Building the Most Faithful Fetish
I was just fishing around in the stacks and ran upon this book, resting face up on a reading shelf: Fetish, edited by John Yau.
I looked at poet Yau's introduction and liked his understanding of fetish very much, liked the way he imaginatively evokes the landscape of such desire:
The reader of this anthology is someone looking across the airshaft, yard, room, or time. On the other side is a bed rigged with a strange contraption, an apartment in which the past (in the form of an ex-lover) clings to one's body, a dream of flying, a dimension in which numbers and things blend together. A train crosses a landscape, a car circles a neighborhood, a sphere arrives from another dimension, a woman hears the steps of her husband and begins hiding the tell-tale evidence.
Is it "I" looking at "you"? Is it "I" seeing "myself"? Or am "I" finally alone with "it"? ... .
And the collection is divided into units reflecting the categories in this last sentence.
Yau is one of those younger generation New York poets whose sensibility is a kind of striking experiment derived from the meeting of the visual arts with the textual. I love that shit. And I have an even deeper taste for the artist after finding this book by happenstance.
