to say I wouldn't want one of the books that was rejected by someone else? So, I don't do it.
M.B.: Have you ever had an author coming to you with a book that had been rejected elsewhere?
J.Y.: I think Doug Nufer’s book had been rejected a number of times. I’ve published two books in translation by Michèle Metail, the first woman that was in the Oulipo group, and I'm going to publish a third without ever having met her. I think Marcella Durand [Metail’s translator] and I were talking and she told me she had this very short book she’d been working on for years that she didn’t know what to do with. I told her I'd publish it. I think she would have gotten a publisher but I just jumped on it. And then once that came out, Philip Terry [also Métail’s translator] wrote me to tell me he had these two books by her. I published the one I really liked, Identikits. That's sort of the other way I work. Rosalyn Drexler, who was one of the only women pop artists, wrote a fairly conventional novel I read when it first came out. I was probably 20 at the time, and it went out of print. It's based on Drexler’s actual experience as a woman wrestler. She then wrote plays, won Obie Awards; she was a wonderful artist. I met her, I interviewed her, I wrote about her paintings. One day, I told her I wanted to reprint the novel, and I did. I mean, how many women pop artists were women wrestlers?! It’s unconventional on some level. It has a kind of narrative plot, but I didn't care because I thought it was a good book.
M.B.: What would you say is your relationship to for-profit publishing? Do you sometimes think about it or not at all?
J.Y.: Not at all. No, I would have to be a different kind of publisher.
M.B.: Do you feel like you are doing the same job?
J.Y.: I don’t think so. I think Robert Kelly told me the story that when he ran Origin, Cid Corman said that there are 300 readers for poetry. I don't think it's changed, even though the population's gotten a lot bigger since the 1950s. I'm publishing for those 300 people.
M.B.: What’s the average number of books you sell for one given title?
J.Y.: 300. [Brian Evenson’s] Dark Property went out of print, as well as some other books, which went into their second edition. I've never had a third edition. It doesn't bother me. I think it probably bothers the authors sometimes, but no one's really complained about not selling enough.
M.B.: I imagine that when an author chooses to sign with an independent publisher who curates the way you curate, they don't do it to sell a lot of copies, at least that's not the point. They do it to talk to those 300 people.
J.Y.: I once told my art students, that if they listened to a group that had sold more than 500 records, or CDs, or songs... they were mainstream. And they were pretty freaked out. I have a friend named Ken Vandermark, he's a wonderful jazz musician. I've done a record with him that hasn't come out yet. He just played at a reading with Ed Roberson and Ken Taylor. He has his own company, Catalytic Sound. He produces huge numbers of pieces. I don’t think he's selling 10,000 records, and I don't think he cares.
M.B.: Because they’re not for-profit, independent presses like yours have a role that is very important in the literary landscape. What do you think it is? How do you see it? Is it something you think about?
J.Y.: I probably think about it occasionally. I think what I'm interested in is people who do something with language that other people don't do, and that shows you what's possible in language. I think that's what I'm interested in—what's possible in language.
M.B.: It’s particularly interesting as you publish a lot of texts in translation. How do you approach this? Do you read the text in the original language? And if you do, how do you project it in English?
J.Y.: Well, I think that some of the translations that I'm publishing, like Michèle [Métail]'s, are difficult in their own language. Their translators produce texts that are equally difficult in English. Jaccottet’s book is about Francis Ponge, whose work I discovered when I was young. I never thought I could publish some of Ponge’s texts because I think everybody's published them. But the fact that Jaccottet wrote about Ponge made me want to publish them. My decisions are somewhat personal. For example, and this is pretty important, I'm interested in Asian-American experimental writers. When I was young as a writer, and it’s still true, Asian-Americans like me were expected to write autobiographical transparent poetry about their immigrant experience. And I didn’t want to write this. As I became a publisher, I decided I had to find people to write these kinds of experimental texts. I published Michael Leong, Jack Jung, Eugene Lim, Jared Daniel Fagen, and Jennifer Hayashida. I am very proud of this.
M.B.: I would like to ask you about the way writing as evolved all through you career, and more specifically about the influence of MFAs [in creative writing]. They don’t exist in France, many people don't know what an MFA is, and there are still very few creative writing classes. They're emerging in some universities, but they're very rare. Whereas in the US they've existed for a very long time, and I feel like they've multiplied in the past twenty, thirty years. Do you think that has had an impact on writing, on what has been published?
J.Y.: Ron Silliman talked about something he called the workshop poem. I did not want to go to grad school and get an MFA. I came to New York, I took a writing workshop at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project with Bill Zavatsky. And then I heard John Ashbery read, and he said that he was teaching in an MFA program, so I applied and got into his class. The only other person I thought of studying with was Robert Duncan at the New College, but since I had already studied with Robert Kelly, I didn’t really want to study with Duncan because I thought it was a kind of continuity of a particular line of thought that I didn't want to be restricted to. By then I had discovered the New York School, and I was very interested in it.
M.B.: It was Brooklyn College, right?
J.Y.: Right, and he said that he had to take every student that applied because no one knew who he was at that point.
M.B.: Which is insane.
