Doing Cartwheels on Doomsday Afternoon. Anxiety Press. 2026. $17.00 paper.
In all probability John Yamrus is an average person, hanging out with his dog, Stella in the backyard, reading in his sun room, listening to jazz in his basement; but the inner man says we’re living in a beautiful, deeply flawed world, and shame on you if you don’t love it (this last idea, a paraphrase from a Yamrus poem). The poet, no offense intended, is a walking, talking paradox, whose proclivity to irony comes naturally. Irony elevates his utterances from prose to poetry, fuses his lines with unpredictability and, often, wry humor. For the readers of Doing Cartwheels on Doomsday Afternoon, irony is the key to inclusivity.
Yamrus “gets right down to business.” Simple and direct suits his style. But he’s not at all simplistic. Verbal irony reveals a complex persona. He says one thing while meaning the opposite at the beginning or in the middle or at the end of a poem. In “i just now” the persona is irked because interviewers never ask the right question, why he writes so much about dogs. Dogs teach him “joy, perseverance, acceptance … total concentration on a single task, and …the secret …” The poem’s structure of irony sets up readers for a profound revelation and then delivers:
the truth
is
the great secret
these dogs
teach
me
is
there isn’t any.
To fully appreciate this poem, a reader must experience its many nuances, accented by the poet’s line breaks and use of white space. “his wife had” is about someone other than the persona; a man has lost his wife and his job. He’s been drinking heavily, likely not sleeping. But the persona swears the man “looked / ten / years / younger.” “the headline read:” is about terrible people who commit terrible crimes that get in the news. The persona speculates that these criminals are “looking/ for/ immortality,/ or/ entertainment,” then the punchline “whichever / comes / first.” “when i was a kid, i” goes into detail about a co-worker. The poem would be lesser had the persona named his co-worker at the beginning. He says at the end, “Leo …/ his name / was Leo.” In “why I’m not Buk,” the persona concludes that the writer Charles Bukowski wrote “like / a slumming / angel, / while / looking / like / hell.” The persona ends one other poem about Bukowski with:
get up,
go to work,
come home
and go to sleep
and
in between
you try
desperately
to hold on to
the fire.
In Yamrus, the reader must expect the unexpected. “it was taking” has a film noir style. It’s about two men playing cards. One of them goes off on a spiel about shooting somebody to the extent that a reader might forget all about the game, till Lawson, the one talking says to the other, at the end “deal / will ya!” In “i never thought I’d,” the persona talks about being in his sixties, in “chronic pain,” which he never expected. He expects to be “the crazy old guy / who hit / all the elevator buttons / and ran.” In “I don’t know what it was,” he contrasts a night where a poetry reading went bad to a night where one went well. “in dog obedience class …” depicts the persona as disappointed that his dog is a conformist “just like all the other dogs.” “they sent me for” places the persona in a room getting “x-rays / to see what’s / wrong with my back.” He liked the agile person he was, though he thinks “i’ll get to like / this new guy, too.” “Eddie” tells the story of Eddie and the foundling dog he named Bastard. They both “had it rough,” but they were together, for a while:
him
and the Bastard.
besides,
what they’ve got
is ten times
better
than
Immorality.
Situational irony is no better conveyed than in “write a poem about THAT,.” Here is the whole poem:
“write a poem about THAT,”
she
said,
sitting
on the edge
of the bed,
smiling.
Without the minimal last line this poem would “sink;” instead, it resonates with all that precedes it. Yamus has been called a master of minimalism. Anything can be a poem, if it’s good. What’s left out of this poem is just as important as what’s in it.
Often, in Yamrus, his readers’ pleasure comes from knowing things his characters don’t know. To this end he employs in minimalist poems dramatic irony. A good example is “the failed poet.” All of her work “came from god …” She can’t take criticism, but he can. He acknowledges his arrogance, then adds that someone’s calling themselves a poet doesn’t make them a poet. Then he figuratively turns the tables, poking fun at himself.
just like
me
calling myself
an ass
doesn’t
NOT
make me one,
does it?
All the while he’s dead serious about the poet who remains in the dark. When asked about poetic influences in “the next question,” the poet says “Hank Williams / Groucho Marks / and Willie Mays.” Beneath this seemingly flippant surface, he’s serious. “we were at” is set in a hotel bar. A trio (of two musicians) is playing “that old Patsy Cline hit / ‘Crazy.’” A man mistakes it for an Eagles song, and the persona, the poet, doesn’t try to correct him. Similarly, in “Dear John Yamrus;” when a critic says that what the poet is writing isn’t poetry, the poet doesn’t try to argue. The end is quite humorous, as the critic writes:
Please!
Tell me
this is not poetry!”
“dear sir;
this
is
not
poetry.”
“Contrary” is a response to people who read poetry via social media but not in books, and have been “fooled” by “the internet” into thinking they can write it. While this may sound arrogant, there is truth in this poem. Again, the poet might sound flippant when asked where his inspiration for his poems comes from, and he cites a news headline: “Ice skating bear kills trainer.” He’s joking, but serious, though people who ask may think he’s only joking, as they were expecting his answer to be something like eternal love and betrayals of the heart.
An appreciation of Doing Cartwheels on Doomsday Afternoon would be incomplete without reading Yves Gore’s introduction. Early on, she takes on the concept of doomsday. “Doomsday has now imploded our human experience into a one-dimension, single-purpose grueling need: to survive at all cost.” A bit further in, she says that the poems in this book “…allowed me to exist again by showing me that I don’t have to be stuck in a black-and-white binary thinking during doomsday, like gloom on top of gloom.” And a bit further in still, “John does not adulterate being human, he does not attempt to make things artificially cool. He lets life be life.” And his gift is that he turns it into art. He is cool in the way Charles Bukowski is cool, in the way Yamrus’s mentor and friend Gerald Locklin is cool. As Yves Gore points out, Yamrus is nuanced. It’s to the credit of Anxiety Press that his book, Doing Cartwheels on Doomsday Afternoon, originally published decades ago, is back in print. Its many truisms are timeless.