Yates is Poetry Month

J. Michael Yates was a writer's name when I started paying attention to living writers, then local ones. His work was here and there, in anthologies and "little magazines", and never seemed to add up to much. Just as well, writing's not arithmetic. For some writers the book is too limited. 

I spent about ten minutes flipping through the fictions of Fazes in Elsewhen (Intermedia, 1977), reading opening sentences, and couldn't get any traction. The constructions brought to mind Donald Barthelme, a lot of baroque 1970s science fiction, Renata Adler, marijuana -- and no music. On that particular day I needed some music, something heart-beaten. Everything in Fazes is inclement noise.

Here's the strategically underwhelming opening of "Water Rising":

"When I first noticed the damp traces behind me, I was surprised." (37)

I remember seeing Intermedia books here and there when researching my way through museum libraries. The books were unusual looking and resonated integrity; writing that differed from what the straight up publishers were doing, writing that can only be uneven.

Vancouver's Intermedia stopped being an artist collective for a book publisher (and maybe a software developer) around 1973. Not sure when its last book came off the press, but if I had to guess, I would say the late-1980s.

Prior to Elsewhen, the last thing I read by J. Michael Yates was a clean and bureaucratically-written grant application in the late-1990s (for a book of prose poems). One of the jury members kept saying "I don't know, I just love the writing" and there was no dissuading her.