To Shake My Bag into the Valley, a review of ain’t done yet! by John Yamrus

By Peter Mladinic

To Shake My Bag into the Valley: a review of ain’t done yet! by John Yamrus. Anxiety Press. 2025. $16.00 paper.

Labels are a matter of convenience that let people talk about different aspects of literature. The labels minimalist and minimalism characterize the poetry of Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, and John Yamrus. While each has a distinctive voice, all three have spare images, blunt and often surprising comments, and a compassion for others that builds as the voice in the poem seeks truth. Yamrus’s "he was,” from his Twenty Four Poems, exemplifies this compassion superbly. His beginning sets the scene.

he was

drawn
to this bit
of graffiti he saw
written in white paint
on the side of a building.

Do yourself a favor, read the rest of this poem. It’s anthology worthy; more importantly, it goes right to the head and the heart. It’s no nonsense, tough tenderness carries over, into his new book, ain’t done yet! Three ways to talk about these new poems are to consider eavesdropping, coming in to the middle of things, and the silence between words that musician and composer Jeff Cotton talks about in his introduction.

Reading, hearing a Yamrus poem is like eavesdropping: standing near two people and overhearing their conversation. Yamrus is one-on-one, me speaking to you. Whether what is said and heard is unsettling or comforting, there’s an intimacy in his tone. The reader-listener, eavesdropping, hears something unsettling in “even the rain” on / his face felt evil.” Further into this overheard conversation “Cody / wiped it away.” The urgency in the conclusion is accented by “knew,” “and / did what he / knew he had to do.” Similarly, the eavesdropper hears one person talking to another about a third person in "so, he says:”

all you
had to do
was take one
look in his eyes

and
you knew
what the problem was;

he
was living
way too close to the bone.

Further along, the eavesdropper hears:

so, I said
what happened next?

and
he looks
at me and says:

fuck me
if i’m ever
tellin’ anyone
as stupid lookin’ as you!

In the dialogue, the poet “turns the tables” to end in a lighter vein. The reader’s pleasure, in part, is this abrupt change in tone, from dead serious to just having fun. In its tone, this “overheard conversation” is markedly different from the tone of “even the rain.”

Intimacy is also involved in poems that give the effect of coming in to the middle of things; in medias res is the Latin term. This structure technique is prominent in at least ten poems in the forty-one poems that comprise ain’t done yet! One memorable in media res poem is “for Tony it was.” A poem that ends very differently from how it begins, and goes straight to the heart, this one showcases this minimalist’s tough tenderness, with not a jot of sentimentality.

for Tony it was

all 60s music…
Archie Bell And The Drells…

The Stones…

Smokey…

that
was all he
needed to get right.

that, and
his little dog Tail.

After the second “that,” there’s a brief pause; then the dog is introduced. Ironically Tail has no tail, and is missing a back leg. As they sit “out back” listening to music and drinking beer, Tail, “a splash in his bowl,” they have each other; their bond is quietly emphasized in the repetition that concludes this excellent poem.

for
Tail and Tony
it never got any better than that.

it didn’t have to.

Tough tenderness? Yes, in the poem’s imagery. A last line that is needed and absolutely clinches it? You bet. While only a fragment of this poem is quoted, its abiding affection comes through loud and clear. It begins as it ends—in the middle.

To know light, a person must know dark; to know sounds, a person must know silence. Jeff Cotton, a former member of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and an acclaimed musician in his own right, applauds the silence in these poems. Silence is one of numerous techniques Yamrus uses to include his readers. This collection of forty-one poems is rife with significant moments of silence, “pregnant pauses” that are integral to the meaning of each poem. Timing, everything in these poems, these moments of minimalism, contributes to their rhythm. “anamnesis: noun” is the only poem that begins with footnotes; like the silences in the poem, they are needed. The speaker references these notes as he says:

he
kept those lines
on a paper in the back of his wallet,

along
with a list
of the pills he took every day.

A comma signals the silence after “wallet” and acts as a bridge between these disparate, seemingly unconnected things: expository notes and a list of pills. A longer silence is signaled by the period. It is followed by a compound negation:

the
list of pills
meant nothing to him,

and
neither did
the line about anamnesis.

The reader rightfully assumes then, why did he keep them, and so close to his person? More silence. The last line rings true to the idea that poetry is more about questions than answers. Once again, Yamrus “turns the tables” in a last time that directly address the reader, not once but twice:

but, you just never know, do you?

The reflective silence, another compound, is an integral part of the sense of this conclusion. With its arresting caesuras, its “pregnant pauses,” this poem becomes more than a poem about one person’s slight eccentricities, the keeping of two footnotes and a list of pills, but becomes the reader’s poem, a thing with which the reader identifies.

Inclusivity is all over this book. The poet takes these personal, intimate moments in the life of his speaker and makes them ours through his manipulation of syntax and diction, his exacting images, and the rhythms of his distinctive voice. Yamrus’s free verse form and his content are one. He intuitively knows when a line should be run-on and when a line should be end-stopped. In “nobody” his homage to Norman Mailer, he “pulls no punches.”

with
all his faults,
Mailer was a hell of a writer.

masculine to a fault.

Yamrus, a master of the one-word line and of line length variation, writes what he feels. And that is to his readers’ credit. He writes poems because that’s a thing he enjoys doing. Read his book, and see for yourself.