By Yeow Kai Chai

Poet, fictionist, art critic, curator, editor and publisher, John Yau is a ceaselessly innovative polymath who cannot be pinned down.

As an Asian American whose father was half-English, the prolific author has consistently in more than 50 books defied "oppressive rules" of conventional discourse, what he regards as "the structures of language — the accepted narratives, their little boxes."

In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation and criticism. He is currently an editor of an online journal, Hyperallergic Weekend (hyperallergic.com/weekend/), and an editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail (www.brooklynrail.org/).

The New York-based author is an associate professor of critical studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. His latest poetry collection, Further Adventures in Monochrome, has been published by Copper Canyon Press.

1) What are you reading right now?
I usually am reading many books at any one time, from poetry and detective novels to art monographs and essays.

In no particular order:

a) City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester University Press, 2002) by Ian Walker
Walker writes about the area where the Surrealists adapted documentary photography to their own purposes and how documentary photographers were influenced by Surrealism.

b) Engine Empire (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012) by Cathy Park Hong
A book of poems in which the Old West, a fictional Chinese boomtown and a future world are the settings for the poet to explore language in wild and original ways. She invents slang, riffs off familiar tropes and turns language on its head.

c) Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays (University of California Press, 2012), edited and with an Introduction by Peter Quartermain
This long awaited book is a necessary addition to everyone's library.

2) If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
Either none or many – most likely a detective (or private eye).

3) What is the greatest misconception about you?
All conceptions about me – including my own – are misconceptions to one degree or another.

4) Name one living author and one dead author you most identify with, and tell us why.
There are no living authors that I identify with, but plenty of dead ones whose work I admire. Charles Baudelaire the poet and art critic is at the top of my list (if I had a list).

5) Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I believe in it, but I have never had it. (Fingers crossed.)

6) What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
These are the qualities I admire – the ability to not repeat oneself, not become ideological, and to step outside of conventions and be surprising to yourself.

7) What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
See above.

8) Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"The the." – Wallace Stevens

9) Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
am not the person who appears in my poems and fiction.

10) At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
Since the genres you mention seem more Hollywood than non-Hollywood, I would probably go for an action thriller. But that is rare since I do not go to many movies these days and certainly would not seek out an action thriller.

11) What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
"Can" is my favourite word and "cannot" is my least favourite.

12) Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: knife, bookkeeper and fortune cookie.

The bookkeeper was secretly a bookie
Who hid his knife in a fortune cookie

13) What object is indispensable to you when you write?
I don't know that anything is indispensable. I write on a computer, but have also written with a pencil on the backs of envelopes carrying mail I don't want.

14) What is the best time of the day for writing?
I like to write all times of the day, but prefer early morning.

15) If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Charles Baudelaire, H.P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Li Shangyin, Arthur Cravan, Nadja, Isak Dinesen and Joyce Mansour. I think eight guests would make for a lively dinner. I am sure that in each conversation I have with them I will experience something that is unlike anything else.

16) You're known for collaborations with artists across different media. If you could work with someone from another era and another discipline, who would it be and what would you produce?
I would like to work with a filmmaker.

17) What would you write on your own tombstone?
"I wink at you from infinity."

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