J.Y.: I know, and I thought I’d be lucky if he even got to see my manuscript because there must be hundreds of people applying. Hundreds of people should have been applying! He [John Ashbery] later said that when he read my manuscript he said to David [Kermani], Oh, I got a live one. He was very sweet, very funny. His first class was amazing. He started talking about translation from sound rather than meaning. He talked about Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus poems. And then, he asked us to do the same thing. More than half the class was completely bamboozled by what he said, but I was in. I was all in. Then, he handed out two pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which we don’t know how it sounded. I wondered what he was up to. He was so confounding in that first class, I decided I would never drop out. I studied with him for two years and wouldn't study with the other teachers in the MFA program. After a while, they just let me do it.
M.B.: I feel like a lot of the publishing feels very New York centric. However, even though Black Square Editions was based in New York City, where you used to live, and still is technically in New York state, I feel like one of the roles of independent presses is to decenter the conversation. Do you feel like you participate in that?
J.Y.: I think that's very important. I've published poets from other places and other countries. The art world is global now. I was in Beijing and Shanghai this past May, I went to fifteen art studios, and any one of those artists could be showing in America. I think there's a global art world, and I think that's truer and truer of poetry, in a way.
M.B.: I also feel like independent presses contribute to creating another sense of community in the U.S. that is not just about New York.
J.Y.: Let’s go back to the MFA question. I think there is a kind of workshop poem, but then I think about Rosemarie Waldrop teaching at Brown, and that program continuing to be interesting. There are certain places like Duke, that has Nathaniel Mackey, Joe Donahue, and some others. There are centers, and then out of those centers people come out that are interesting. Lucas Alford teaches at Wake Forest, and Laura Mullen used to teach there. There are people that do something in the place they're in. Johannes Göransson is teaching in Notre Dame, of all places, with Joyelle McSweeney. There are these places, and I think that's produced a number of pretty interesting experimental writers.
M.B.: How does literature circulate between those places?
J.Y.: I think the writers know about each other, and they tell each other about their students who write interesting things. Think of Black Mountain, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson writing to each other, and they had never met. When I asked Creeley about this correspondence, his first answer was that there was no one else out there. It's not quite true now, but there is still a trace of it at the same time.
M.B.: You’re very active on social media, where you post some of your collages. Do you think it contributes to these kinds of encounters or exchanges?
J.Y.: I think it does. I've learned about people, about magazines that way. I don't send work to those magazines, but I read them, to know who else is out there. People have written to me because of social media, for solicitations or just letters or notes.
M.B.: When we set up this interview, you said that you were traveling a lot. Is meeting people wherever they are creating important to you, as a publisher, as a critic, and even as a poet?
J.Y.: It is. When I went to China, I met an artist who introduced me to a poet. I found out that he was translated. I have yet to figure out what to do about it. I do try to meet people everywhere I go. I went to Italy to talk about an artist that I had met years ago, Nicola De Maria. But I also asked this man who brought me there about different poets. He introduced me to a woman who's a publisher and a poet. I published someone from Argentina. I went to China one time, and because of a student I met here I ended up giving a talk at Wuhan. There I met someone who's now going to translate my work, but I'm also going to tell her about other poets.
M.B.: This reminds me of Rosemarie and Keith Waldrop, Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, and St. Mark’s Church. What is the equivalent of these communities and places today?
J.Y.: St Mark’s Church is still running. But magazines that are in universities have become more interesting thanks to their editors. I think that's been a big change in the last 10 or 15 years. The Kenyon Review and the Chicago Review got interesting. Cecily Chen, who is a poetry editor at the Chicago Review, is doing interesting work. And then mostly other, I would say, little magazines. Online magazines are also getting more interesting. That's why I spend way too much time on the internet.
M.B.: Which presses do you read?
J.Y.: New Directions, who published Yoko Tawada and Fleur Jaeggy. I'm jealous of them sometimes because they have the money to get these writers. Dalkey Archive.
M.B.: Fiction Collective?
J.Y.: Oh yeah, that was great! Ugly Duckling is probably my other favorite. I used to subscribe to it all the time. I like Wave Books, they’ve done some beautiful things. I like Solid Objects. There's a press in England that I love called Tenement Press. New York Review of Books. Nightboat.
M.B.: What would you say is the conversation Black Square Fiction is having with American culture right now?
J.Y.: It’s probably argumentative. The way I look at it, American culture is telling you what lane you're supposed to drive in, particularly if you're ethnic or of a certain color or gender. I'm not interested in that, and I think none of the writers I've published would want to identify in that way. So that's the argument, but I don't think it's an argument that I publicly announce. I mean people can if they want to, I'm not saying they shouldn't. For my part, I think that's the argument.
M.B.: It's generally pretty obvious in the work people write or publish.
J.Y.: That's what I think. And this argument started long before the present administration. It started when I picked up certain poets as a high school kid.
M.B.: My last question is kind of an obvious one, but is publishing political?
J.Y.: Ah, it is. Ad Reinhardt said all art is political, so I've come to think that all gestures are political, and that publishing is political, but that you don't necessarily have to say it's political. I think about that quite a lot in some way. I think about it in terms of who I write about as an art writer, the artists I pick. At one point I wrote about Ab Reinhardt and one of the things I got really involved in was what's called the Via Negativa. He was friends with Thomas Merton and the poet Robert Lax, and Merton's belief is that you can't say what God is because that's human language. You can only say what God isn’t. And of course, Ad Reinhardt said, art is art and everything else is everything else. I think about that over and over again in terms of my own writing, but also in terms of what I publish. They don't have to say what this is, they can go another way. I think most of them do without necessarily thinking of Reinhardt or Thomas Merton. If you challenge narrative and accessibility, you are being political. I don’t need a mission statement because what I produce is the statement.